Repeated onboarding fixes weren’t sticking. Discovery interviews revealed the system underneath the documentation needed to change.
The situation
Team health surveys on a distributed state unemployment modernization program consistently flagged onboarding as a pain point. New hires reported contradictory checklists, unclear task ownership, and no easy way to track what was still outstanding. Previous attempts at fixing it hadn’t resolved the underlying issues.
My role
Co-sponsor and lead researcher for the onboarding redesign initiative.
The approach
- I conducted approximately 13 one-on-one interviews with recent new hires, across roles/disciplines, to understand what onboarding actually felt like, not what we assumed was broken.
- The same themes surfaced consistently: unclear ownership across teams, no single source of truth, checklists that felt copy-pasted rather than curated, and no easy way to know what was still outstanding.
- Based on what I heard, I redesigned the onboarding system: clarified ownership across four distinct joiner types, formalized a two-role buddy structure separating task-focused and culture-focused support, moved coordination ownership to a dedicated role rather than scrum leads, and created infrastructure for new hires to get what they needed without relying on institutional knowledge.
Outcomes
Post-redesign feedback showed 70–80% positive sentiment. Every new hire since October 2025 flows through the system across four vendor partners. The process runs without me driving it, which was the goal.