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Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?

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Re: Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?

#41

Post by wikidani »

tedhallez wrote: post #9

I'm facing a similar challenge, but for Sales within the defense industry. I've approached it by reading and thinking about the company's relationship to it's stakeholders. Understanding and writing mini-essays on the current customers and their pain points, the main competitors and their products, the history of the industry/segment and more. Information sources include YouTube, podcasts, press releases, news articl…

If you don't mind me asking, what does a sales role within the defense industry entails? I am only familiar with the big expos and (sort of) public tenders for specific things like PPE

Re: Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?

#42

Post by sevagh »

UncleEntity wrote: post #33
rohanm93 wrote: post #28

I covered this in a recent issue of a career newsletter I write [1]. Some snippets from it that I think would help new joiners (not only those joining a new industry): 1. No-one’s going to go out of their way to guide you. Esp at smaller companies, the fact that you’ve been hired means you’re joining a time-poor company, and there likely won’t be a formal onboarding process. So...you’ve got to onboard yourself. 2. Ad…

This is also sound advice for someone wanting to join an established open source project. Pluck some of the low-hanging fruit so they can get to know you and try not to be a burden on the core maintainers. And...have fun?

I think starting off with the impression of being a small wins person sticks, and people will think of you as "does small tasks well." No promos and whatnot.

It's why being a loud jackass that deploys something horrendous has better outcomes for your career.

Re: Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?

#43

Post by bzmrgonz »

omarhaneef wrote: post #31

All these suggestions are great but I would add two more: 1. find a good text book in the field as narrowly construed as possible, and just browse the table of contents. This will give you a quick map of the field, and a place to put all the info you gain. 2. Read the management discussion in the 10k of a public version of the company you work at and 2 leading customers, and the transcript from the earnings call. Fas…

Nice, we are going macro now. This is often overlooked, if you did a lateral industry shift, you have to get conversant in the industry lingo asap, so don't forget the jargon and concepts. Most standard industries are well documented, even though the documentation may be less than stellar (I'm personally looking for IP industry material to binge on, nevertheless, because it's IP(intellectual property), they don't publish much training/guide material). I tend to do the book thing but on subreddits of the particular sector/industry, I think that browsing topics on reddit is the fastest way to get conversant and begin to absorb knowledge, or more specific, awareness of existence of knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?

#44

Post by PaulHoule »

maroonblazer wrote: post #37
PaulHoule wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can work really well but you can sometimes find individuals who won't play along.

In which case that's good feedback to give to management. Unless they have very good reasons and offer an alternative ("I'm on deadline so can't talk now, but after this sprint I'll have time.") those individuals are actively sabotaging the team and should be dealt with accordingly.

Often management knows all about it and does nothing for one reason or another.

I had two cases of having a toxic coworker and only being able to get them fired after leaving myself. (Step 1 is “oh shit, we lost an important team member”, Step 2 is “aha! we haven’t been able to replace that team member in six months because of the behavior of the toxic employee”). Next thing I see the person is on LinkedIn looking for a new job.

Re: Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?

#45

Post by ilc »

I've done this a few times.

1. Immersion. I learn more German in Germany when I visit for a week than I do in months of study. Why? Because I can see it all context. I can guess what a Hauptbahnhof is context, and other words. You start to see the patterns. Work is much the same. Get in there and learn! There is a reason why the first thing every software developer should do is fix a pretty easy bug. It gets them to do so many essential things they will need to do day to day as part of their job.

2. There are no dumb questions. "What is Alpha?" "What are the Greeks?" etc. All VERY valid questions. If in Star Trek parlance if someone says to "Tech, tech the tech." ask some questions. :) (Tech was used by the writers as a stand in to allow them to write the script without looking everything up.)

3. You have time. Nobody expects you to know anything. Ramp up for an industry to basic levels is usually about 6 months.

4. Suffer. Try to learn the concepts. This won't always work, but it'll teach you tons of extra concepts you will need later. Time spent learning is rarely totally wasted. It just may be the knowledge you need to cross a gap later. Also it makes it obvious to the people around you, you are trying, thus you are more likely to get help.

5. Don't be afraid to be stupid. When I used to work with TLAs a wise boss once told me if he didn't know what some word/acronym meant. He'd just ask.

It was amazing how many times nobody in the room could expand it. Despite us all working with it ;)

I've picked up this habit from him. It hasn't hurt me... But it can be a great way to rattle people.

Re: Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?

#46

Post by hn72774 »

> We do have a set of required reading material that I've gone through, along with product demos, and even 2 VC books that have been recommended on the subject.

What were some of the reading material and books? What area of fintech?

I went the other way, from finance into non-finance. And from bigco to smallco. It took a solid 6-12 months to start feeling competent. It was worth it. I now have a lot more breadth on the business side, and technical depth from having to read code to learn a bunch of new stacks and end to end integration flows. At the smallco there wasn't much for docs to read, and the ones they had were out of date.

Re: Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?

#47

Post by qznc »

tedhallez wrote: post #9

I'm facing a similar challenge, but for Sales within the defense industry. I've approached it by reading and thinking about the company's relationship to it's stakeholders. Understanding and writing mini-essays on the current customers and their pain points, the main competitors and their products, the history of the industry/segment and more. Information sources include YouTube, podcasts, press releases, news articl…

Second Anki!

Joining an industry/domain/organization also means learning the language there. The acronyms are vocabulary.

Re: Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?

#48

Post by DavidPeiffer »

rco8786 wrote: post #3

I have a very specific (and pretty easy) strategy for this when I join a new org. Technically you could do this at any time, but you generally have a "grace window" when you're new where people are happy to go out of their way to meet you and teach you. First, meet 1 on 1 with every member of your immediate team. This of course serves as a "get to know you" meet, but your real goal is to get them to explain their wor…

This process was mandatory at my last company, and it was really helpful. People are way more likely to respond to your email or do something for you as a newer employee if they've met you, particularly so if you can meet in person.

Taking notes during or immediately after the meeting, then synthesizing them to form a narrative is also helpful when you're meeting so many people.

The other thing I do is start a file literally titled "Everything I know about " and just write everything down. I make diagrams, write sentences with highlighted blank spaces for gaps in knowledge, etc. As you get to the 10th meeting, you have a decent mental model of how things are intended to work, and have probably heard about some of the systems the 11th person works with. When you communicate some of your understanding of the system to them, they can fill in gaps or correct misunderstandings.

The other thing I always ask about is what a cadence or work looks like? Is there seasonality in their availability? Finance/accounting are best left alone the first week of the month as they're dealing with month end. Some people are slammed Monday and Tuesday, catching up from things that happened over the weekend. If an entire business is seasonal, it makes sense to prioritize heavy lift projects to the off-season.

Re: Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?

#49

Post by KineticLensman »

DavidPeiffer wrote: post #48
rco8786 wrote: post #3

I have a very specific (and pretty easy) strategy for this when I join a new org. Technically you could do this at any time, but you generally have a "grace window" when you're new where people are happy to go out of their way to meet you and teach you. First, meet 1 on 1 with every member of your immediate team. This of course serves as a "get to know you" meet, but your real goal is to get them to explain their wor…

This process was mandatory at my last company, and it was really helpful. People are way more likely to respond to your email or do something for you as a newer employee if they've met you, particularly so if you can meet in person. Taking notes during or immediately after the meeting, then synthesizing them to form a narrative is also helpful when you're meeting so many people. The other thing I do is start a file l…

> If an entire business is seasonal, it makes sense to prioritize heavy lift projects to the off-season

One form of seasonality is associated with financial years, in some industries. I found this working on contracts for UK govt agencies, where the FY runs from April to March. The customers usually procrastinated about letting contracts, which sometimes wouldn't appear until after the summer or even just before Christmas. Then there was a mad panic from Jan to March to actually spend the money and submit those deliverables. It followed that the time to do training, internal projects, housekeeping etc, was in April and May.

Re: Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?

#50

Post by cableshaft »

I work in consulting and have been working for a client in finance for the past two years working on greenfield applications for them.

I haven't gone too far out of the way to learn aspects of finance other than through exposure and osmosis. As long as there's someone on the team that really understands it on a deep level, you don't have to be that person to be effective, at least on the frontend (which has been my focus for this client, although I am doing a bit more backend now).

Hasn't stopped me from implementing complicated features as requested and discussed, just asking questions for what's expected, what the data should look like when it's done correctly, etc, but now I do understand it a lot better and I can mostly follow along during deep discussions (some of it still goes over my head though).

That being said, you can pick up books on finance to help you understand things better. For me, I discovered recently (stumbled upon it at a used bookstore, actually), that I should probably pick up textbooks on Quantitative Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management in order to understand those deeper discussions better, but the focus of your startup might be different.

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