What happens in the first 90 days of an embedded team

In our experience the start date says little about whether the collaboration will work. The better question is how long it takes before this person can deliver work without a senior next to them, and what the senior’s time looks like on the way there. That is what the first ninety days are for, and the groundwork that decides them is laid before day one and in the first four days.

Before day one

Between signing and the first working day there are usually two to three months. Many companies let that time sit empty. We use it to build familiarity before anyone has worked an hour: information about the client, the projects, the tools and the people the engineer will be working with, so that day one is not a first contact.

Then there are the small things. We have sent flowers to an engineer for signing a contract, and rakija to a colleague on the same team, because in Serbia that is what marks the moment. When a client happened to be in Belgrade months before a start date, we asked the engineer to come by for cake with the team. On the first morning there is a laptop on the desk, the starter book with the onboarding programme, and a handwritten postcard from Hans and Vlada. None of it is expensive, all of it valuable. By the time someone walks in, it already feels less like a first day and more like a continuation.

The first four days, in Belgrade

Onboarding starts in Belgrade with four days together, and whenever possible the client is there for it rather than meeting the engineers over a screen.

Day one is about getting to know Teem: how everything works, and a cultural introduction. Day two is when the team comes together, engineers and client, and the day goes to team building rather than to work. Days three and four belong to the client: their systems and their projects. Then the goodbye, and from there the collaboration continues online.

The order matters. People meet as a team on day two before anyone opens a project on day three. Everyone flies home eventually and from then on the work runs through a screen, but if the formal distance came down while people were in the same room, it tends to stay down.

Who comes from the client side matters too. If it is the team lead the engineer will speak to every day, the working relationship starts on day two. If only the owner comes, the engineer meets the company but not yet the person they will work with. It also depends on who is starting. A junior in a first job needs something different from a senior with fifteen years of habits from another working culture.

The first weeks online

Once everyone is back at their own desk, the aim for the first two weeks is that the engineer produces something real: a drawing, a calculation, a model element the team would otherwise have queued or done themselves. The team lead’s experience of these weeks shapes everything that follows, including whether a second engineer is ever discussed.

For the first four weeks there is a fifteen-minute call every week between the engineer, the team lead and someone from Teem. The point is to catch small things while they are small: a missing access right, a review step nobody explained, a question the engineer has been sitting on.

That last one matters more than it sounds. New people deal with uncertainty in one of two ways. They ask and it is resolved in ten minutes, or they build their own explanation of how things work here, which is usually wrong. So in these weeks the engineer needs a specific person next to them whose job is to show them the way. A buddy, a team lead, or in a smaller company the owner. Who it is matters less than that the engineer knows they are allowed to use them.

What it costs the senior

Every team lead we meet has the same worry: one more person to onboard on top of a full plate. The first weeks do cost the senior real time. That cost is front-loaded and it declines. By month two the questions change from “how do you do this here” to “does this look right”. By month three the aim is that the engineer runs defined work unsupervised and the senior’s role is review. One Head of Engineering told us after the first two weeks that he expected his new engineers to be working independently in about three months, where onboarding an engineer in the Netherlands had usually taken him six.

That is the point of an embedded team. Onboarding is paid once, and because the person stays, what they learn about the company keeps compounding instead of walking out the door.

Thirty, sixty, ninety

At the end of each of the first three months we sit down with the client, with the team lead in the room, and go through three questions. Is the engineer working unsupervised yet? What still requires the senior? What work is queued that nobody is doing? The first two tell us whether integration is on track. The third tells us whether capacity has arrived, and it is usually where the conversation about a second engineer begins, because the value of the first engineer has already become measurable.

Meanwhile several things run on our side that the client does not need to manage: employment, contracts, compliance and day-to-day HR, and continuity work that starts in week one rather than only when something goes wrong. The client owns the engineering: the technical direction, the priorities and the quality standards. We are responsible for holding everything around it together.

Ninety days is enough to know whether a match works. It is not the finish line. In one of our longer-running collaborations, two engineers were communicating directly with the client’s own customers and writing reports under their own names within months of starting. That is not a level of trust most companies extend quickly. It is what a team looks like once the groundwork has been done.

So when a client asks about the start date, we try to move the conversation to a different one: the date the engineer runs work on their own and the knowledge they have built up belongs to the company. The first ninety days show how far off that date is. We would rather do the groundwork that brings it forward than discover the answer the hard way.

If you want to see how we plan the first ninety days for a specific role, get in touch and we will walk you through it.