What is it like to start at Kit

Hi, I’m Jess and I have just joined Kit’s engineering team. I am in my second month here and want to share my experience of onboarding.

Get To Know You meetings

I’ve just had my Get To Know You with our CEO, Nathan Barry. This has been one of many Get To Know You meetings over the past 6 weeks. I don’t think I’ve ever had so many Zoom calls! There have been days where the meeting load has been exhausting, but I have greatly appreciated that the scheduling has kept two days a week empty. This has provided much-needed and desired heads-down time where I can plan my day with my own blocks.

Get To Know You meetings replace all the casual introductions you would get in an in-person office. Kit is fully remote and strongly encourages team connections. They ensure that a new team member meets people across the company by scheduling many 30-minute meetings. Up to now, I’ve had over 30 Get To Know You meetings. The advantage I’ve seen with these meetings is I have a record of everyone I have met. I don’t know about you, but when I meet many people, I lose track of who I have and haven’t met. With this process, I have found it easy to connect with them and get beyond the initial small talk. Every conversation has gone in a unique direction, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this experience.

Learning about Kit

Between these meetings, there has been a lot of content to consume. I was given a document that outlined some objectives and goals for my first few weeks. These goals involved understanding the company’s mission and objectives, understanding our target customer and learning the product. Meeting these goals involved reading internal posts and watching past meetings. In addition, Kit has lots of content about our customers in various media forms. Reading or listening to Creator Stories and watching I Am a Creator and Creator Sessions episodes introduced me to our customers and built a connection with them. I fully embraced the onboarding time to learn about Kit’s journey and to get inspired by our customers.

Working in public

The other notable onboarding experience has been the focus of working in public. Kit strongly encourages communicating in public slack channels rather than in private groups or direct messages. I was delighted to see that this is the default behavior. The only direct messages I have received are HR-related or links to join a 1:1 meeting. Everything related to doing my job has been in a public channel.

This has been super beneficial as I have unblocked myself several times by searching in slack. Someone either asked the same question or close enough that it was sufficient to help answer my question. With Kit working across so many timezones, asking a question in a public channel opens up the audience. If a team member you know is unavailable, it is helpful that others can see the question as they may have the answer.

Now I have built a foundation with the team, I am ready to dig into the code and start addressing tickets. I have a good understanding of where to ask questions and who to mention for specific issues.

Off to code - see ya later!