When onboarding to a new organization, it's vital to bootstrap your network and context quickly. While it's possible to get up to speed by reading documents and attending meetings, knowledge gained this way can be hard to actually use, and you run the risk of being a detached academic instead of an expert partner.

In this talk I'll present a method that I've used to onboard to two different companies as a new hire, and partially used after a major re-org focused on learning-by-doing. Each time, I've used a basic view of the org chart to pick several broadly scattered teams in my scope, then embedded with those teams to push a change fully through to production in 2-3 weeks. I'll discuss in detail the pros of this method (fast context and social network), the cons (potential delay in delivering staff+ work and a real challenge for impostor syndrome), and how you might build a similar hands-on learning tour for yourself. I'll also discuss some options for a less-intensive approach to understand continuous changes in your org. Finally, I'll touch on things that were the same and different across teams and companies.