Onboarding Handbook SOP
*The purpose of this document: This is our onboarding handbook SOP. Each employee will receive a personalized version of this handbook on their first day at Convictional. It is the responsibility of their hiring manager to complete this handbook ahead of their start date.*
The goal of this handbook is to give each new employee a strong jumping off point in their new role, by creating structure and enabling learning from day one.
Section 1: Roger Welcome & Company Values
Each employee gets a personalized welcome message from our CEO Roger. This sits at the top of their handbook and is also in their inbox on the first day.
We observe a handful of long held beliefs in our work. We believe through putting them into action, we will be successful:
- Focused Intensity: Do a small number of things well, with the shortest iteration time possible.
- Caring Deeply: Every person in the company should care deeply for customers and each other.
- Extreme Simplicity: Complexity gets in the way of quality. Ask: is this essential? If not, reconsider.
- Disciplined Growth: We're building a large, profitable and independent company with discipline.
- Craft Excellence: Judgment rights should be allocated by experience, not hierarchy.
- Pro Human: No matter how capable AI becomes, it should remain a human tool.
By working according to our values and helping customers keep their teams mission-aligned by design, we will build a large, independent and profitable company.
Section 2: Company Organization
We are a small, highly focused team. Convictional is structured into three fundamental functions two equally visible execution domains and one support engine that protects and enables the other two:
- Product: Contains design, engineering, and R&D. This includes basically anything that is directly working on or contributing to the software itself.
- Customers: Covers everything necessary to obtain, service, and grow customer relationships effectively and efficiently. This includes sales, product marketing, and customer operations.
- Operations: Serves the Product and Customers functions by taking away anything that doesn't lead to direct customer impact, systematically reducing internal distraction.
Our corporate context, decisions, and organizational history are built directly into the Convictional product ecosystem. You can and should use research and the rest of the Convictional product suite to ask questions and conduct internal research.
Section 3: Role Overview & Scope
Use this section to outline the new hire's structural placement, immediate manager, and cross-functional expectations.
Template Structure to Complete:
- Reporting Lines: Explicitly state who the hire reports to for their first few months and how frequently formal touchpoints (e.g., weekly pipeline or sprint reviews) occur.
- Current State Context: Describe what work has been done in this specific domain so far (e.g., "Founder-led execution has been happening this year to find repeatability...").
- Functional Collaboration Mandate: Document exactly how this role must cross-pollinate with the other branches of the business:
- How they support Product: (e.g., Feed real-world user feedback to engineering).
- How they support Customers: (e.g., Collaborate with product marketing on experimentation).
- How they support Operations: (e.g., Assist in developing new SOPs).
Section 4: The 3-Month Ramp Framework
Every role handbook must feature a progressive, three-month ramp schedule that moves from absorption to full ownership. Customize the inputs using the following structural rules:
Month 1: Learning & Acclimatization
- Focus: Set the focus strictly on domain mastery, internal system/market understanding, and culture assimilation.
- Targets: Define clear input-driven activity metrics (e.g., X tests run, X sprint points completed, or X outreach messages sent per week).
- Expectation: Explicitly state that this is a non-output/no-revenue educational period. The priority is establishing baseline consistency.
Month 2: Refinement & Scaling
- Focus: Shift the focus to process optimization, workflow refinement, and cross-functional scaling.
- Targets: Introduce intermediate pipeline, quality, or production-value targets alongside scaled input volumes.
- Expectation: Incorporate collaborative testing, feedback loops, and launch preparation assignments.
Month 3: Full Ownership & Launch
- Focus: Establish full workflow ownership and live execution autonomy.
- Targets: Set the hard performance expectations that match a fully-ramped team member.
- Expectation: Expect the new hire to independently close cycles, deploy code, or ship initiatives tied directly to the public launch.
Ongoing (Month 4+)
- Define how performance evaluations will balance activity metrics, output quality, and conversion/success rates moving forward.
Section 5: Weekly Time Allocation & Scheduling
Convictional follows a four-day workweek, with Fridays off.
Construct a functional time allocation table for the role. Maintain the baseline percentage distribution below but customize the specific activities to align with the role's primary responsibilities.
| Core Focus Area | Target % | Role-Specific Activities Template |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Deep Work | 50% | Allocate ~4 hours per day to core functional execution (e.g., coding, prospecting, design sprints, content creation). |
| Interactive Tasks | 30% | Allocate to external or internal execution cycles (e.g., stakeholder syncs, code reviews, user interviews) including prep and follow-up. |
| Administrative Hygiene | 10% | Allocate ~1 hour per day to database updates, documentation progression, system clean-up, and tool maintenance. |
| Internal Syncs & Growth | 10% | Allocate ~1 hour per day to cross-functional alignment meetings, coaching sessions, and building structural SOPs. |
Section 6: Downstream & Lifecycle Support Framework
Every team member owns a piece of the post-delivery lifecycle. Use this section to outline how the specific role interfaces with long-term success, utilizing these three pillars:
- Pillar 1: Implementation & Onboarding
- Instructions: Detail the role's impact within the first 30 days of a project, customer sign-on, or feature deployment. Identify the key metric (e.g., adoption rate) and specific tracking activities.
- Pillar 2: Core Optimization & Retention
- Instructions: Define how this role ensures deep value and stability over time. Establish what long-term success looks like (e.g., positive user growth, zero technical debt, high feature retention).
- Pillar 3: Expansion & Prevention of Churn
- Instructions: Detail how the role proactively reviews data or usage patterns to identify missing opportunities, low engagement, or structural gaps to prevent regrettable degradation of our ecosystem.
Section 7: Matrixing Onboarding Objectives
The onboarding journey is structured symmetrically across two tracks: integrating into our broader company culture, and mastering your specific functional role.
| Team Onboarding | Functional Role Onboarding |
|---|---|
| Feel like you're part of the team by building meaningful relationships with everyone at Convictional . Get set up with benefits, payroll, and company-wide tools . Learn Convictional's story, context, and culture . Understand, at a high-level, the problem we are solving and the why behind our work . Become familiar with Convictional's product strategy and understand what we are building . Do some personal reflection and write an individual development plan for your first 90 days. | Outline the specific team-level strategies or system architectures they must master Define the core components of the platform, codebase, or customer profiles they need to study deeply . Detail the historical evolution of our problem definition so they understand the context of current friction points . Map out past operational or developmental experiments and bets run by this department . Require documentation of their personal workstyles, engineering/communication needs, and future goals. |
The Onboarding Journal
We recommend all new hires keep an onboarding journal. Taking the time to pause, reflect, document, and reflect again is an integral part of learning. If you're always going and doing, you'll never slow down to consider what you could be trying to increase your impact long term. Take a look at Teaching Smart People How to Learn if you're not convinced about the importance of reflection (and probably read it even if you are!).
Your onboarding journal should include:
- Questions you have and resources to keep track of.
- Interesting ideas you want to revisit and preparation notes for team syncs.
- Process gaps—things that aren't written down anywhere that should be codified.
- Early project observations, architectural notes, recommendations, or opinions.
- Anything else you think is vital to remember, share, or build upon.
Section 8: Onboarding Milestones & Deliverables
To build practical confidence, every functional handbook must outline three distinct milestones to execute during the onboarding period. Use these operational templates:
Milestone 1: The Quick Win Assignment
- Core Philosophy to Reference: Frame this task around a core corporate baseline: we value high-quality, deeply intentional, and carefully crafted work over automated, mass-produced shortcuts.
- Task Setup: Design a small, practical task that can be completed entirely within 1 to 2 hours (e.g., writing a single bespoke pitch, reviewing a core component of code, or auditing a specific operational flow).
- Timeline Rule: Must be completed and delivered to the manager by Tuesday of Week 2 to kick off an iterative, collaborative editing and review process.
Milestone 2: The First Major Deliverable
- Objective: Strengthen the new hire's foundational grasp of company systems and have them build a scalable asset they can actively execute against in the near future.
- Task Setup: Instruct the hire to build a functional blueprint, multi-step action plan, or structured experiment relevant to their department. Point them explicitly to shared internal drives or resources to aid their research.
- Timeline Rule: Design this activity to take roughly 6 hours (one full working day) to complete. The draft must be shared with core team stakeholders around the middle of Week 2 for open feedback, with final delivery submitted at the beginning of Week 3.
Milestone 3: The 90-Day Plan
- Objective: Instill an early sense of deep ownership and leadership-level responsibility by having the new hire map their own onboarding trajectory.
- Task Setup: Require the hire to author a clear execution plan organized around 30-, 60-, and 90-day milestones. It must detail their self-defined criteria for success , their required depth of business/system understanding , professional growth goals , and tangible assets they intend to contribute back to the company’s internal wiki or processes.
- Timeline Rule: A completed initial draft must be ready by the end of Week 1 to be calibrated and refined alongside leadership during their first end-of-week sync.