Creating a Design onboarding structure

A bottled water delivery service that sources water from the purest mountain streams.

problem

The company had no structured design onboarding. New designers would join a project and figure things out as they went — what they learned depended entirely on who happened to be guiding them at that moment. There was no documentation of design culture, no defined buddy structure, no milestones, and no materials for the person doing the onboarding either. This created inconsistency in designer experience from the first week: some people thrived, others felt lost. The design area's culture — its values, working norms, and ways of collaborating — existed only in people's heads. It had never been written down or made visible. No one had been asked to fix this. I proposed it.

solution

The core problem was structural: the design area had culture, ways of working, and accumulated knowledge — but none of it was documented. Onboarding quality was entirely person-dependent, which made it fragile and inconsistent at scale. A secondary problem emerged from the research: HR couldn't solve this alone. They needed the design area to take ownership of its own onboarding — but no one had volunteered or been given the mandate to do so. The initiative itself was part of the solution.

Before designing anything, I ran a diagnostic phase to understand what was actually missing and what people needed — not just what seemed obvious from the outside.

Desk research

Reviewed DesignOps literature and onboarding frameworks from design-mature companies to understand what effective design onboarding looks like and what tends to fail.

Interviews with designers

Spoke with designers across different seniority levels to understand their onboarding experience — what was confusing, what they wished existed, and how long it took them to feel oriented.

Interviews with HR

Mapped the existing company onboarding process to understand what HR already covered and where design-specific onboarding needed to begin — avoiding duplication and identifying the handoff point.

Design culture mapping

Synthesized interview data to map and articulate the design area's culture — its values, working norms, collaboration patterns, and identity — for the first time as a visible, shared artifact.

How the week was organized

Day 1–2

Research & interviews

Desk research, designer interviews, HR alignment. Problem mapping and synthesis.

Day 3

Culture mapping

Synthesized interview findings into the design culture artifact. Validated with team.

Day 4–5

System design

Designed the milestone journey, buddy structure, and onboarding guidelines.

Day 6–7

Delivery & approval