The Challenge
New hires joining GitHub's Customer Success organization had no real onboarding program, just a checklist. In an organization as large and structurally complex as CS, that left new employees consistently frustrated: they didn't know what teams existed under the CS umbrella, who led them, or how the pieces fit together. Understanding the org itself had become one of the hardest parts of the first few weeks on the job.
My Approach
As part of the team that built the program from the ground up, I helped design highly interactive virtual instructor-led training (VILT) sessions using FigJam as an active workspace rather than a passive presentation tool. The goal was to make new hires do something with the org structure and their new teammates, instead of just reading about them.
The Solution
- Welcome Wall. New hires used FigJam's Polaroid widget to pin a photo of themselves to a shared bulletin board along with their name, role, and team, turning an anonymous cohort into a visible, browsable group from day one.
- Org Chart Challenge. New hires were placed into breakout groups, given time to study the CS org chart, then sent into their own team's FigJam board to reconstruct it from memory using the pieces provided, turning a notoriously confusing piece of institutional knowledge into an active, collaborative challenge instead of a static diagram to memorize.
Results
Reflection
The org chart itself hadn't changed; what changed was asking new hires to build it themselves instead of receiving it. That one shift, from passive diagram to active reconstruction, did more for retention than any amount of additional explanation would have. It's a pattern I look for now in any onboarding program: where can the learner build the mental model, instead of being handed it?