Onboarding with principle: how we integrate leadership from day one 

Starting a new job is both exciting and challenging—especially in engineering, product, and design roles. There are new tools to configure, many new co-workers to connect with, and an entirely new codebase or product architecture to understand—all while trying to ramp up and contribute.

A strong onboarding experience helps engineers and product teams cut through that initial friction. It shortens the time to productivity, provides the necessary technical and cultural context, and helps new hires feel confident making decisions early on.

At Customer.io, we know a new hire’s first days are crucial to their long-term success. As we continue to scale the Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) organization, we want to ensure that the amazing people we hire become high-performing, contributing team members. If done intentionally, an onboarding program leads to a significant increase in long-term employee retention and a shortened ramp time.

One of the most important ways we enable new hires to integrate into the organization's culture is to bootstrap the mindset that comes from our ten Customer.io leadership principles. We don’t want our principles to just be written on a wall somewhere (and that wouldn’t work anyway since we are a fully distributed company!); we want to demonstrate how we live by them in our daily work.

That’s why we created Onboarding with Principle, a ten-week email campaign using Customer.io that introduces new EPD hires to our leadership principles—the foundation of how we work, collaborate, and lead at Customer.io.

Rather than simply reading about these principles, new hires experience them in action through real employee stories, actionable takeaways, and opportunities to apply them immediately.

At Customer.io, leadership isn’t just about titles—it’s about behaviors. We believe that great leaders enable decision-making, drive results, and empower their teams. To ensure that these principles are woven into the way we work, we’ve established ten leadership principles that serve as a guide for how we operate:

• Are customer experts – We deeply understand our customers' needs.
• Continuously question – We challenge assumptions, engage our curiosity, and take different perspectives.
• Find the shortest path – We prioritize work that delivers the most value.
• Reward results, not effort – Outcomes matter more than hours worked.
• Enable decision-making everywhere – We empower teams with context to make informed choices.
• Bias toward action – We move quickly and learn by doing.
• Work iteratively – We improve through frequent feedback and experimentation.
• Combine depth with breadth – We develop specialized expertise while maintaining a broad perspective.
• Are self-aware – We reflect on our strengths, weaknesses, and impact on others.
• Speak plainly – We communicate clearly, avoiding jargon and complexity.

These principles shape how we collaborate, problem-solve, and lead at Customer.io. But for new hires, reading about them isn’t enough—understanding how these principles come to life in day-to-day work is what really matters.

Instead of having a new hire learn about our leadership principles as a reading exercise buried in onboarding materials, we decided it would be most impactful if people could understand how these principles are actively applied across the organization. That’s where our ten-week email onboarding campaign comes in.

New employees starting at Customer.io automatically get added to this campaign through a data-driven segment, with the first email landing in their inbox on their first day here. Each week throughout their onboarding journey, they receive an email spotlighting a different leadership principle, detailing how it applies to our work in EPD.

For each leadership principle, we asked existing EPD members an open-ended question. Over 80% of the people in EPD responded, giving us a huge number of responses to work with. For example, for the leadership principle “Enable decision-making everywhere,” we asked, “How do you make empowered decisions in your day-to-day work?”

Here’s what some of our people shared:

These stories not only give people a glimpse of what to expect in their interactions with coworkers but also how they can carry themselves beyond onboarding. More importantly, they help new employees see these principles in action across the organization—offering real examples of how we collaborate, make decisions, and drive impact. Through this, we aim to not only reinforce our culture but also foster a strong sense of belonging from day one.

Along with personal stories, each email includes clear calls to action to encourage engagement. New hires are prompted to:

• Read important documentation on our internal wiki
• Watch pre-recorded videos, such as recent company meetings or internal recaps
• Review recent company strategy presentations
• Join relevant group chat channels
• View dashboards and metrics in various tools
• Start AI-based coaching chats from pre-defined prompts related to the leadership principle
• Configure various software tools as part of the setup
• Make an entry in our “Friction Log” - a record of friction they encountered in onboarding
• Talk with their manager or team about the leadership principle
• Find additional leadership behavior stories and quotes that could not be included in the email
• Give feedback and offer ideas about the email itself

All of these activities help our new hires in EPD become more productive in their first months at Customer.io. They aim to help folks feel more comfortable with the work, think of their team as a place of belonging, understand the cultural expectations, and deliver customer value sooner.

As part of the process, we send feedback forms to gather insights on both the Onboarding with Principle emails and the overall onboarding experience. Feedback so far has been overwhelmingly positive. People love connecting with the stories and quotes of their new peers, which makes the onboarding experience feel more personal.

Here’s what one engineer shared about the experience:

But beyond that, our campaign engagement rates are extremely high: the average open rate for the campaign is 69%, with the average click-through rate sitting at 17.5%.

An interesting insight: One of our most clicked links leads to our internal documentation about our Ideal Customer Profile. This is exactly what we want—new hires who understand our customers to deliver the most value to them as early as possible.

By focusing our EPD onboarding experience on our leadership principles, we aim to ensure that the people joining our team understand our culture and how we work. This helps them build better relationships with their manager and their teammates. In turn, we hope this sense of belonging will enable them to deliver value sooner and lead to greater performance, growth, and employee retention at Customer.io.

• Hiring soon? Consider how you can embed leadership values into your onboarding process.
• Interested in joining us? Check out our open roles to see if Customer.io is the right place for you.