Onboard new users

Learn some best practices on rolling out Secoda to new users.

Once you've connected your data and built out some documentation within the workspace, you might consider who will be the main users of Secoda. This guide should help you with deciding an initial rollout group, as well as lay out some steps you might take while onboarding users.

Choosing your rollout group

This will look different across all organizations. Some data teams would like everyone in their organization to have access to Secoda, while others might want to limit the member size initially.

Gradual rollout option

We find that teams feel more confident rolling out to a larger group if they are able to start with a smaller focus group of individuals to test and build out documentation within the product.

Consider who might be your target users. We like to encourage teams to think about the different personas across their organization and who might best benefit from using Secoda. Ask yourself a few questions:

• Who is the most knowledgable about the different data across your organization?

• Whose workflows could be improved and automated with a tool like Secoda?

Both of these questions could be great places to start in terms of creating a core group of users to become champion editors within the product.

Onboarding new users

There are many different ways that our users go about onboarding their teammates into Secoda. Here are some steps that we suggest as best practices.

• Before onboarding new editors, outline policies so that users know their responsibilities while working in the tool. Tip: These can be documented within Secoda in an "Onboarding" Collection so that they can always reference them. Some examples:

  • What does Ownership mean (i.e. Owners must stay up to date on documenting data; Owners must notify other users of any changes)

  • Documentation guidelines and expectations (i.e. What information must be included in definitions; How do you use certain Tags)

• Share an introductory email or message to the users - check out our email templates

• Schedule a group training session

  • Check out our Training session guide for tips on what to cover in a demo to your team

  • Ahead of the session, share appropriate documentation as pre-reads so that users can come with questionsSecoda as a Viewer Secoda as an Editor

    • Consider hosting separate sessions for Viewers versus Editors to highlight different features

• Invite the users to your workspace

• Assign the users to their respective Groups and Teams

  • If the group/team doesn't exist yet, create new ones

• Host the training session

  • These will look different depending on your team's use case

  • We recommend including a high-level introduction explaining benefits and use cases of the tool, a demo walk-through, and questions

• Send a follow up email to the group with next steps and links to helpful resources

  • Introduction to Secoda guide

  • Resources addressing any questions from the session (see https://docs.secoda.co/ to search our documentation)

• If you have a dedicated Secoda or data-related Slack channel, invite them to the channel and encourage them to post questions and feedback

  • Make sure to share this feedback with our team as we are always looking for ways to improve the product!

• See User engagement and adoption for some ways to get your users excited about the tool

Workshop ideas

Once you've onboarded your initial rollout group, you might find it helpful to host workshop sessions to get the documentation flowing. Here are some ideas you might consider:

• Teams workshops: Organize recurring Teams workshops to discuss how the group would like to organize their resources. Talk through and designate owners, and consider implementing different custom metadata tags for your resources.

• Dictionary workshop: Brainstorm a list of terms that the group uses/hears in their day to day workflows. What concepts or terms are you often explaining to others? Those could be potential terms in the Dictionary!

• Documentation days: Set aside a recurring workshop for documentation clean up days to ensure that your users are staying on top of the resources that they own.