What Questions To Ask In Your First 1-1’s With Your New Teammates
When done well, your first 1-1's can reveal insights about your new role, team, and priorities.
Hey there! I’m Nicole, and I’m a product designer. I write this newsletter to share my experiences and lessons learned through my work as a product designer.
In product design roles, you’ll work with a lot of different people — engineers, technical leads or engineering managers, and product managers, to name a few. And when you’re first starting a new role, having a 1-1 with each of these individuals will be an important part of your onboarding process.
Done well, your first 1-1’s with each of your team members can accomplish a few important first steps:
Sets the tone for the working relationship
Helps both parties get to know each other
Provides you with insightful tips and context
Ultimately, by starting the new relationship off on the right foot, you’ll acclimate faster in a new role and be more successful overall. Especially for remote environments, these 1-1’s are a great opportunity to establish that personal connection with your new colleagues.
So what should you cover in these critical first 1-1’s — and how can you make sure you’re asking the right questions? In this post, I’ll unpack what I’ve found to work well. 👇
Before we begin: duplicate the FigJam template!
You might be meeting with anywhere from a small team of individuals to a diverse group of people spanning different roles, products, and specialties. To help you organize that huge swath of information, you can duplicate my FigJam template here:
I used this format when meeting with each of my 10+ cross-functional peers. Rather than using separate Google Docs, this format consolidated all the information in one place. And afterwards, this method made it so much easier to synthesize the findings and create high-level takeaways for my own learning purposes.
Structuring your 1-1’s
I’ve found it helpful to structure 1-1’s with three distinct parts in mind:
Small talk and introductions
Asking a few baseline questions to get a foundational understanding
Asking any role-specific questions to paint a more detailed picture of their role and impact
Most of this post will focus on points 2 and 3, for which I’ve included a few examples of topics you could cover.
That being said, the trickiest part is identifying which points are most relevant to cover, based on your own role and circumstances — after all, there’s a lot you could cover and only 30 minutes or so in each 1-1.
What I’d recommend is reading through these questions, identifying which points or topics are most relevant to each person or team you’re speaking with, and creating your agenda accordingly. You could also phrase questions so they touch on several different points. And if you’re not sure what to include, keep track of which questions seem particularly interesting, try them out, and iterate as you go through each of your 1-1’s!
Step 1: Small talk and introductions
If it’s your first time meeting the person, having a casual introduction of yourself prepared is a good first step. Covering your personal and professional background can set the overall tone for the rest of the conversation. Your introduction could include the following:
Your name, role on the team, and location
Your educational background
An overview of your career: where you worked prior; what kinds of products, services, or experiences you’ve worked on; and any other relevant points about your history
For an in-depth post covering some points that could be helpful to include in your introduction, check out my other post below.
Once you’ve had some small talk and introductions are complete, you can segue into an overview of some of the topics you were hoping to cover in the rest of the conversation. This can be as simple as saying something like, “I wanted to hear more about your background and what you’re working on. I had a few specific questions that we can get into, which will help me get my bearings.”
Baseline questions
Regardless of who you’re speaking with — what their role or job is — covering a few foundational questions will create a more descriptive backdrop of their background and work.
I recommend starting with these questions before diving into the “what are you working on” discussion, because it’ll contextualize their current projects and areas of focus. Especially if you’re new, these baseline questions can ease you into the denser role-specific questions.
I’ve divided these foundational questions into two different sections: questions about their background and questions about their contextual understanding.
Questions about their background
Where they were prior to the current team/company. What does their educational and work background look like overall — what did they study at school, and where have they worked before their current role? I’ve found it interesting to ask these questions not only to understand how the person ended up where they are today, but also to see if there’s anything you might have in common with their history. Past companies they’ve worked for, teams they’ve been on, or problems they’ve had to solve before are all potential starting points for further exploration.
Their history with the team. When did they join the team; how has their experience been? These questions can highlight their unique and individual experience of being on the team and what particularly stands out to them from their time as part of it.
Questions about their contextual understanding
Their understanding of your team’s users. For teams at the forefront of designing and building products for users, having a solid understanding of who those users are is super important. Seeing where your teammates fall in terms of their understanding of your team’s users can provide insights about how user research overall is socialized at the team or company. Different roles will also usually have different answers for this as well, so this question can also highlight how that understanding differs across domains or areas of expertise. I’ve found this topic helpful in 1) diagnosing how much additional user research, and on what topics, might be helpful to do early on, 2) what possible ways of communicating that research could be effective, and 3) who on the team might be particularly interested in being more involved with user research.
Their thoughts on the team’s priorities, challenges, and/or anything they’re excited for in the future. Going into these 1-1’s, you should have an idea of what the team or team members might be focused on. Asking for their thoughts on that specifically — how they feel about each of the projects, what they might foresee as potential challenges, or what they’re looking forward to — can tune you into some feedback that might otherwise be hard to draw out in larger settings. Even if their thoughts are consistent with what’s generally said about each of these points, that’s an indication that people are pretty well aligned (which is great!).
Their projects, priorities, and processes. This can be broken into a few categories:
What they’re currently working on
What larger projects, priorities, or initiatives they’re focused on
What processes are central to their work (i.e. what team processes help them work efficiently, are there any processes they’d like to see, or are there processes they think could be improved)
In addition to those general questions, you can also sprinkle in a few specific questions you can ask to each of your cross-functional peers: engineers, product managers, and the engineering manager or technical lead.
Role-specific questions
Including a few tailored questions can draw more nuanced insights based on your conversational partner’s area of expertise. It’s also a nice gesture to show that you’ve done some thinking, prior to the conversation, about their unique role on the team.
Engineers
Questions about their area of expertise or focus. Do they have a technical focus (i.e. frontend, backend, or full stack)? Knowing this helps you piece together the full makeup of your team, as well as having insight on what kinds of projects might interest them. If an opportunity arises, you’ll be able to recommend them to work on the project.
Questions about their experience of working with designers. Have they worked with designers before — if so, what was the experience like? What do they think has worked well, and what could be improved? I’ve found these questions helpful in understanding how to tailor my collaboration approach to the engineer’s background. Especially if they have preferences around how to communicate with designers, like if async or synchronous methods work better for them, identifying this upfront can inform what approach you take.
Questions about any personal goals they have. Personal goals can often serve as the bigger picture behind one’s projects or day-to-day work, so I like asking this question to better understand what they might be working toward. If they aren’t sure, or if they’re still figuring it out, that can also be an indication that they might be interested in taking on more of a variety of projects and responsibilities — something you can keep them in mind for.
Product Managers
Questions about product and design processes. What’s their method or approach for prioritization; how is discovery usually conducted; how involved are they in research; how do they typically work with designers? Finding out how they get work done, especially with other cross-functional peers, can highlight methods of collaborating with them — or opportunities to try new things.
Questions about stakeholders. Which stakeholders are they frequently working with; how are stakeholders mapped to product areas or priorities; what does the stakeholder collaboration usually look like? If they have any thoughts about successes, challenges, or areas for improvement, this is also a good time to ask. These questions will help you understand how to approach the relationship with stakeholders and what kind of design help you might be able to provide.
Questions about product marketing. What does product marketing typically look like; if there are allocated product marketing resources, how do they typically work with them? Even if your team or company doesn’t have dedicated product marketing managers, these questions can open up the discussion about how products are typically communicated to different audiences and how products go to market.
Engineering Manager or Technical Lead
Depending on your team, you’ll want to reach out to either the engineering manager and/or technical lead — whoever can advise on topics more specific to the team’s composition and members. For the purposes of this section, I’ll refer to this individual as the engineering manager for simplicity.
Questions about the team. The engineering manager can provide insight on the team overall: which team members are focused on which projects, what areas of expertise certain team members have, which team members tend to work more closely with design, etc. Often, they’ll also have a unique perspective on the team’s direction — what they’re striving toward in terms of team dynamic, or how they’d like to grow or improve the team going forward. While this might be consistent or redundant with what you’ve heard from the individual team members, it’s still helpful to cross reference your notes and see how answers align (or differ).
Miscellaneous questions
If time permits, I also like to ask a few logistical questions. Gathering your teammates’ responses about these can help create more awareness of preferred ways of working together, which is especially helpful in remote environments.
Preferred times for meetings vs. focused work time. Do they prefer to meet at certain times of the day or on certain days? Are there “no meeting” days? When do they like to have focused work time, and how often?
Communication style or preferences. How do they like to communicate — do they have a preference for asynchronous or synchronous methods? This is also something you can observe as the work relationship progresses, but I’ve found it helpful to ask directly if the opportunity arises in a 1-1.
Your first 1-1’s can — and should — cover a variety of topics, from work styles to processes and preferences. These talking points provide a structure for your first conversation with your teammates, ensuring that both you and your conversational partner utilize that valuable time effectively and walk away with new learnings. Good luck! 🙌
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