The situation
BENlabs sits at an unusual intersection: it’s an AI-powered product placement and entertainment intelligence company. New hires ranged from PhD-level AI researchers to entertainment industry veterans who’d never touched machine learning. Getting everyone aligned on mission, culture, and operating norms was genuinely hard, the usual “welcome to the company” deck wasn’t going to cut it.
The company had also grown through acquisition, meaning there were pockets of culture and vocabulary that didn’t map cleanly onto each other yet. Onboarding needed to do real unification work, not just check a compliance box.
What I designed
Structure and strategy
The course opens with company identity, what BENlabs actually does, told through real examples of AI-powered product placement and entertainment analytics. This isn’t a mission statement slide; it’s a demonstration of the work with enough context that someone from outside the industry can orient themselves.
From there the course moves through:
- Who we are, company history, evolution from BE ON to BENlabs, the acquisition story told honestly
- What we do, the product suite, client categories, how the AI layer works without requiring a data science background
- How we work, tools, norms, cross-team operating agreements, communication expectations
- Your role in it, closing reflection that ties individual work back to company mission
Design decisions
The tone problem was the hardest part. Entertainment industry people often find corporate training condescending; technical people find it vague. I split the difference by writing at a high level of intelligence without assuming domain expertise, specific, concrete, and never cutesy.
Visuals used BENlabs’ actual brand assets pulled through Bynder. Instead of stock photography, I built illustrated diagrams and custom graphics that showed how the platform works rather than gesturing at it abstractly.
LMS deployment
Course was deployed through Bridge with completion tracking, manager notifications at the 50% and 100% marks, and a structured 30-60-90 follow-up cadence. This was one of the first courses systematically tracked in Bridge, which meant I also helped establish the LMS architecture for the broader L&D program.
The published course
The company onboarding is live and accessible:
View the BENlabs onboarding course →
What I learned building it
Onboarding is underrated as a design challenge. The audience is always maximally diverse, everyone is new, nobody knows the insider vocabulary yet, and attention is split between the course and the overwhelming flood of starting-a-new-job logistics.
The constraint that sharpened the work: every section had to answer “why does this matter to me specifically” before moving to the next. Whenever I caught myself adding context without that answer, I cut it. The final course is shorter than the first draft by about 35%, and meaningfully better for it.