The first time is never your fault - by Simone D'Amico

When someone new to your team pushes directly to production or logs their hours wrong or breaks an 'obvious' rule, your instinct is to ask 'how could you not know?' But here's what actually happened: you made a decision to leave something undocumented, and they paid the price for it. Unwritten rules aren't just gaps in process - they're active choices where the consequences land on someone else.

The author learned this twice. First as a consultant who logged hours incorrectly for a month because nobody explained the actual rule during onboarding. Years later as a leader, they made the exact same mistake - a new hire pushed straight to production without proper review because the team's informal process was never made explicit. The tooling didn't enforce it, the team assumed it was obvious, and the new person did what made sense at their previous job. Predictable disaster.

The fix isn't better onboarding meetings. It's treating documentation as continuous work, not a one-time task. When you catch yourself thinking 'how could they not know?', that's your trigger to write it down. The author now maintains simple, scannable team docs that cover rules, expectations, and workflows - no fluff, just what people need to know. They pair this with a buddy system so new hires have someone safe to ask 'stupid' questions without going through their manager.

The real insight is recognizing when things don't get done. It's rarely about unwillingness - it's usually because the process exists only in your head. People don't ask because they assume they should already know. They wing it, get stuck, or skip things entirely. If something seems obvious to you but keeps not happening, you've found an implicit rule that needs to be made explicit. Keep rules simple, avoid conditional logic, and don't wait for questions - new people don't even know what they don't know yet.