🟠 Product Onboarding

[leahbannon2]

What

We need onboarding for Product. As we build out product documentation, guides, and rules, we should also be creating onboarding checklists or training.

Why

None currently exists. There's no product-specific Platform orientation or section of the Platform documentation devoted to product. This is, of course, not entirely the responsibility of Platform. OCTO gov shares responsibility here. We'll need to clarify product specific onboarding and documentation for

• all OCTO teams
• teams building on va.gov and Platform
• gov-only content
• clarify what applies to people who are serving as the gov lead for a contract team (aka OCTO Product Lead/Owner) and what applies just to people in the product community of practice

What currently exists?

• OMB IT Operating Plan
• VA OIT Vision for Digital Transformation
• DEPO product/project board
• Platform's Product Development Checklist
• templates and docs in the va.gov-team > Platform > Product Management folder
• templates and docs in the va.gov-team > teams > VSA > Product folder
• I believe this onboarding checklist issue is a generic one for everyone?

What's needed?

• Guides and examples for everything listed in the Roles & Responsibilities doc

What's needed for everyone, not just product?

• slack guidance

Next steps

• [ ] Everyone shares what they're working on or already have related to this
• [ ] Leah: review and iterate with Health portfolio PLs/PMs on https://github.com/department-of-veterans-affairs/va.gov-team/issues/46192 and identify biggest gaps
• [x] Possibly change the "operations" folder on va.gov-team repo to be "OCTO" and start building octo-wide documentation there -- Leah to socialize this idea more

Then, as we identify our top documentation needs and work through the issues in this board, we will follow these steps for each item

• [ ] identify existing versions of each item within the various components of OCTO (ask everyone in product ops to weigh in and then put out a question with list we have in the #product channel.
• [ ] use CoP meetings to review status and get feedback or competing version from product people
• [ ] identify the processes and docs in place that use existing versions
• [ ] identify any work currently underway to update related docs or processes
• [ ] coordinate with the product ops team to create a single, OCTO version of each item
• [ ] update doc links, archive old docs, and update processes to direct users to the new version
• [ ] ensure the new version is listed in onboarding docs and processes

[leahbannon2]

I've started doing some greenfield brainstorming on an Onboarding Checklist. It seems like most good onboarding docs think about onboarding in terms of your first 90 days and break it down by what you need to learn in chunks of time.

[lkoenigsberg]

Sharing a draft 30-60-90 day onboarding template I played around with here. Would be good to sync that up with what @leahbannon2 shared above.

[lkoenigsberg]

Making sure we don't lose sight of this related slack thread

[MickinSahni]

Lowering priority from high to medium. We're sequencing #47181 before this opportunity so that we have a opinions and artifacts to onboarding people to.