A generic 30-day bootcamp, replaced by 90 days planned from a skills assessment, on live work, with a first-year development plan at the end.
New hires spent their first month on a generic bootcamp project that delivered nothing, then needed close guidance for most of their first year.
Team leads did not have time for dedicated onboarding mentoring alongside their delivery work.
Team confidence in new hires at 90 days rose from 45% to 80%. New hires started live work after two weeks and worked on their own in 3 to 6 months.
Confidence: the average rating from team leads and their teams for new hires at day 90, under the old bootcamp and under the new system. Team lead time was tracked for the first two weeks only.
The bootcamp was a generic 30-day project with a presentation at the end, unrelated to new work or the backlog. Hires left their first 90 days with no clear evaluation and no development plan, and team leads supervised them closely all year with time they did not have.
Time to working alone is the typical range KP observed across about 30 hires over two years.
I helped the leadership team build a skills matrix for evaluation. A pre-assessment was captured during interviews. Before each hire started, I reviewed their interview notes and portfolio and added my own assessment.
With the hiring manager and team lead, I planned the hire's first 90 days against the open backlog and the workload of the people around them, so pair design was available when it was needed. The project management process tracked the capabilities we expected to see, and any concerns we wanted to watch.
In earlier feedback sessions, team leads had said they could not give onboarding the mentoring it needed. I took responsibility for it. Senior designers and some mid-level designers became onboarding support for each hire, and I supported them when they had questions. I used the daily 1:1s in the first two weeks to get to know each hire and ask assessment questions that surfaced any concerns early.
About 30 hires went through the system over two years, both new roles from growth and backfills. Team leads saved about 32 hours per new hire across the first two weeks. After that, each hire joined the team's daily standups and a weekly 1:1 with their team lead, and onboarding was consistent across every team.
Daily 1:1s in weeks 1 and 2 covered the department, tools and processes. Weekly 1:1s ran alongside live work to day 60. Senior and mid-level designers handled day-to-day questions, with KP behind them.
At day 90 we cleared every open question and concern, and completed the hire's individual development plan for the year, built from a FigJam log they had kept since week one. We went through the skills matrix with a current-state evaluation from me and the rest of leadership, and talked through anything the hire felt we had wrong. Each review ended with how the first 90 days could have assessed them better or supported them more, and those answers changed the next hire's onboarding.
Rebuilt intake, review and planning as one system, then followed work past launch.
A process inside the delivery rework: team leads scoped and locked work before it started.
Weekly measures that kept every layer informed, from team leads to the C-suite.
AI integration for design delivery, approved by Legal and IT security, reaching SDLC partners and marketing.
Gallup results turned into the department’s operations roadmap, alongside budget and growth planning.
A new-hire pipeline from schools, and a lane for projects no roadmap could fit.
A 30/60/90 system that assessed each hire’s skills and matched mentors by weekly capacity.
Three design systems consolidated into one, with a governed path for every change after.