Let’s talk about the employee onboarding program we built for new hires @Shopify in RnD (1/7)

After folks finish company-wide onboarding where they learn about Shopify’s history and culture, new hires in Data, Development, UX, and Product join us for technical onboarding (2/7)

Everybody in RnD sets up their development environment and ships code within their first week. It’s part of our goal to make Shopify the most developer-literate company on the planet: https://twitter.com/jmwind/status/1255605381864308737?s=20 (3/7)

Next, new hires in RnD embed on the support team for a full week. They learn the Shopify product deeply and support merchants in the process (with lots of help from our incredible @ShopifySupport team!). Merchant obsession is built into our RND DNA right from the start. (4/7)

Guided by a checklist we co-build with leads, new hires then embark on a personal learning journey focused on building craft-specific skills (5/8 - added one )

Let’s focus on developers as an example: with their lead’s support, developers choose from a variety of codelabs and code bootcamps offered in-house to get them ramped up in practicing their craft at Shopify (6/8).

As a rule, nothing is “mandatory”. We focus on delivering challenging and engaging technical learning experiences that have real output (like a completed application, or a functioning data pipeline), and let leads and new hires choose what works best for them (7/8).

The program is digital by design. Tomorrow I’ll share how we’ve built RnD onboarding to uniquely meet the needs of a global, remote team (8/8).