Onboarding

Know what to cover with a new colleague.

Someone new starts on the 6th, and most of what they need in their first month is in your head — the order things make sense in, the two systems nobody can explain quickly, the thing you forgot to mention to the last person and apologised for a month later. You’ve done this four times in six years. Often enough to be the one who does it, never often enough to be good at it.

You keep working in ChatGPT or Claude the way you do now. Giraffe is where the plan you built three weeks early is still sitting on the morning it starts.

You prepare for weeks, then improvise on the day

The preparation is real work, and it happens in the evenings. One session working out what a first week should even contain. Another arguing about whether someone should ship something small in week one or read for five days. A short one at ten on a Tuesday, because you remembered the payments dashboard needs an approval from someone who is away until the 9th.

Then the 6th arrives and none of it is in front of you. What you have is the shape of a conversation from three weeks ago and eleven minutes before she gets in. So you improvise, in the wrong order, and forget the same two things you forgot last time — and you find out which two in week three, when she hits them.

What Giraffe keeps

Onboarding someone is a plan you build over three or four evenings with ChatGPT or Claude and then need in one piece, weeks later, on a morning with no time to rebuild it. When you settle a part of it, you tell your assistant to write it down: “Save that to my onboarding project — no shadowing week, she gets a real task on day three.” It lands under headings that don’t move: what’s true now, what you’ve decided, what’s still open, and the notes that fit nowhere else.

Then the date moves, because dates move. You say so, and March 6 takes the row; February 24 is kept underneath it, dated. Same when the first task you had planned turns out to be the wrong thing to give anybody in week two. What you read is the plan you’re on now rather than the one you were on in January — in a browser, on your own, without starting an AI session at all.

Three weeks of preparation, in one project

Say Priya starts on the 6th and the first three weeks are yours. You worked it out in pieces — an evening on the running order, another on what to give her first, a short one after you remembered how badly the same week went for Marcus. Saved as you went, it comes to this:

Nothing is captured automatically. Giraffe has no view of your conversations — only what you ask your assistant to save, or type in yourself.

You’re the only person who opens it

On the 6th you read down that page and work through it. How we bill, at ten, in one sitting, before she sees a line of the code — because in the other order none of the code means anything. Not the whole system in four hours, which is the mistake you already made once. The accounts that exist and the one that doesn’t yet, said out loud, so she isn’t discovering it on Thursday.

Priya never opens this. It isn’t a document for her — it’s what you read before you walk over, a running order and the four sentences you know you would otherwise forget. What she gets is you, prepared.

Then week two, and the question every single person has asked by then: why there are two customer tables. You know it’s coming, because you wrote it down when Marcus asked it, along with the honest answer — one is from 2019 and the migration was never finished. Having that ready is worth more than most of day one.

The next person, eighteen months from now

Someone else starts, and you’re editing rather than beginning. The running order held. The two things that confuse everybody are the same two things. What changes is the date, the first task and who sits nearby — three rows, with the values they replaced still underneath them. Most of the time reading it is the whole job. When you do want help with the next piece — what a first task should be for someone joining a team of five instead of three — you pick it up in ChatGPT or Claude with the last two onboardings already written down, instead of describing them from the top. That is how Giraffe works.

A few more questions

Does the new person get access to the project?

No. A Giraffe project has one reader: you. There are no shared projects, no team accounts and no administrator, so nobody else can open it. The project is your own preparation — the running order for day one, the things you always forget, the answer you know you’ll need in week two. What the new person gets is you, prepared. If you want them to have a written version, you write that out and send it yourself.

The start date moved. Do I redo the plan?

No. You tell ChatGPT or Claude the new date, or type it into the project yourself, and it becomes the live value on that row. The date it replaced is kept underneath, with the day it changed, so a plan built around February 24 doesn’t quietly read as though it was always March 6. Giraffe doesn’t watch your calendar and never asks you to confirm anything — a value changes when you say it changed.

What is there to save before anyone has started?

The order you’ll cover things in, the parts of the job only you can explain, the decisions you’ve already made about the first week, and the question every new person ends up asking. Nothing is saved unless you ask for it: you tell ChatGPT or Claude to write it down — “save that to my onboarding project: no shadowing week, she gets a real task on day three” — and that is what gets written. Giraffe has no view of your conversations.

Can I use the same project for the next person?

Yes, and that is where most of its value shows up. The second time you’re editing rather than starting: the running order held, the two things that confuse everybody are the same two things, and what changes is the date, the first task and who sits nearby. The versions those rows replaced stay in the project’s history. It’s the difference between onboarding your fifth person and onboarding your first person five times.