Getting Oriented Without a Script

Joining a new company as an engineering leader is rarely a linear process. At Shopify, the onboarding experience intentionally avoids a rigid checklist. Instead, the focus shifts to building context through conversations, observing how decisions actually get made, and figuring out where your skillset creates the most leverage. The first weeks are less about learning a specific toolchain and more about mapping the organization's pulse.

What Early Days Are Actually For

The initial period isn't about shipping code or proving technical chops. It's about deliberate listening. New leaders are encouraged to conduct broad 1:1s with peers, direct reports, and cross-functional partners to understand the existing pain points before suggesting any changes. The goal is to build a mental model of the system — both the technical architecture and the human dynamics that keep it running.

Several practical activities anchor this phase:

  • Read the code, but read the history too: Understanding why a system looks the way it does is as important as knowing how it works. Pull request discussions and archived design docs often reveal more than the current README.
  • Shadow the operational flow: Sitting in on on-call rotations or incident reviews provides unfiltered insight into what breaks and how the team responds under pressure.
  • Identify quick, safe wins: Not to impress anyone, but to build trust. Small improvements in documentation or tooling signal that you're engaged and that you respect the team's existing efforts.

Resist the Urge to Reorganize

One of the strongest pieces of guidance is patience with the current structure. It's tempting to look at a team topology or a codebase and immediately see flaws. However, the existing structure usually reflects a series of historical trade-offs. New leaders earn credibility not by declaring what's broken, but by asking what constraints led to the current setup. Structural changes made before you fully understand those constraints often do more harm than good.

The First Deliverable Is a Point of View

Rather than a 30-60-90 day plan filled with generic goals, a more valuable early output is a written perspective. After a few weeks of listening, synthesize what you've learned:

  • Where the team is strong and where it's fragile.
  • What the biggest risks are for the next quarter.
  • Which opportunities for impact align with the company's strategy.

This document serves as a concrete artifact for alignment. It forces clarity and gives your stakeholders something tangible to react to, correcting your assumptions before they turn into actions.

Onboarding as a leader differs from onboarding as an individual contributor. Your success is tied to the output of others, which means your focus must be on enabling managers and senior engineers, not doing the work yourself. This requires a shift in mindset: your learning happens through the lens of your team's challenges.

A key element is psychological safety. New leaders must create an environment where the team feels comfortable surfacing bad news early. When you're new, you have the unique advantage of being able to ask "naive" questions. Use this window deliberately — once you're perceived as an expert, the questions that reveal implicit assumptions get harder to ask.

The Long Game

Effective onboarding has no hard finish line. While the formal structure may last a few weeks, the real integration takes quarters. The best indicator you're fully onboarded is that you no longer need to check how things work — you simply know which conversations to have and which levers to pull. Until that instinct kicks in, keep listening, keep writing down what you learn, and keep testing your assumptions against the organization's reality.

Six Weeks to Impact: How Shopify’s Onboarding Works for New Engineering Leaders

In many organizations, onboarding for a new engineering leader amounts to a laptop, a handful of document links, and a “good luck.” The expectation is that you’ll somehow hit the ground running despite missing the cultural and technical context you need to lead effectively.

Shopify takes a different approach. Its engineering onboarding program for new leaders is a structured, multi-week experience designed to build context, relationships, and trust before expectations around output kick in. Avanti Ketkar, a Senior Development Manager who joined the Shipping and Buyer Trust teams, and Maria Robledo, a Director of Engineering on the Payments team, talked about what that first period was actually like.

A Front-Loaded Introduction

Both leaders found that the preparation began well before day one. Robledo was already receiving materials and clear information about what to expect before starting, and had hardware and swag in hand days in advance. More important for her, thinking shifted within the first couple of hours to what she could expect over the next six weeks, making it clear that onboarding would fundamentally be her job for a meaningful stretch, rather than a firehose session that ended on day two.

Ketkar had a similar first impression. She called the program one of the best she had experienced, calling out how it connected employees to the company mission and to merchants on a deeper level, while covering product fundamentals, engineering, marketing, and support.

During the first week, new hires weren’t just watching screens or reading documentation; Robledo said the process centered on creating a shop and understanding the admin interface. Learning by doing was the philosophy, including setting up test shops and working within the retailer’s UX terrain to build empathy for users.

The Surprises: Focus on Learning, Not Just Output

Ketkar admitted that the initial breadth of the onboarding caused her to wonder if she was taking in too much context at once. However, once she had to work with her team and submit a pull request, parts of those earlier sessions connected. Having already walked through how to set up and use a test shop in onboarding, she found that context key to shipping quickly later.

Robledo’s surprise was not lesser but more about the unexpected license given to new leaders. Her primary objective early on was singularly to learn and build relationships — with the org, with the engineering practices, with hiring, and with teams. She was initially reluctant to trust that this environment would extend beyond a week without real responsibilities to takeover. It did.

That same space for learning eventually led to internal friction for Robledo, who expressed feeling guilty about not delivering concrete impact in her first weeks. Her manager and coach were crucial in helping her reframe that period as productive, not stalled.

Mission in the Wild: Merchant Obsession

Every time Shopify’s values get referenced in a deck, there is a chance they won’t transcend into everyday decisions. Mentioning values would mean nothing unless they made their way into workflow daily. Robledo cited merchant obsession as the most demonstrable value in action: through onboarding, she built a shop to understand her users, then moved to handling real merchant requests by week two. Ketkar, working towards a project focused on consumers rather than sellers, was struck that even on this buyer-facing initiative, connections to merchant intent remained part of the company’s daily decision-making pulse.

People, termed Shopifolk, were equally singled out as being kind and collaborative. Ketkar noted she forged long-lasting bonds during onboarding, and that specific cohort connections grew into monthly one-on-ones that still help give strong workplace context, particular useful in a large remote-first company. Even integrating within existing teams went smoother as those mutual friendships and modes of assistance expanded.

Always in Learning Mode

For Robledo, that educational mindset persists. Her way of continuing development is scheduling and guarding time specifically for learning so she can expand her knowledge of product landscapes and where those initiatives are heading.

Ketkar also views continuous upskilling, not re-learning cycle, as key. Stepping into a new Rails ecosystem without that stack background, she leveraged onboarding to ramp on both old and new materials. That involved heavily consuming internal docs, taking technical elearnings, pairing with coders, and getting experience around CICD flows; such learning was instrumental before entering leading new teams and diverse technical languages within a fresh product domain.

Top Tips from the New Leader Seat

  • Lead by understanding. Lead strongly through relationships. Ketkar noted the difficulty with remote leadership when only seeing a sliver of your coworkers. Building one-on-one time beyond work-for-work context helps provide the knowledge to fill support gaps and suggests overlaps where collaboration, assistance, or adjustment is needed.
  • Put aside pride and dive deep into new technical work. She argued though leaders sometimes unplug from ground-level craft to see wider company goals, catching the essentials can mean testing the processes your reports live with, such as the CI/CD pipeline, and building trust by truly listening.
  • Operating across time zones needs a strategy. As someone new to one base location and split among teams living in different ones, respectfully scheduling and acknowledging those asynchronous pathways allowed her to work effectively around an East and West Coast distance.

When new leaders step in the door, carrying a point of view matters not just on technical solutions. For new leaders approaching their team’s evolved, embedded routine, that adaptability and unique perspective holds almost as large a weight as learning to navigate logistics: they should ask how it is going, observe frictions that seem encoded, then push forward that “new eyes” perspective — questioning ways that are helping things run and where those processes do not, without losing respect for what the company does to keep things moving.

There’s also more classic yet essential work of making meaningful professional connections. According to the leaders interviewed, you can’t deliver for others without caring to know about what actually works for them when solving problems inside their roles. Fostering rapport and supporting personal trajectories that employees prioritize is what enables future technical + professional wins on strong-footing terms in a modern work structure — and embedding within the nuances of a company-wide crafted context at Shopify proves possible by enforcing onboarding as a time to really become absorbed in its reality, especially for leading personalities.