Customer Engineering Onboarding

Welcome to Sourcegraph—we’re VERY excited to have you on the Customer Engineering team! This page describes the onboarding philosophy and process for new customer engineers as they onboarding, and outlines expectations and goals of onboarding as well as what success looks like 30 / 60 / 90 days in.

Company-wide and Customer Engineering-specific Onboarding

Our goal is to have CEs fully ramped by the end of your 6th week. During your first 6 weeks, you will complete a variety of activities intended to both introduce you to the company as a whole, as well as provide you with the knowledge, tools, and support necessary to be a successful CE!

Onboarding Tooling

As a company, we use Process.st to guide each individuals’ onboarding. Your own custom onboarding plan will be provided to you prior to your first day and will serve as your guide.

Onboarding Support

Each new CE is paired with two individuals during their onboarding time: an onboarding buddy and an onboarding mentor. Your onboarding buddy is assigned as part of our company-wide onboarding program. For the CE team, this will be a peer from an adjacent team with whom you’ll work closely. Your onboarding mentor will be someone from the CE team with whom you’ll have regular check-ins and will be there to help guide you. Both of these assignments will be indicated in your Process.st checklist.

High-level Onboarding Overview

Below are the goals and expectations for each week of your onboarding.

Week 1 Goals:

  • Complete through General Company-Wide Onboarding activities: our values, our vision, our culture, what it means to be handbook-first, and how we operate as a business
  • Get all necessary access to tools and logistical setup
  • Learn about our purpose and the value we provide to customers: why does Sourcegraph exist, who uses our product, and how do we add value to our customers’ business
  • Learn about the CE org: who are we, who do we work with, what’s our vision and why what we do matters

Week 2 Goals:

  • Continue orienting yourself to the company: all the different teams, our internal tooling and how we use it
  • Start to learn our processes (pre and post-sales), learn about the different templates that we have and how we use them
  • Identify customer calls to shadow for weeks 3–6

Week 3 Goals:

  • This week is all about the product! Read docs, watch videos, apply what you have learned by using the product, deep dive into parts of the product to your onboarding mentor

Week 4 Goals:

  • Learn about how we differentiate from technologies like GitHub Search, Livegrep, OpenGrok and more
  • Go deeper in your understanding of Sourcegraph’s products, learn how we should talk about Sourcegraph relative to the current technologies devs use

Week 5 Goals:

  • Start working towards your first product demo, begin working towards Demo Certification
  • Prepare for your first set of customer meetings that you’ll lead
  • Check-in with your manager on your experience and near-term goals

Beginning week 6, you’ll look to lead your first customer meeting, with your onboarding mentor there to support you. You’ll have the support of your onboarding mentor or a more tenured CE until you reach Demo Certification.

30 / 60 / 90 Day Plan

We want every CE to feel certain and comfortable with where they are at currently, what’s expected of them, and what’s next. During your first 90 days, this is what success looks like.

Customer Engineers (Level 1–2)

First 30 days:

  • Demonstrate baseline understanding of core product, value proposition, and processes.
  • Successfully deliver initial product demo, covering core functionality.

30–60 days:

  • Get Demo Certified.
  • Actively participate in initial prospective calls: perform customer discovery, provide demos.
  • Be paired with 1 AE with whom you should begin to build a rapport.

60–90 days:

  • Guide your first prospects towards and through a trial.
  • Collaborating with your lead, mentor, and / or AE, create plans around red accounts, renewals, and / or post-sales engagement.
  • Participate in CE-led internal projects.
  • Raise feedback to the appropriate product team.

After day 90, your role expectations will then align to the predefined CE career ladders of your current level.

Senior Customer Engineers (Level 3–4)

First 30 days:

  • Demonstrate baseline understanding of core product, value proposition, and processes.
  • Successfully deliver initial product demo, covering core functionality.

30–60 days:

  • Get Demo Certified.
  • Actively participate in initial prospective calls, performing customer discovery.
  • Lead customer demos tailored to their described needs.
  • Be paired with 1 AE with whom you should begin to build a rapport and begin strategizing on book of business with.

60–90 days:

  • Guide a prospect towards and through a trial.
  • Guide the creation of plans around red accounts, renewals, and / or post-sales engagement.
  • Participate in and lead CE-identified projects.
  • Raise feedback to the appropriate product team.
  • Drawing from previous experience, make internal contributions by identifying opportunities and proposing and delivering solutions.

After day 90, your role expectations will then align to the predefined CE career ladders of your current level.

CE Demo Certification

Each CE is expected to receive demo certification before being allowed to deliver customer demos without the guidance of their mentor. Certification means new CE’s have demonstrated full proficiency in each criteria area and are prepared to be able to successfully conduct customer meetings on their own.

As onboarding progresses to around weeks 4 and 5, the CE should begin practicing their demos and product knowledge with their mentor 1:1. When they feel that you have an understanding of Sourcegraph’s features and functions, they can approve you to begin leading customer calls while they shadow.

For certification, a rubric will be used to assess a new CE’s demo competency as they onboard to Sourcegraph. Until passing certification, each time a new CE leads a demo session, the shadowing mentor and the CE manager (via Chorus recording) will watch the demo and fill out a demo certification rubric. This will help provide feedback and give the new CE specific areas of focus as you work to get certified and improve your overall presentation.

A CE is considered “Demo Certified” when they have scored a rating of 3 on all of the core competencies by both the tenured shadow CE and the CE manager. (Scoring options include: 1 - Insufficiently Demonstrated, 2 - Partially Demonstrated, 3 - Fully Demonstrated).

Once certified, a CE no longer needs to have a shadow on customer demos. They are still encouraged to meet weekly with their mentor throughout their first 90 days as they continue to face new parts of the pre and post-sales cycles. Mentors or other more senior CE’s are always free to help in more advanced conversations as needed.