Your early days can make or break your trajectory. This framework helps you map stakeholders, extract expectations, and make learning look like shipping.

Most startups won’t onboard you. And by that I mean you probably won’t get some dedicated time to work your way through a structured presentation or folder of documents to bring you up to speed gently on the company and your roll. Even if they set out with that in mind, what you’ll likely get after the first few days is a real deliverable, some loosely referenced docs, and if your lucky, a direct line to your manager if you get stuck. If your unlikely, like I was in my 2nd startup your manager and entire team might also be busy, or worse, away.

Day one as a junior dev, I’d never seen the company’s framework or systems. I was handed a 10-day task to build a working app for a company event happening in a little over a week. Then I got the cherry on top… my boss, and every other member of my direct team, would be off next week. No code tour, no starter task, and no real acknowledgement of the terrifyingly lonely, not to mention high pressure week I had before me.

I spent the first half of the morning staring at the repo, scanning files and pretending to “learn,” but inside I was having a meltdown. Then just before lunch I shot my manager one message… mostly out of self-preservation:

That single ask changed the entire trajectory of my career, and laid the foundation of a framework that helped me progress to technical lead with a team of 3 within 2 years. As a response I got references to a few existing projects, each covering something similar to different parts of my task. Now suddenly I wasn’t trying to understand everything… I only had to understand these files, and I knew that 90% of what I learnt would be directly useful to the project I had to complete. I had a structure to follow. And because those references narrowed the scope and focused my attention, I had my first round of targeted questions/blockers and ask by the time my boss returned from lunch. I still didn’t know if I’d complete the whole thing, but at least I knew I’d clear the first hurdle.

This experience taught me the hard way that your first month won’t come with a plan. Expectations live in people’s heads, timelines are assumed, and “just figure it out” is the default. If you wait for clarity, you drift. If you try to learn everything, you’ll melt your brain and miss the first visible win.

To get ahead, narrow your scope early, turn ambiguity into checkpoints, and set up a predictable signal so nobody wonders “how’s it going?”

Here’s how I’ve done exactly that in every junior and new role I’ve had at startups across the last decade:

RULE 1 → Start with References, Not the Whole Codebase

After that question, I stopped trying to reverse-engineer entire systems. I opened the reference projects and used them like rails. I traced how they where structured, where key information lived, how the UI worked and how the outcome was delivered, and what “company-standard” looked like. Because each reference mapped to a different part of my task, the work naturally got broken into chunks: “follow reference A for this piece,” “mirror reference B for that bit.”

The questions changed too. No more “how does this “very general thing” work?” Instead: specific blockers. This really mattered because I had one week with almost no one around. Those focused questions got answered before they left, and that’s what got me, and kept me moving.

Why this works: References shrink cognitive load to what you need now. You learn the company’s patterns by example, not by osmosis. And copying proven patterns de-risks the task and the chances your project doesn’t work.

RULE 2 → Extract Expectations Early (Build Your Safety Net)

With rule 1 in place, I realised the panic wasn’t just from the actual task as much as it was from not knowing the boundaries of the work. So I built on rule 1 and started to ask the same five questions at the start of every project.

The basis for the questions came from a project where I delivered something I believed was solid and met the criteria…but that I eventually learnt was in a different format than what was expected from my manager, but not communicated properly. My manager had pictured an Excel sheet. I sent a tidy Word doc because it “made sense to me.” We wasted three weeks of 1:1s giving “feedback” that was really, “I want this work as a spreadsheet.” That’s when it clicked: a few direct questions up front save you from the pain later.

Here are the exact questions I use and why:

1. This gives you the framework to start from along with the bar for the structure, setup, and the quality. It’s also the first place to look when you hit a wall, instead of going in endless circles.
2. Sounds basic, but it’s often assumed and unspoken. The basis of this question is that you want to know if they expect a full delivery or just checkpoints at the first review. This tells you how much time you get to investigate vs implement and keeps you focused.
3. This isn’t about outsourcing your work. It’s about not losing half a day waiting for a manager who’s in back to back meetings. It also reduces how much you bother them, which in turn builds trust that you can work things out.
4. Your manager will likely have a good idea about the projects potential hurdles, challenges, and dependencies. You want those up front so you can plan your time accordingly. The added bonus of this question is that if your manager doesn’t know the landmines at this point, it gets them thinking about what they’ve actually asked you to do which, if it is particularly challenging or different, might make them more helpful or considerate when it comes to the potentially challenges.
5. This is the format/complexity/use question. It’s where Excel vs Word gets caught early. It also surfaces whether this output feeds other systems with specific data formats.

Why this works: These five questions turn a ambiguous task into a structured task, with boundaries and clear expectations which will hopefully result in fewer surprises and less revisions.

RULE 3 → Create a “No-Surprises” Weekly Signal

During probation I made it. my obsession to make notes on everything - and with AI this has never been easier. Everything got covered including questions, ideas, blockers. I then used these to form the basis of my communications with my manager. What this looked like in reality was 1:1s became the arena for the hard stuff. The “I fixed it but I don’t fully understand why” moments, the wider contexts, the thought experiments and the weird edge cases. For simple updates and decisions, I tried to keep entirely through Slack DMs or team channels following a structure like -> What I’d done -> The direction I proposed -> One decision request/unblocker if needed.

Two things made a big difference:

1. I always proposed a path, even if I wasn’t 100% sure. If I was wrong, the correction came with reasoning which taught me faster than silence ever could. If I was right, it was a quiet confidence booster.
2. I separated learning time (1:1s) from decision time (Slack). That kept meetings useful and kept work moving between them.

Why this works: Leaders don’t want your life story; they want progress, what’s stuck, and the decision you need i.e. what you need from then. So you should aim to make thinking easy for them and decisions fast.

Wrap-Up

• Start with references, not the whole codebase.
• Extract expectations early: timeline, refs, unblockers, success definition.
• Create a weekly no-surprises signal (Goal → Progress → Decision).

That's all for this weeks edition of TSCA. Until next time…

Here’s to clarity in the chaos!

Hayds & The TSCA Team

Hit reply and tell me why, or what you’re struggling with right now.

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