Inkyu Oh
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Learning

Onbo

Every new teammate meant explaining the same things over again, and forgetting something different each time. I wanted it written down once and left to run itself.

Year
2025
Role
Solo — product and build
Status
Built
Onbo program view: a Frontend team setup path at 62%, with completed steps, one in progress, and later steps locked until the previous one is done
A program is an ordered path with a visible finish line.

The problem

Every time a new person joined the team I reconstructed the same thing from memory: what they needed to know, in what order, and what I had forgotten to tell the last person. The knowledge existed — scattered across a wiki nobody reads end to end.

Onbo makes the order explicit. An admin writes a program as a sequence of steps, each with a checklist, reference links, an optional quiz and attachments. A new hire works through them one at a time, like quests. Progress is tracked per person, and any program can be shared as a link that works with no account at all.

The interface is deliberately plain. No mascots, no streaks, no confetti — the reward for finishing onboarding is being finished with onboarding.

How it changed

Each version below exists because the one before it was wrong about something specific.

  1. v1

    A strictly ordered path

    Why
    The whole point was sequence, so steps unlocked only when the previous one was complete.
    Change
    Ordered steps with hard locks, per-user completion tracking, and progress rolled up by category.
    Result
    Correct for a first week, wrong for everything else. Someone who already knows the deployment step should not have to fake their way through it, and a new hire who wants to read ahead on Friday should be allowed to.
  2. v2

    Make the strictness a per-program choice

    Why
    Different programs want different rules, and the author is the one who knows which.
    Change
    Step flow became configurable per program: require steps in order or allow any order, and separately choose whether locked steps can be read ahead. Added public share links so someone outside the org can be onboarded without an account, with progress kept on their device.
    Result
    One product now covers a first-week induction and a self-serve reference path without either one feeling bolted on.

Built with

  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL