Onboarding Is Culture in Action

Janna Biagio

Global Head of Culture & People Ops

Monte Carlo – the world’s #1 data + AI observability solution

July 25, 2025

Before I moved to the Culture & People Team at Monte Carlo, I spent half a decade leading a Customer Success & Community team in the PeopleTech space. One thing that sticks with me: onboarding a new employee isn’t all that different from onboarding a new customer.

In both cases, the first few weeks are everything. It’s when expectations get set, trust gets built, and momentum either starts or stalls. You usually only get one shot to make someone feel confident they made the right decision. And ultimately, it’s the people they interact with that shape the experience. 

At Monte Carlo, we take it seriously. New hire onboarding isn’t just a process, it’s our culture in action and  one of our most powerful expressions of who we are. How we welcome someone, support their ramp, and make them feel connected is one of the clearest ways we show who we are, how we work, and what we value.

The Shift: From Process to Experience

All five of our values – Customer Impact, Measure in Minutes, Ship & Iterate, Beat the Odds, and Have Fun – shape how we approach onboarding. They’re not just posters on a wall or bullets on a slide; they guide how we welcome people, wherever they are in the world, and set them up for success.

As we’ve scaled rapidly over the past six months, it’s become even more important to safeguard the culture that makes Monte Carlo special. And the People Team doesn’t do it alone. Managers play the key role in translating and modeling our culture, especially during those early days.

Here’s a look at how we try to make onboarding personal, engaging, and anchored in our values.

Safeguarding Our Favorite Monte Carlo Onboarding Traditions

First Week “Ship”
We ask every new hire across the organization to ship something to customers in their first week. This reinforces our belief that action – and impact – matters. Nothing proves our value of Beating the Odds more than making a real contribution in your first five days.

Surprise & Delight Moments
We’re still a startup, so our budget for this isn’t huge, but small touches go a long way. Whether it's our MC-branded new hire gift or our public shout-out on Slack with the new hires’ Two Truths & A Lie, we try to make people feel seen right away.

Managers as Culture Carriers
We set the expectation with managers that they own the onboarding experience for their new hires. Our job in People Ops is to equip them with tools, reminders, and structure (quick plug: Camino makes a huge difference here!) – but the human side? That’s where managers shine.

We coach them to:
✔️ Have intentional 1:1s in the first few weeks
✔️ Talk openly about how our values show up on their team
✔️ Create space for feedback early and often
✔️ Celebrate small wins and progress

The same way we coach Customer Success Managers to build relationships, uncover risks early, and create a sense of partnership, we expect our hiring managers to do the same for new hires.

Real Talk: It’s Iterative (And That’s On Purpose)

At Monte Carlo, we’ve learned that onboarding is one of our most powerful tools for culture-building, and one of the clearest signals we can send about what kind of company we’re building together.

So yes, we’ll keep iterating. But we’ll also keep anchoring in what matters: connection, impact, and a whole lot of fun along the way.

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Janna Biagio leads Global Culture and People Ops at Monte Carlo and proudly brings her opinions (and a few lessons learned) to Camino’s Customer Advisory Board. Before that, she spent nearly five years leading a Customer Success team for a PeopleTech company which, it turns out, is pretty great training for building onboarding experiences that actually work.