Onboarding Buddy

SaaS Product (B2B)

Onboarding Buddy is a calm, step-by-step home for a new hire's first 90 days. Paperwork, training videos, gear, the team's tools and the people to meet all live on one path, shown one step at a time, with a real buddy for every new hire. People Ops builds the journey once in a journey builder, and every hire follows it from the day they accept the offer to graduation at Day 90. The idea came from a clinical psychology counseling center whose biggest pain point was onboarding: leadership coached every new counselor by hand, then answered the same questions again and again. That work became Clinically Ready, a uniform path for new clinicians. Onboarding Buddy takes the same idea to any company.

Role:

Product Designer

Year:

2026

Explore the full story –

Challenge

Most companies onboard through a pile of disconnected things: an offer email, a tax form, a laptop request, a Slack invite, a handbook PDF and a calendar full of intro meetings. Nobody owns the whole journey, so the new hire pieces it together alone and People Ops chases everyone by hand. Starting a job is already stressful, and a scattered first week makes it worse. The design challenge was to bring every step into one place without turning it into another busy dashboard, and to make it work for 5 roles at once: the new hire, People Ops, the manager, IT and the buddy.

Objective

One journey a new hire can follow one step at a time, that People Ops can build once and reuse. The first direction, a bold sporty orange, was rejected for a calm one: dusty pastels, a serif for headings, hairline borders and no cartoon mascots. Every screen has one highlighted card for what matters right now, and yellow means "what's current" and nothing else. Every stage opens with a short video from a real teammate, because a 2-minute video is harder to skip than a handbook PDF and puts a face to a name before Day 1. Each company's tools (Slack, Notion, Linear) use one shared page template, so adding a tool means adding its details, never a new layout. Ask Buddy, a built-in assistant, answers only from the company's own handbook, the hire's journey and their people, and when it doesn't know, it says so and points to People Ops.

Results

A working product, live in the browser, designed and built in 4 days with AI as a design and build partner, from wireframes to the deployed app. The Figma file holds the full suite: a brand guide, a design system with components in every state, lo-fi wireframes and clickable prototypes for desktop and phone, for both the new hire and the admin. The live app has 21 screens, including a 4-step W-4 with a typed signature, lessons with video and a quiz, a journey builder that updates hires already in progress, and manager check-ins at Days 30, 60 and 90. 1,221 text layers passed a contrast audit, with nothing under 12 px. 17 automated tests guard the parts that must never break, such as one company never seeing another's data. Next is research with new hires and People Ops beyond the clinic.