Onboarding

A guide to what a new team member's onboarding looks like at Rocketium

Every new team member's success is a responsibility we both share. We provide them with all the right resources that can help in building on our 3-step Master Plan aimed at personal and organizational growth. In return, we expect them to take a plunge into different aspects of how we think and absorb the parts they feel the most connected with. The sooner both of us start visualizing our growth together, the more successfully we reach there.

All new team members at Rocketium go through a multi-stage process of getting to know the industry, product, teams, tools, and practices over 2-4 weeks.

These onboarding phases are divided into five sections:

• Industry • About Rocketium • Team • Product • Role

We call this combination of learning content Rocketium University.

Industry

We accept the fact that sales automation, marketing automation, or supply-chain automation are established categories, unlike creative automation. Creative automation is still an alien concept to most organizations even if they need it the most. Every time we ask a new person what they understand about our industry, the answers are often different and interesting.

Also, our team’s background is fairly diverse so not everyone knows about B2B, SaaS, or startups. We realized that there were folks who brought commendable talent but were new to these concepts. This is where we had to start!

We put together a series of articles and videos to help team members get up to speed on startups, SaaS, campaign lifecycle, and creative automation. This was a combination of curated articles and content that we created.

About Rocketium

Before a team member gets to know the team and the product, they need to understand why Rocketium exists in the first place and what is the problem that we are solving.

In this section, the walkthrough starts with an introduction to digital marketing and digital design software. For anyone to learn about Rocketium’s product value proposition, they need to know the challenges of marketing and design teams. Concepts like campaigns, channels, A/B testing, and analytics are a part of the everyday vocabulary of marketers. Learning about some of these helps new team members in understanding what is important for our customers. The same goes for design teams, their workflow, tools they are familiar with, and how they use them in their daily work.

Lastly, we use the Problem > Feature > Impact framework to educate our team about the key problem that we are solving, how our features are solving them, and what impact we are able to create with this feature. We do this by going into the details of how campaign operations are carried out and the workflow followed by marketers and designers.

Team

The last mistake an organization would want to make while on-boarding new team members is not exposing them enough to their teammates across departments. At Rocketium, we start introductions with different teams right from the first week. In the past two years when remote onboarding has been at its peak, team catch-ups have played a big role in making new team members feel engaged and included.

During the first two weeks, new team members are made to catch up with each team and team leads. The session with team leads gives them an inside look into the goals for each team, what they do on a daily basis, and how they add value to our users. The session with each team is an ice-breaker and a way to foster more cross-team collaboration.

A few examples:-

• Marketing team shares how our customers run campaigns, the metrics they track, and how they use of creatives impacts their ROI

• Customer Success team shares our key customers, how we onboard them, how they collaborate with product teams to make our customers win

• Product and Engineering teams share how they prioritize new features, analytics that goes into choosing the right improvements, and our roadmap

Product

Regardless of which team anyone joins, we encourage everyone to know the fundamentals of Rocketium’s product. While some teams need deeper knowledge than others, basic and intermediate levels of learning are common for all. Advanced product training happens for select team members depending on their role.

Rocketium is a product for growth-stage marketing and design teams. Every product learning module uses the Problem > Feature > Impact framework to help new team members learn both the why and what of our features. Each of these modules is followed by a short assignment that allows teammates to try the feature to gain practical experience of how it is used by our users.

To encourage product learning among all team members even beyond the onboarding phase, the Product and HR teams collaborate with all teams through the Product Learning Tracker. It is updated with details of major new features that teams can review weekly and stay up-to-date with demo videos.

Role

After two weeks of general learning, we start with functional learning. It is by this time that new team members get a hang of the basics and are ready to start learning more about their team and role. Each team has its own onboarding goals and processes.

A few examples:-

• Customer-facing teams like Sales and Customer Success focus on case studies, call reviews, customer understanding, tool walkthroughs

• Design team focuses more on our brand guidelines, advanced product training

• Product and Engineering teams focus more on roadmap, advanced product training, dev environment setup

• Marketing team focuses on customer understanding, campaign overview, content plan

Reflection

Throughout the onboarding, new team members attend a daily catch-up with their managers to share what they are learning and their thoughts on improving the process. After every learning module, they fill out reflection forms that have a few questions so team members can summarize what they learned and what other ideas they have. This helps them retain what they learned better and also helps us improve the onboarding process.

A few examples of the reflection forms:-