Replacing the Post-it onboarding checklist.
A People Operations lead at a 75-person agency replaced ad-hoc first days with curated guide playlists. Designers, account managers, developers each get the stack they need by day two.
01
Hiring came in waves: four to six new joiners a month, split across three offices. Each person needed a slightly different stack. Designers got Figma, Linear, the asset library. Account managers got Salesforce, Asana, the briefing templates. Developers got the local-dev pack and the deploy keys.
The first day depended on whichever manager picked the new joiner up. Some had a doc. Most had a checklist on a Post-it. New joiners would hit day two without VPN, without Slack channels, without the SSO connection to the design tool. The People Ops Slack inbox stayed full from Monday to Monday.
The fix everyone reached for was 'write better docs.' Docs went stale within two months. The team did not read them anyway.
02
Onboarding got split into role-based playlists. Each playlist was five to eight Capture guides: setup, day-one tools, the brief format, the Slack channel etiquette, the way the agency runs design reviews. Different roles, different sets.
The role-agnostic guides got recorded once. Each team lead recorded the role-specific extras. Designers got the design playlist. Account managers got the AM playlist. Developers got the dev playlist. Each playlist took the new joiner about ninety minutes on day one.
The Post-it checklists disappeared. Managers stopped being the bottleneck. Onboarding-related Slack DMs dropped from twelve a day to two.
03
- 01Define the playlists.
One per role, between five and eight guides each.
- 02Record the role-agnostic ones once.
Setup, Slack, SSO, security basics. Re-recorded only when something actually changes.
- 03Ask team leads for role specifics.
Design review process, briefing format, deploy flow. Fifteen minutes per guide.
- 04Send the playlist on day-zero email.
New joiners arrive with day-1 setup already half-done.
- 05Track completion.
The completion log shows who finished which guide. By Wednesday it is clear who is behind.
04
Day-1 productivity used to be untracked because it was always low. Now it is near 100%: every new joiner can run their stack by day two. Onboarding-related Slack load dropped from a day a week to an hour.
The playlists became a hiring asset. The public-facing intro guide is now linked in offer letters. Candidates see exactly what their first week looks like.
Record one workflow.
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Customer Success retired the onboarding Zoom.
45-minute calls became 12-minute guides. Territory grew 80% without adding headcount.
Operations rebuilt the SOP library before audit.
Twenty-one processes, recorded by their owners. SOC 2 closed two weeks early.
IT cut Tier 1 tickets by a third.
Twenty repeat questions, twenty guides, eight weeks. Mondays got their afternoons back.