New Engineers Don't Hit the Ground Running

01 /The Concept

Silo Team, according to its founders, is the fastest way to get newly hired engineers up to speed – so they start contributing results sooner rather than later.

The problem is that being a good engineer isn't enough to be productive in a new company. A new hire has to absorb the internal toolchain, figure out how to access servers and storage systems, understand the team's coding conventions, learn how tasks are assigned and code is reviewed and deployed – and a dozen other things that separate professional software development from building side projects alone.

Those processes and conventions vary significantly between organizations, and often between teams within the same organization, depending on the product area and tech stack involved. Even experienced engineers arrive as beginners in a new context and have to relearn or unlearn.

Engineers also don't work in isolation. They interact with testers, designers, system administrators, security specialists, and non-technical departments whose work their code affects. Each of those groups has its own requirements, preferences, and standards. A new engineer has to figure out all of that too.

The upshot: getting a new engineer into effective orbit without disrupting existing work is genuinely difficult. Silo Team exists to solve that problem.

The core concept is a visual editor for building, storing, and maintaining onboarding workflows for different categories of engineers. Each workflow is composed of discrete knowledge modules arranged in a logical sequence with calendar-based pacing.

The editor is designed for collaboration, so representatives from every team that will interact with the new engineer can contribute to and maintain their relevant sections. This distributes both the knowledge capture and the upkeep: when a process changes in any department, that team updates their module – and everyone else automatically sees the change.

The standout feature is the AI assistant, which can generate a complete onboarding workflow for any type of engineering role from a defined set of requirements and team-specific constraints. The generated workflow is then editable in the same visual interface for fine-tuning and future iteration.

New hires receive a link to their personalized onboarding plan, and track their own progress through it. Engineering managers and relevant cross-functional stakeholders can see who's completed what – and step in when someone is stuck on a particular step.

This Swedish startup first appeared on the radar [last spring](/review/1-2-goda-jeto-ochen-malo), when it raised $1.16M. It resurfaced this week with a new version of the platform on Product Hunt.

02 /Why It Matters

Something Silo Team used to mention – and curiously doesn't emphasize in the new version of the site – is offboarding: the structured capture of a departing engineer's knowledge so the next person can take over cleanly.

This problem is significantly harder than standard onboarding. The average engineer stays at a company for 1–2 years. In that time, they accumulate a web of undocumented decisions, workarounds, and context that only they fully understand. Handing that over when they leave is far more complex than simply orienting a new hire to how the company operates in general.

A complete Silo Team would include offboarding workflows with the same rigor as onboarding ones – and make completion a condition of final sign-off. No offboarding checklist completed, no clearance granted.

There's also a less obvious connection between onboarding quality and retention. An engineer who gets up to speed quickly, starts delivering visible results early, and receives timely recognition for it has a reason to stay. An engineer who spends their first months lost and frustrated is likely to be out within a year.

Data supports this: in the US, around 22% of all employee departures happen within the first 12 months. The next spike, at about 20%, comes around the 5-year mark when burnout sets in. A significant share of early attrition is directly attributable to poor onboarding.

So Silo Team solves two problems simultaneously: faster time-to-productivity for new hires, and improved retention through a better start. That's worth flagging, because those are two separate pain points owned by two different teams.

This gets to the most interesting strategic angle in Silo Team's story. It's technically a developer tool – positioned at engineering managers and dev leads. But its impact reaches HR (whose performance metrics often include time-to-productivity for new hires and early attrition rates) and Finance (which tracks recruiting costs and revenue per engineer).

Research on B2B software purchasing consistently shows that about 60% of buying decisions involve multiple departments, each contributing a portion of the budget. And roughly two-thirds of B2B purchase decision-makers have no technical background whatsoever.

Which means that for a developer tool to sell well, it helps enormously to have champions outside engineering – in HR, in Finance, in Ops – who actively advocate for the purchase. Silo Team has a straightforward path to those champions.

The broader lesson: don't solve this problem at the sales stage. Solve it at the product design stage. Build in properties that create obvious value for adjacent departments from day one – so that when the buying conversation happens, cross-functional support arrives naturally.

03 /Opportunities

Silo Team is useful enough that building analogs – including improved versions – is a reasonable direction in itself. Taking their current platform as a starting point, what would a more complete version include beyond offboarding workflows?

Silo Team also surfaces a product design principle that applies to any B2B platform. Most enterprise software is built to solve one problem for one department. That makes it hard to sell, because the buying committee almost always includes people from other departments who need to be convinced.

The solution isn't a better sales process – it's a better product. Design in cross-departmental value from the beginning, so that representatives from HR, Finance, or Operations become natural advocates rather than obstacles in the approval process.

If you're already building or selling a B2B platform, the most useful question to ask isn't how to improve the core feature set – it's what to build that makes adjacent departments actively lobby for the purchase rather than simply sign off on it.