As Faire’s marketplace has experienced incredible growth over the last few years, so has the size and scope of our Data team. As we’ve delivered more impact by building additional machine learning models, running more experiments, and evolving our tooling and infrastructure, we’ve had to think about growing our team thoughtfully — balancing onboarding new team members efficiently with scaling best practices to tenured ones.
The challenge with building a standardized Data team onboarding process
Previously, the Data team onboarding at Faire was a decentralized process in which the manager and an onboarding buddy would curate a custom set of resources for each new hire, which was both time-consuming and inconsistent. In the spirit of embracing our core values at Faire, be kind and take ownership, we wanted to build a content library with a set of standardized “classes” that all Data team members could leverage to learn about new topics while minimizing the overhead needed from managers, onboarding buddies, and subject matter experts.
However, there was one big challenge: our Data team covers a wide range of skills, tools, and specialties at varying levels of seniority and experience.