How to Ramp Up Like a Pro
Your First 90 Days Matter More Than You Think
You landed the job, celebrated with champagne (or cider), updated your LinkedIn, and the “how do I avoid fumbling this awesome new opportunity?” question pops into your head. Ask any manager whether their top performers were obvious in the first several months of joining a team. I’d be surprised if they weren’t!
Most engineers think ramping up is just about learning the codebase and becoming productive. That's table stakes. Real ramping is about setting yourself up to succeed long-term and it's one of the most underutilized career accelerators in tech.
This matters because leadership teams are constantly making mental notes about who gets up to speed quickly, asks thoughtful questions, and starts contributing meaningfully to the team's goals. That early perception creates a powerful momentum that can accelerate your growth, open doors to challenging projects, and fast-track your path to promotions for years to come.
On the flip side, if you're seen as someone who takes forever to get oriented or struggles to make meaningful contributions early on, that reputation can stick. It might take months or even years to shed that initial impression in favor of one that will get you the attention and sponsorship you need to advance.
The stakes are high. So here's how to not screw it up.
The Four Pillars of Effective Ramping
1. Learn What You Don't Know (And Embrace the Information Overload)
Most engineers make the mistake of diving straight into their immediate responsibilities without understanding the broader context. This is like trying to optimize a function without understanding what the larger system is supposed to accomplish. Start from the very top instead.
Take time to understand how the business actually operates and how your team fits into the bigger organizational machine. You should be able to confidently explain how your team's work contributes to the company's bottom line. Is your team a cost center that enables other teams to move faster? Are you directly building features that drive revenue? Do you maintain infrastructure that keeps the lights on? Understanding this context will inform every decision you make.
Begin posing strategic questions early, even if they seem tangential to your immediate work. Why doesn't the company use an off-the-shelf email platform instead of building their own? Why are we doubling down on notifications rather than in-product nudges? Why did the team choose this particular architecture over alternatives? You don't need the answers immediately, but these questions will guide much richer conversations with your colleagues and help you understand the reasoning behind current decisions.
Resist the urge to immediately synthesize everything into a coherent mental model. Instead, just let yourself be confused for a while. Your brain will start making connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of information over the coming weeks.
Think of it like learning a new city. At first, every street looks the same and you rely heavily on GPS. But gradually, you start recognizing landmarks, understanding traffic patterns, and developing intuition about which routes work best at different times of day. The same thing happens with company knowledge.
2. Start Small and Build Credibility Through Unglamorous Wins
Nobody starts on a new team and immediately launches a massive overhaul. It just doesn’t happen. The real winners are engineers who land small, unglamorous things like a fix for a common pain point that everyone else has been tolerating. These engineers earn their team's respect faster than those who immediately jump into complex feature work. There's something powerful about solving the papercut bugs that have been annoying the team for months.
Don't underestimate the strategic value of taking on documentation improvements, test fixes, build pipeline cleanup, or other “unsexy” tasks that others have been putting off. These tasks serve two critical purposes beyond their immediate value: first, you're unlikely to fail at them, which builds confidence for both you and your team. Second, other engineers will genuinely appreciate the effort because these improvements make their daily work better.
As a manager it’s SO common to have the new engineer who spends their first week fixing a flaky test that's been randomly failing in CI for months suddenly becomes everyone's favorite person. Meanwhile, the engineer who immediately tries to architect a new microservice without understanding the existing system often struggles to get their work reviewed and merged (and is low-key hated).
Starting to establish your productivity and attention to quality early creates a foundation that enables you to work on more complex, higher-impact projects later. Your teammates need to trust your judgment and execution before they'll feel comfortable giving you ownership of critical systems.
Resist the strong temptation to immediately work on something "at your level." This is especially important for senior engineers who might feel like documentation work is beneath them. Staff-level engineers and mid-level engineers alike need to learn the ropes before they can contribute at their expected level. It's an extremely common failure mode to reach beyond your current depth of understanding of the company's systems and processes.
3. Clarify Expectations and Demonstrate Growing Autonomy
Even if they don’t say it, managers expect some ramp-up time before firm performance expectations set in. But they're also watching carefully to see how you use that grace period. Use it to the fullest because you won’t get it back. While teams can often accept lower velocity for a few weeks (sometimes months for more senior engineers), there's an implicit understanding that you'll eventually "pay back" this investment.
When your manager gives you a ramp-up plan or onboarding document, treat it as a starting framework rather than a rigid checklist. Most well-intentioned ramp-up plans start to fall apart after the first few weeks as priorities shift and new information emerges. That’s ok. It’s your opportunity to step up and demonstrate strategic thinking. More importantly, it’s a chance for you to take ownership of your career progression which will earn you a wide smile from your manager and leadership team.
To do this, understand the spirit behind the plan rather than just following it mechanically. If the plan says "learn about the authentication service," dig deeper to understand why this knowledge is important. Is there a project coming up that will require auth changes? Are there ongoing reliability issues? Is this service a common source of confusion for new team members?
As you progress, start proposing your own tasks and projects that fill gaps in the original plan. This demonstrates initiative and shows that you're thinking beyond just completing assignments. Maybe you notice that the team lacks monitoring for a critical service, or that there's no documentation for a complex deployment process. Identifying and proposing solutions for these gaps is exactly the kind of autonomy that managers love to see and opens the conversation. If those aren’t the right things to work on, you’ll be earning valuable information about how to prioritize.
4. Build Relationships Strategically (It's Not Just About Being Nice)
Some engineers hate this, but it’s useful to remember that building software isn't just technical: it always involves people, and this becomes more true as you advance in your career. The most successful engineers understand that technical excellence is necessary but not sufficient. You need to build a network of relationships that will help you understand context, navigate organizational dynamics, and ultimately get things done.
Whenever you meet someone new, ask them two strategic questions: what they think you should know that isn't obvious, and who they think you should meet. These questions serve multiple purposes (a) they show that you're thoughtful about your learning process, (b) they often surface valuable insights that don't make it into formal documentation, and (c) they help you build a map of the organization's informal power structure.
Learn not just what your colleagues can teach you about technical systems, but what they think is important, what's missing, and what frustrates them. Understanding their biggest pain points serves two purposes: it helps you avoid common traps and mistakes, and it gives you fertile ground for building genuine rapport later when you can actually help solve some of these problems.
Don't limit yourself to people working on your immediate tasks or even your immediate team. If someone works with your team for more than a few hours a week, they're probably worth talking to. These relationships often prove unexpectedly valuable months later when you need to understand the history behind a decision or get context on why something was built a certain way.
Also, don't just stick to other engineers. Getting to know cross-functional stakeholders like product managers, designers, data scientists, sales engineers, customer support folks is hugely valuable. These people often have context about customer needs and business priorities that doesn't filter down to the engineering team in formal channels. Strong engineers don’t draw the borders of their responsibility between specs and code. Your progression depends on it.
If you're unsure who to meet, be direct with your manager. Tell them you'd like to connect with some of your team's key stakeholders and collaborators, and ask for specific introductions. Most managers appreciate this initiative because it shows you're thinking about the broader context of your work.
Subtle Dynamics That Make or Break Your Ramp
Beyond these four pillars, there are some subtler dynamics at play that can significantly impact your ramping success. Understanding these will help you navigate the inevitable challenges that arise.
Managing Information Overload: Every company has its own vocabulary, acronyms, and shorthand that can make early conversations feel like learning a foreign language. Don't try to absorb everything at once. Instead, keep a running document of terms, tools, and concepts you encounter. Review and update it weekly. After a month, you'll be surprised how much the fog has lifted.
Reading the Room: Pay attention to team dynamics and communication patterns. Some teams prefer detailed technical discussions in meetings, while others keep meetings high-level and do the deep dives in smaller groups. Some teams communicate primarily through Slack, others through code comments and pull requests. Adapting to these norms quickly will help you integrate more smoothly. Avoid getting trapped in how your old team or company used to do things!
Productivity Paradox: There's a natural tension during ramp-up between learning and producing. Early on, almost everything you do will take longer than it should because you're learning as you go. This can be frustrating, especially for experienced engineers who are used to being highly productive. Resist the urge to optimize for short-term velocity at the expense of understanding. The upfront investment in learning will pay dividends later.
Asking Questions Effectively: There's an art to asking questions during your ramp that demonstrates thoughtfulness rather than helplessness. Before asking, try to find the answer yourself through documentation, code exploration, or existing discussions. When you do ask, provide context about what you've already tried and what specifically you're confused about. This shows respect for your colleagues' time and helps them give you better answers.
Ramp-Up Pitfalls to Avoid
Even with the best intentions, there are several traps that can slow down your progress:
Perfectionism: Trying to fully understand every system before contributing anything. While deep understanding is valuable, you can often start contributing meaningful value with partial knowledge. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Hero Complex: Attempting to solve major problems or architectural issues in your first few weeks. These complex challenges usually exist for good reasons and require significant context to address properly. Focus on building credibility through smaller wins first. Even for more senior folks, an easy way to lose face with an organization is to underestimate a large challenge or make a sweeping proposal that lays bare your ignorance. Don’t get embarrassed by this!
Don’t Ostrich!: Keeping your head down and trying to figure everything out independently. While some independent exploration is valuable, ramping is inherently social. The people around you want to help, so let them. This won’t always be true in later months.
Uncharitable Assumptions: Believing that practices or decisions that seem obviously wrong to you are actually wrong. Every organization has historical context, constraints, and trade-offs that led to current decisions. Understand the "why" before proposing alternatives. If you don’t yet know the why, demonstrate curiosity and ask questions.
The Bottom Line
Your ramp-up period is one of the highest-leverage investments you can make in your career at any company. The perception you build during these early months (whether you're someone who gets up to speed quickly, asks thoughtful questions, takes initiative, and contributes stuff that actually matters) will follow you throughout your time at the organization and influence the opportunities that come your way.
Take it seriously. Start from the top with business understanding, build credibility through thoughtful contributions, clarify expectations while showing growing autonomy, and invest in relationships across the organization. The compound interest on these early investments will pay dividends for years to come.
Your future self will thank you for making your ramp-up count.
Changelog
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Awesome content! Most of these tips are relevant for engineering managers too. Would love to see a dedicated post on nailing manager onboarding as well 🙏