Data Analyst onboarding plan

What a strong ramp looks like for a new data analyst. Week 1 universals + 30/60/90 day milestones, each with an accountable owner — manager, new hire, team, or HR.

Week 1

Get them productive on tools, oriented to people, and clear on what success looks like in their first 90 days.

1. 1Day 1: workspace + tooling set up before they arrive (laptop, accounts, Slack, email). New hire's first email should be 'everything just works.'Manager
2. 2Day 1: 30-min welcome with their manager — share the team's mission, their first project, and book recurring 1:1s.Manager
3. 3Day 1-2: meet & greet calls with 4-6 people they'll work with most. 15-20 min each, calendar-blocked in advance.Manager
4. 4Day 3: have them ship something small (a Slack post, a document, a tiny PR) — confidence-building, momentum-setting.New hire
5. 5Day 5: review the 30/60/90 plan together. New hire confirms it sounds achievable; manager confirms it's the right shape.Manager
6. 6End of Week 1: HR / People check-in. Surface friction (access issues, missing context, mismatched expectations) early.HR

Days 1-30

Understand the data warehouse, the metrics, the analyst playbook.

1. 1Get warehouse access on Day 1-2. Without data access, the analyst clock hasn't started.Manager
2. 2Read the existing data dictionary. If sparse, add to it as you learn — fresh-eyes are the moment.New hire
3. 3Replicate one existing dashboard yourself from scratch. Builds muscle on the schema.New hire
4. 4Ship one analysis (even small) within 14 days. Confidence + immediate value.New hire
5. 5Meet with the top 5 internal consumers of analytics. What do they ask for vs what do they need.New hire

Days 31-60

Own a major analysis. Improve data quality at one seam.

1. 1Own one major analysis end-to-end. Question, data, hypothesis, finding, recommendation, follow-through.New hire
2. 2Improve data quality at one seam. Fix a broken join, deprecate a stale metric, document an undocumented one.New hire
3. 3Build one new dashboard that becomes weekly-reading material for an exec.New hire
4. 4Develop directly-asked-for SQL skills — your team's most-used patterns plus 1-2 stretch techniques.New hire
5. 5Pair with one engineer on instrumentation. Better events upstream = less wrangling downstream.New hire

Days 61-90

Drive a decision. Become the go-to for one area.

1. 1Drive a decision with your analysis — leadership changes course based on your work.New hire
2. 2Become the go-to analyst for one area (e.g., growth, retention, product, ops).New hire
3. 3Build one model or prediction that's used operationally, not just for reporting.New hire
4. 4Mentor next analyst on schema + SQL pitfalls.New hire
5. 5Retro: what's the biggest data-quality investment that would unblock everything else?Manager

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Onboarding plans for other roles