Onboard a new hire in a week.
A specific day-by-day plan: which docs, which people, which shippable first task. Not 'here's the wiki, good luck'.
A new person starts Monday. You want their first week to end with them having shipped something small, met the right people, and understood the shape of the work — not with them still reading Notion. This prompt structures that week.
THE PROMPT
Design a 5-day onboarding plan for a new hire joining my team. Paste the role, team context, and current in-flight work below. Return a day-by-day plan. For each day: **Day X** - **Morning (2h)** — specific reading or watching. Named docs, not "read the wiki". If a doc doesn't exist yet that should, mark [DOC TO CREATE]. - **Afternoon (3h)** — one meeting or paired session. Name the person, why they're the right conversation, what the new hire should come out understanding. - **Their homework tonight (optional, ~30min)** — one small artifact to bring tomorrow. By end of day 5, the new hire should have: 1. Shipped one small change to production (name what — e.g., updated a doc, added a small utility, fixed a small bug). 2. Met the 5 people whose work most directly touches theirs. 3. Written a one-page "what I understand so far" doc that I can react to and correct. No generic advice. Every item should be specific enough that it's actionable Monday morning without further planning. Context: [PASTE ROLE + TEAM + IN-FLIGHT WORK]
**Day 1 (Monday)**
- Morning: Read /docs/team-charter.md (30min), skim last 4 weekly updates in #eng-weekly (30min), read the current PRD /docs/prds/notif-v2.md — this is what we're mid-flight on (1h).
- Afternoon: 1:1 with Rae (2h). Rae is the tech lead — she'll walk through the codebase's actual mental model (not the diagram, the version that matters). New hire should come out with "I understand what a Job is and how it moves through the system".
- Homework: sketch the notification-flow diagram in your own words. Don't peek at the doc. We'll compare tomorrow.
**Day 2 (Tuesday)**
- Morning: Fix the "outdated OG image" ticket (LIN-4412). It's a doc + config change. This is the shippable first PR — small, real, low-risk.
- Afternoon: 1:1 with Sam (design lead, 1h). Sam will show the current designs for notif-v2 and the design constraints that shape what we can build. Then paired PR review with Rae on your Day-2 work.
**Day 3 (Wednesday)**
- Morning: Read /docs/oncall.md + skim last 3 postmortems. This is what "things going wrong" looks like here.
- Afternoon: Shadow me during the weekly PM sync. Not to contribute — to see how decisions get made and who pushes back on what.
**Day 4 (Thursday)**
- Morning: Pick up your first non-trivial ticket from the notif-v2 backlog (I'll pre-tag 2-3 that are good first ones).
- Afternoon: Coffee with someone from the analytics team (they consume everything we ship). Understanding their needs upstream is worth an hour early.
**Day 5 (Friday)**
- Morning: Finish the ticket if in flight; write your "what I understand so far" doc.
- Afternoon: 90-min recap with me. Walk me through your understanding doc. I correct where you're wrong. You leave with a corrected model of the work.