Technical Advisor Onboarding

Welcome to Sourcegraph—we’re VERY excited to have you on the Technical Advisory team! This page describes the onboarding philosophy and process for new Technical Advisors as they onboarding, and outlines expectations and goals of onboarding.

Company-wide and Technical Advisor-specific Onboarding

Our goal is to have TAs fully ramped by the end of your 6th week. During your first 6 weeks, you will complete a variety of activities intended to both introduce you to the company as a whole, as well as provide you with the knowledge, tools, and support necessary to be a successful TA!

Onboarding Tooling

As a company, we use Process.st to guide each individuals’ onboarding. Your own custom onboarding plan will be provided to you prior to your first day and will serve as your guide.

Onboarding Support

Each new TA is paired with two individuals during their onboarding time: an onboarding buddy and an onboarding mentor within the TS Organization. Your onboarding buddy is assigned as part of our company-wide onboarding program. For the TA team, this will be a peer from an adjacent team with whom you’ll work closely. Your onboarding mentor will be someone from the TA team with whom you’ll have regular check-ins and will be there to help guide you. Both of these assignments will be indicated in your Process.st checklist.

High-level Onboarding Overview

Below are the goals and expectations for each week of your onboarding.

Week 1 Goals:

  • Complete through General Company-Wide Onboarding activities: our values, our vision, our culture, what it means to be handbook-first, and how we operate as a business
  • Get all necessary access to tools and logistical setup
  • Learn about our purpose and the value we provide to customers: why does Sourcegraph exist, who uses our product, and how do we add value to our customers’ business
  • Learn about the TS org: who are we, who do we work with, what’s our vision and why what we do matters

Week 2 Goals:

  • Continue orienting yourself to the company: all the different teams, our internal tooling and how we use it
  • Start to learn our processes (pre and post-sales), learn about the different templates and tools that we have and how we use them
  • Working with your manager and onboarding mentor, identify customer calls to begin shadowing for weeks 3–6

Week 3 Goals:

  • This week is all about the product! You’ll read docs, watch videos, and apply what you have learned by using the product, deep diving into parts of the product to your onboarding mentor and other teammates
  • You’ll also start to work on some select Support tickets – there’s no better way to learn the product than to collaborate with Support Engineering and go deep into a particular topic or area. This is a great way to augment your product learning
  • You’ll start shadowing customer calls and watching recorded customer calls via Chorus
  • You’ll be introduced to your eventually book of business so you can start getting up to speed in the background

Week 4 Goals:

  • Learn about how we differentiate from technologies like GitHub Search, Livegrep, OpenGrok and more
  • Go deeper in your understanding of Sourcegraph’s products, learn how we should talk about Sourcegraph relative to the current technologies devs use

Week 5 Goals:

  • Begin working towards Demo Certification. It’s important that anyone is able to do a demo because we might receive this request from a new face at any point in time.
  • Check-in with your manager on your experience and near-term goals
  • Plan your initial book of business with your manager and begin introductions (your onboarding mentor or another teammate will shadow you as the first few times as you get the hang of the role)

Demo Certification

Each TA is expected to receive demo certification before being allowed to lead their first customer demo or training. Certification means passing against this rubric scoring guide.

As onboarding progresses to around weeks 4 and 5, a new TA should begin practicing their use-case based demo scripts with their mentor and manager 1:1. When a TA and their mentor feel they have progressed enough in demo practice, the onboarding TA should schedule a demo review with their mentor and manager for agreed approval that the onboarding TA can lead customer calls. From this point of approval, an onboarding TA is ready to lead a customer demo.

For final demo certification, a rubric will be used to assess a new TA’s demo competency.