4 essential roles for onboarding a new tool

Whenever you’re buying a new tool, these four roles are critical for ensuring it—and your team—are set up for success.

Katy Turner

Product Marketing Manager at Coda

4 essential roles for onboarding a new tool

By Katy Turner

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Product teams · 6 min read
Whenever you buy a new tool for your team, you’ve likely been through a lengthy and detailed security review and buying process to make sure it’s a good fit. As a result, by the time your team gets access to the product, you’re very eager to start solving the key business challenge that drove the purchase. To ensure you can start seeing value as quickly as possible, it’s critical to have a plan for onboarding your team—and you can start planning before the contract is signed. This will accelerate not only achieving your original goals, but additional value or use cases the tool can provide. As a former Customer Success Manager at multiple SaaS companies, I’ve helped onboard dozens of teams, ranging from 50 users to 5,000. Through this experience, I’ve learned that there are four essential roles in a successful onboarding plan:
  1. The lead.
  2. The sponsor.
  3. The champion(s).
  4. The end users.
Ensuring you know who will play these roles, and engaging them early, is critical. Let’s take a deeper look at each one.

1. The lead.

 As the name suggests, this is the person leading the implementation process for the new tool. (If you’re reading this post, it might be you!) This is often someone in an IT or operations role, and they’ll have a broad overview of the capabilities and capacities of your business.
During buying and implementation the lead will:
  • Have an understanding of what’s needed for setup and security with each new tool, often partnering with the security team or performing security evaluations during the buying process.
  • Be responsible for ensuring the right people involved in implementation and onboarding have early access to the tool (the sponsor can help determine who this should be).
  • Usually do the initial setup of your workspace, or test and configure the right settings.
  • Approve and distribute seats/licenses once the tool is up and running.
When enterprise businesses get Coda, we work closely with their lead to define the expected long-term value of Coda, which onboarding milestones they want to track, and how they’ll evaluate value over time. For example, that might be actively monitoring using Coda’s admin console or Admin Pack. Or, for some enterprise customers, it might be quarterly meetings with your Coda account team.

2. The sponsor.

 The sponsor—usually a Director or line of business owner—is usually the person who initially identifies the business need for a new tool, and shares it with the IT team. Their goal is to solve this need and drive meaningful change with whatever solution they choose to purchase. They’re usually heavily involved in the entire process, from identifying requirements and evaluating options, to making or influencing the final purchasing decision and overseeing the onboarding process. Sometimes, the sponsor and the champion are the same person but, otherwise, it’s common for the sponsor to nominate who the champion(s) will be.
The sponsor will:
  • Identify the business need and requirements for a new tool.
  • Shortlist, evaluate, and make or influence the final purchasing decision, in collaboration with IT or procurement.
  • Help with or drive the purchasing process, such as obtaining approvals, negotiating contracts, or ensuring that the purchase aligns with the organization's budget and goals.
  • Nominate the champion(s) and ensure those champions are set up for success by obtaining resources for the onboarding process.
  • Oversee the onboarding process, including coordinating with the vendor to setup the tool, organize training for users, and ensure a smooth transition.
  • Assist the champion and lead with fostering long-term adoption by communicating their support and the need for the new tool.
  • Monitor usage and feedback to ensure positive return on investment (ROI) from their purchase.
This means the sponsor in Coda is usually the owner of a specific line of business or area, like a head of product at the company. We work with the sponsor to ensure Coda is solving the business need they previously identified, help them effectively communicate the value to their team, and ensure they’re getting maximum benefits from the tool.

3. The champion(s).

 Champions play a pivotal role in the adoption and long-term success of a new product by acting as advocates for the tool within your business. It’s an exciting opportunity to work closely with the sponsor and drive the vision for how the tool will be implemented—and directly impact how their team works. Being a champion is a great skill they will benefit from in their future career, too. An ideal champion is someone excited about this opportunity, and about becoming an expert of the specific tool. It’s not uncommon to have multiple champions involved in implementation, and their role is ongoing.
The champion(s) will:
  • Provide feedback during the evaluation process to ensure the selected tool meets the business’ needs.
  • Become experts in the new tool’s features and capabilities, so they can be the go-to resource for other team members.
  • Assist with onboarding by working closely with the lead to plan training and build resources.
  • Monitor usage to ensure adoption is on track and that the tool is delivering value.
  • Drive engagement by actively promoting the tool’s benefits, encouraging others to use it, and addressing any resistance or hesitations from the team.
  • Listen to and share feedback from the team with the lead and the tool provider, to inform customizations or improvements. This might also extend to actually helping set up integrations and other workflows to tailor the tool to the business’ needs.
With Coda, the role of the champion is especially exciting. Coda can be used for many different use cases and tailored specifically to the team. Unlike other tools that lack this flexibility, Coda enables the champion to turn “I wish we could do xyz” into “Here’s how we can do this in Coda...” which means they can create drive efficiencies in unexpected ways. This also means that champions can have a direct impact on expanding the value your business gets from the tool. For example, a team might decide to use Coda to better organize their documentation and resources into a single source of truth (a team or company wiki). After a while, they realize that they could also use Coda to have better meetings, and have those notes and artifacts live alongside the other resources they already have there. By enabling these new use cases, champions can provide infinite additional value from a tool like Coda—and directly impact how their team works, for the better. We support champions with a wide range of resources to help them get started quickly and delivering immediate impact. This includes weekly “Nail the Basics” training sessions with our dedicated customer education team, guides, help articles, and access to our expert customer support team.

4. The end users.

 End users are members of your team that get to experience the new tool you’ve purchased. While the champion makes sure the tool is implemented, the end users are the ones who get to take it for a test drive and share their feedback.
For other tools, any further feedback that their team might have can drive small tweaks, within the confines of what the tool allows. With Coda, feedback is a gift and can drive meaningful updates. Because Coda can be tailored exactly to what your business needs, your team’s feedback can be translated directly into actionable change such as building out docs with new functionality, building personalized views to suit different teams’ needs, and even spinning up entirely new docs that address new use cases or requests from the team. We also regularly see end users start to take initiative as they get more acquainted with Coda, building out more functionality or creating new docs themselves. Sometimes they even become champions for another use case, because they’ve seen firsthand how problems get solved with Coda.

Set your team and tool up for success.

 We’ve seen time and time again that these four roles are critical to the long-term success of any new tool purchase. Investing the time to identify and resource these roles upfront ensures your team gets the most value possible from whatever tool you buy—and can even expand that value beyond what you originally imagined, too. When you choose Coda, you can be sure that we’re here to set you and your team up for success. We have a wide range of templates to make getting started easy, guides and courses to help your team get onboarded, and personalized guidance and training for enterprises in need of more custom support. We even have a free Coda Doctorate program for enterprises, so your team can further expand their knowledge and invest in themselves. We’re constantly refreshing our resources and launching exciting new features based on feedback, too. And if you ever want advice or get stuck, our support team are true product experts who are eager to help. Want to learn more about Coda? Get started with a demo.
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