The onboarding questionnaire

Imagine you are joining a new job as a tech executive. How can you prepare for you first day. I was amazed as a friend of mine, came up with a list (not extensive) of things to ask pre-emptively, thus getting some context at your pace and make others prepare for your arrival.

So these are some suggestions on topics/questions for you.

Company

• Mission, vision and values
• Basic process and way of working (company-level)

Engineering

• System architecture and diagram
• Technical Stack eg. languages that are used, cloud providers etc
• Infrastructure (CI/CD models on production
• Software development processes that are already adopted

Leadership / management

• Tech organisational structure
• Engineering guiding principles
• Career framework / Salary ranges / Job families
• Interview process
• Budget / hiring plan

Product management (if applicable)

• OKR or similar framework in place
• Customer feedback (if any, and methods to collect it)
• Products and product flow
• Design UI/UX principles and guidelines
• Experimentation and testing (A/B testing etc)