RDD: Retention-driven development

Its typical for company onboarding to gloss over the team-specific and technical information you need to truly get started in a new role. Kristen Gallagher explains how to apply the concept of test-driven development to onboardingin other words, retention-driven development, a new, durable way to build and maintain technical employee onboarding programs.

Most of us are familiar with test-driven development but may be less familiar with the concept applied to new-hire onboarding. Enter retention-driven development, where you design your new-hire onboarding using the same principles as TDD. It’s typical for company onboarding to gloss over the team-specific and technical information you need to truly get started in a new role. It’s challenging to divert time and resources away from the backlog and feature requests to build a technical onboarding program. More often than not, a new hire is given a list of people to talk to and not much else. This kind of onboarding isn’t incredibly effective; it’s more trial-and-error than not and often leads to imposter syndrome, slow time to productivity, and duplication of work. On top of all these frustrations, bad onboarding is a waste of time and money when you can’t retain your new hires. Kristen Gallagher explores retention-driven development. You’ll discover that a retention-focused perspective is both light on effort and perfect for onboarding in a busy, rapidly changing environment as you rethink how to approach the new hire experience, the manager lift, and the documentation needed to effectively onboard someone.