Team & Organizational · master area
Onboarding to the Chain
Shadow one cycle. Pull one story. Write one prediction. One cycle, witnessed, is worth more than all five volumes read.
Owners: PO, Tech Lead, Leadership Phase it lives in: Continuous The corpus principle this enacts: The chain teaches itself through contact, not through study.
Where it lives in the chain
How to do this
The new team member's six weeks:
- Week 1 — Shadow one story. Not doing the work. Watching it. From brief to amigos to pull to code to review to release. Take notes about what surprised them. The model the chain runs on becomes visible from inside.
- Week 2–3 — Pull one small story. With a more experienced developer (or PO, or designer) available. The PO walkthrough is longer for this first story. The amigos session is more explicit. The first PR review is gentler.
- Week 4–5 — Run one cycle. Author a small Feature Brief, run amigos, write a prediction. The trio reads alongside.
- Week 6 — Be useful. Pull stories normally. Write a one-page note: what about the chain felt unclear in the first month. That note feeds the next onboarding update.
What good onboarding looks like
The new person does not read five volumes on day one. They read the opening of each volume (an hour total), then they sit in on the team's current cycle. The chain is concrete; reading the chain abstract is exhausting and forgettable. Shadowing the chain in motion is grounding and durable.
The onboarding is complete when the new person can read the team's artefacts — signal reading, brief, ADR, runbook — and name what's missing without being told. That signal is the team's confidence that the chain has reached the new person, not just been described to them.
Related crafts
- Knowledge Retention — the artefacts the new person inherits
- T-shaped People — what shape the new person grows into