What is successful onboarding?

I was expecting a piece on onboarding new employees, turns out this one is on onboarding new users. As a user, I really appreciated a great onboarding experience. The best I can recall was Slack some years ago (I'd assume they are even better now). When you first signed on, you got an interactive tutorial that took no more than a handful of seconds to familiarize yourself with the product. It was quick, efficient, and visually nice.

On the thought of onboarding new employees, I think that is very important too, and for the same reason as in the article: you want folks to stick around! On our team, we have a whole processes set up to give new team members the best chance for success and as efficient as possible spin up. We have some tutorials for working in our stack, resources for the languages if you are unfamiliar, some tasks for "do X with the Y API." We get them familiar with our stack and architecture, getting them to a spot where they can whiteboard our non-trivial interactions of different services. We do regular check ins on this process which we estimate can take up to a week when you first start. Meanwhile, we do more pair programming than normal, giving the new team mate the ability to drive, allowing them to start feeling that they add value day one/two. This has taken some effort to put together, and is a far cry better than when I started there years ago. Back then it was sink or swim and baptism by fire, haha. I think it took nearly a month to get one of my testing environments up and getting green tests at the time (for a myriad of reasons).

https://www.useronboard.com/ does a bunch of great walkthroughs of good and bad user onboarding experiences.