The Newbie Designer’s Guide On Ramping Up Quickly
Tips from surviving and thriving for 2+ years at Meta
At Meta, we move fast, which means learning any new product and or ramping up on an entirely new business space can get challenging. I recently switched teams (Ads → Meta FinTech), one whose work was already well under way, and one where I had limited knowledge on the domain. The natural desire to become an active contributor and make an early impact can become burdensome. Nevertheless, there are some lessons only time can teach. I now follow a framework that has helped me ramp up quickly on a new team, while minimizing uncertainty.
Connect with the mission
One aspect that makes work feel super valuable (and fun) is getting to understand and align on the team’s mission and vision. This helps you build a mental model of anchoring your work to a set of principles and balancing work that you enjoy, as well as open opportunities to further develop skills that align with the company’s broader goals.
Settle into the team
I tend to think of Meta as a mini social network, even at the office, where you need to build relationships and regularly collaborate with cross-functional partners to get the most out of them.
Start your 1:1s with your manager — This can be weekly in the beginning but you can adjust the cadence as necessary. Your manager can help you with context on product direction, prioritization, connecting with key partners, troubleshooting, and setting and working toward goals. Use your first few meetings to talk about what kind of support you want from them as your manager.
Set up 1:1 and recurring meetings
Identify your core partners (PMs, product/content designers, researchers, PMMs and engineers) and their areas of focus — and later start mapping out the next set of interconnected rings and relationships across teams. Schedule snack-size, 30-minute meetings with co-workers to introduce yourself and catch up on their priorities. Some starter questions you might ask:
What is the team focused on right now? What are our goals?
What does success look like from your perspective/discipline?
What has worked in the past, what hasn’t — what they wish could have been improved?
What are challenges the team is facing right now?
What content-related problems are currently going on that you think I can help with/focus on? Is there any research going on now I can jump into?
What's the team communication style?
What recurring meetings should I have on my calendar?
Who else should I make sure to meet with as I ramp up?
What internal groups (if any) should I join?
Understand the team’s priorities
A major focus for me while ramping up is an opportunity to review and learn from the teams’ priorities and plans for the next couple of weeks/months using existing roadmap plans. Having deep dives with your Product Managers around strategy is particularly helpful in identifying and discussing top people problems, the requirements, scope and timelines. Some questions you might ask:
What is our company’s business objective for the next half/year?
Which of our current projects align with the objective?
What type of problems have we identified on the roadmap that could impact the overall objective?
What does success look like for our team?
What stakeholders do we need to get alignment with?
Prioritize your information intake
There can be a lot of people to meet and a lot of existing documentation to go through — Don’t let it overwhelm you. Initially, I found myself navigating through tons of documents, decks and group posts. I now make a habit of organizing them into buckets of topics using a wiki tool like Notion or Google Docs (I know – the irony of using a document to maintain documents, but trust me, it helps), pinning the most time sensitive and important ones for frequent use, while passively reading through others. Eventually, you can weed out any non-relevant and outdated documents over time.
Breathe
Getting accustomed to a new job or a new team is never easy, and doing it remotely can make things especially tricky. So cut yourself some slack. Breathe — It’s going to be okay — and ask for help if you need it.
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