A developer joins on Monday. His laptop arrives at noon. His GitHub invite arrives on Wednesday. On Thursday he finds the staging environment password in a chat thread from last year. By Friday he has read a great deal of documentation and shipped nothing. He starts to wonder if he picked the right firm.
The Friday test
Use one test for a first week in a product company. By Friday, can the new hire show something small that is done? An engineer merges a pull request behind a feature flag. A product manager writes the one-pager for a small change and walks the team through it. A designer ships a revised empty state. A sales executive runs a mock demo on the staging account. A customer success hire closes five real tickets with his lead looking on.
The test is not about output. It is about showing that access, context and support worked. If the Friday item is missing, something in the first week broke, and you can find it. The pressure points of this group are on the SaaS and product companies hub.
Days one and two: common ground
Name: ________ Role: ________ Team: ________ Manager: ________ Buddy: ________
BEFORE DAY 1 (IT and manager)
Laptop shipped or ready, SSO, mail, chat and password manager created.
Repository, board, design files or CRM seat requested with the manager as approver.
Calendar invites sent: manager 1:1, team stand-up, buddy coffee, product demo.
DAY 1 (manager and HR)
Walk through the company: product, customers, plans, who does what.
Employment and confidentiality papers signed; equity or variable pay terms explained in plain words.
Security basics: MFA, no customer data on personal drives, how to report a phishing mail.
DAY 2 (buddy)
Reads the customer journey doc and the last two release notes.
Sits in on a customer call or a support session.
Writes a half-page note on what he does not yet understand.Days three to five: the role tracks
- 1
Engineers
Clone the repo, run the app locally, pick a good-first-issue labelled ticket, open a pull request by Wednesday, get a review by Thursday and merge behind a flag by Friday. Pair with a senior for one hour a day.
- 2
Product managers
Read the roadmap doc and ten recent customer calls. Shadow a sprint planning and a release. Write a one-pager on a small change and present it on Friday.
- 3
Designers
Audit one flow in the product, list five friction points, and ship one change in the design system with an engineer.
- 4
Sales and customer success
Practise the demo on a staging account, listen to five recorded calls, handle live tickets or leads under supervision and update the CRM with the buddy checking fields.
- 5
Support engineers
Learn the ticket tags, the severity rule, and the escalation to engineering. Close five tickets with a reviewer.
Set up the toolchain before the person
Most of the lost days in a first week trace to a short list. Single sign-on and SCIM provisioning for the right groups. A sandbox tenant with seed data, so the new hire does not touch a real customer account. A CI pipeline that passes on a clean clone, with the linter configured. A Figma library with the current design tokens. A CRM seat with the right pipeline view, the battlecards and the call-recording tool. A help-desk login with macros and the health-score dashboard. Give one person the job of checking each item two days before the start date.
Where it goes wrong
- Access arrives in a trickle, so the joiner waits and loses heart.
- The buddy is the busiest engineer, who answers in one-word replies.
- No one tells the joiner who decides, so he asks the wrong person.
- A 90-day goal is announced as a surprise at the end of the month.
- Equity is mentioned once in the offer and never explained, so the new hire finds out later what vesting means.
- On-call is added in week two without warning.
Pick one buddy who has joined within the last year. He remembers what was confusing. A founder or a long-tenured architect knows too much to see the gaps.
Friday conversation
End the week with thirty minutes of manager and joiner. Review the Friday item. Ask what slowed him down. Write three goals for the next thirty days, each with a visible outcome, such as a feature flag turned on, a demo delivered or a backlog trimmed. Explain how performance is reviewed, and when the first feedback will arrive.
For hiring tracks that run side by side, see recruitment for AI product start-ups. For month two onwards, see onboarding at subscription software businesses and the employee onboarding process.
