Onboarding with Donut

I wrote most of this back in August time, but it’s been sitting in my drafts folder. Posting now as I’ll be working on bringing Donut to more Happiness Engineers.

As I mentioned, I’m on rotation to the JPOP division at work. It’s been a long minute since I went through any learning or on-boarding process so it was neat to use Donut.ai as part of my training for this rotation.

My colleague Anne, who leads another of the JPOP Happy teams, gave a great interview with the team at Donut.ai which sheds a small light on some of the work we do to ensure everyone who joins the team feels supported and connected from day one of being full-time.

Donut works in Slack and the bot pings you with various notes, advice, and next steps as you start to get through the on-boarding process. This links up our learning platform, (not surprisingly built on our Sensei product), and provides a rounded backbone to make sure you have everything you need to succeed.

At the core, a rotation at Automattic is similar to the support rotation which new non-Happiness hires go through – you experience a different area of the company and return to your home team with new learnings, experiences, and basically level-up as an Automattician.

Originally all onboarding was a p2 post which was copied and updated with specifics. JPOP and WordPress.com have Donut working for new hires and I’m going to work with a colleague to bring that magic over to WooSupport.