🔗 How do engineering leaders onboard at HubSpot?

HubSpot has a unique onboarding program for engineering leaders that consists of a few months of embedding as an IC in a few engineering teams. I recently finished my embeds and thought I would share some of the observations!

First of all, I’m super grateful for that experience, both for the team to host and educate me, and for the organization to invest in the long-term success of new leaders. It was very energizing, reflective, and also intimidating!

So what did these embeds give me?

It allowed me to build empathy. The experience of working day-to-day with the team is something easy to forget if you stay in leadership positions for long. Observing and triaging paging alarms, answering other teams’ questions, and debugging questions from customers helped me understand the day in and day out rhythms of the team. Observing how the team handles them and feeling at least a part of the pain allows you to better help your organization in the future.

It helped me learn how we ship to customers. Shipping is your heartbeat and it’s important to understand how the process works, how to monitor the change and what tools are available to do that, how to roll it back and recover. You learn your log search engine, observability tool, alarming tool, deployment pipeline, infra configuration, or storage architecture.

I understand the pace. Team by team, you learn how fast the teams ship, understand the bar, and orientate yourself in what pace a team should operate under different circumstances.

I’ve learned the process. You learn how teams work week by week. You understand how the implementation details are discussed and aligned and how engineers contribute to them. This also allows you to understand how resilient teams are, what shape of talent there is in place, and what roles or skills you might need to invest more in.

It facilitated relationship building. Coming fresh, vulnerable, and in learning-mode helps build stronger relationships with engineers in your org that will be useful later to get a trusted pulse from the teams, help you champion ideas, or provide honest feedback.

I understand the problems of our customers. by working with the team, you have the opportunity to ask why multiple times and deeply understand what problems we are solving, why in that priority, and how they are contributing to the bigger picture of teams around you.

Embedding in other engineering and product teams, and shadowing teams from other organizations and our go-to-market teams has given me a better understanding of HubSpot, my role, and how I can immediately make an impact. I’ve never had such an impactful experience onboarding, and look forward to putting my learnings into practice!