playbook

Build a reusable onboarding-in-a-box

Build a role-specific first-week checklist and a 30-day plan — accounts, people to meet, docs to read, one clear early goal — grouped by day and reusable for every new hire in the role.

medium ~45 min

when to reach for this

New hires spend week one waiting — for an account that wasn't requested, a meeting nobody booked, a doc nobody pointed them to. Onboarding lives in one person's head and gets reinvented (badly) every time. This system builds the box once: a day-by-day first-week checklist and a 30-day plan for a specific role — accounts to set up, people to meet, docs to read, and a clear early goal — that you reuse for the next hire in that role instead of starting from scratch.

gather this first

The role and team — and what "good" looks like by day 30 (the first real thing this person should ship or own).
The raw ingredients: the systems/accounts this role needs, the key people and what each is for, and the must-read docs — a rough onboarding-notes.md dump is fine, Claude will structure it.
Anything that has to happen on specific days (IT setup lead time, a standing team meeting, a compliance training deadline).

the workflow

01
Define what 'ramped' means before listing tasks

Start from the 30-day goal, not the task pile. A checklist without a destination is just busywork; naming the early win first lets every task earn its place by pointing at it.
you ask
```
Read onboarding-notes.md. This is for a [role] on the [team]. Before any checklist, propose what 'successfully ramped by day 30' should mean for this role — one concrete early goal the new hire can own, plus 2–3 signs they're on track. Don't build the schedule yet.
```
what you get back A crisp 30-day goal ("By day 30, owns the weekly metrics email end to end") and a few progress signals — the destination every checklist item now has to serve.

Anchoring on a concrete early goal is what turns a generic checklist into a real ramp. Get this right and the rest writes itself.
02
Build the first-week checklist, grouped by day

Now lay out week one day by day, sequenced so nothing blocks anything. Grouping by day is what makes it usable — a new hire and their manager both see exactly what today is for.
you ask
```
Now build a first-week onboarding checklist for this role, grouped Day 1 to Day 5. For each day: accounts and access to set up, people to meet (with why), docs to read, and one small thing to actually do. Sequence it so prerequisites come first — laptop and accounts before the tools that need them. Mark who owns each item: new hire, manager, or IT.
```
what you get back A day-by-day checklist — "Day 1: laptop + SSO (IT), team intro lunch (manager), read the team charter (you)" through Day 5 — sequenced so nothing's blocked, with an owner on every line.
03
Extend into a 30-day ramp plan

Week one gets them set up; the 30-day plan gets them productive. Break the early goal into weekly milestones so progress is visible and a stall is obvious early.
you ask
```
Extend this into a 30-day plan in weekly milestones (Week 1 done, Weeks 2–4 to go) that build toward the day-30 goal we set. Each week: what they should be learning, who they should be working with, and a checkpoint conversation with their manager. Keep it realistic — don't overload week 2.
```
what you get back A four-week ramp with weekly milestones building to the goal, a manager check-in each week, and a deliberate ramp curve (shadowing in week 2, contributing by week 3) rather than everything front-loaded.
04
Templatize it for the next hire in this role

This is what makes it a system instead of a one-off. Have Claude strip the person-specific bits and leave clearly-marked placeholders, so the next hire in the role is a fill-in, not a rebuild.
you ask
```
Turn this into a reusable template for any new [role] hire: replace person-specific details with clear [placeholders] (name, manager, start date, buddy), and add a short 'manager prep' checklist of what to set up before day 1. Keep the structure identical so it stays consistent hire to hire.
```
what you get back A clean, reusable template with obvious [placeholders] and a pre-start manager checklist — drop in the next hire's details and you have their plan, identical in shape to the last one.

Save this template. Reusing the same structure for every hire in a role is what makes onboarding feel consistent and fair instead of dependent on who set it up.

make it your own

**Different role, same engine:** swap the ingredients in step 1 — the goal-first → week → month → template flow is identical for a sales rep, an engineer, or a support agent. Keep one template per role.
**Don't bury the docs:** the must-read docs only help if they're readable. Run anything dense through the *Rewrite a policy into plain English* playbook first, so day-1 reading isn't a wall of jargon.
**Automate the reminders:** once the template is stable, a scheduled agent (see the Playbook's *Features* tab) can post each day's checklist items to the new hire and nudge the manager before day 1 — so the plan runs itself instead of living in your calendar.

watch out for

Keep real new-hire details — full name, personal email, home address — out of prompts while you're building the template; design it with [placeholders] and fill them in your approved HR system, not in a chat.
An overloaded week 2 is the most common onboarding failure. Have Claude pace the ramp realistically; a plan nobody can keep up with gets abandoned by Wednesday.
Claude builds the plan; a human owns whether the goal is fair and the access is appropriate. The manager confirms the 30-day goal is achievable and that every account on the list is actually needed — least access, not most.

you'll end up with A reusable onboarding-in-a-box for a role — a day-by-day first week and a milestone-based 30-day ramp toward a clear early goal — built once and dropped in for every future hire instead of reinvented each time.

Define what 'ramped' means before listing tasks

Build the first-week checklist, grouped by day

Extend into a 30-day ramp plan

Templatize it for the next hire in this role