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Hi, I’m Marina

I’ve led People teams across countries and today I specialise in People Automation, using AI, automation, and practical experiments that turn ideas into impact.

This article is part of my No New Tool Required series, where I share smart, lightweight experiments to free up People team time and generate better insights with the tools we already have.

🔗 Let’s connect on LinkedIn

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💡Why This Matters

People teams know onboarding shapes retention and performance, so we carefully build onboarding programmes. Onboarding is one of the biggest investments People teams make.

👏🏻 Great… but we rarely measure when new hires first start engaging.

🫠 Not so great…

The risks:

• New hires don’t feel part of the team.
• They get stuck in theory rather than delivery.
• Early excitement never turns into lasting engagement.
• Ramp-up is guesswork instead of measurable progress.
• Leaders can’t see where onboarding succeeds or stalls.

💡That’s why product teams measure activation, the moment users hit their “aha!” moment (think LinkedIn: the first time you liked a post). Jessica Zwaan introduced this idea to the People world in her brilliant book Built for People. This experiment is my take on putting that principle into practice.

For People, activation means defining the moment a new starter shifts from observer to contributor.

• 💻 For software engineers, that might be the first code review or first commit.
• 💼 For sales, the first deal closed (or first meeting booked if cycles are long).
• 🎧 For customer support, the first resolved ticket or the first 5-star review received.
• 📣 For marketing, the first campaign launched or first piece of content published.

The exact metric will differ by team, but the principle is the same: track the moment someone truly starts adding value.

The good news: you don’t need a new platform. You just need sharper ways of looking at the data you already have.