Learning path
The First 90 Days is an eleven-part path for analysts joining a new company or a new team. Most onboarding fails quietly: you read everything, believe all of it, ask vague questions, and reach day 90 without anything that is yours. This path replaces that with four phases and five levers: documentation read against evidence, AI on approved tooling, questions that show your work, feedback with good timing, and a 90-day review backed by proof. Then it applies all five to each analyst role, with a real banking and ISO 20022 scenario for every one.
Written by Ahmed at Analyst Engineering, a Senior Technical Business Analyst with 10+ years in banking and payments, who has joined more payments programmes mid-flight than he would choose to.
Every phase ends with something you can show. If a phase has no artifact, it did not happen. Part 1 has the full plan and the checklist.
Parts 1 to 5 apply to every analyst. Parts 6 to 10 are the role angles: read yours, then skim the others, because you will work alongside all of them. Part 11 closes the 90 days.
Parts 2 to 5 and 11
Whatever your title, onboarding comes down to the same five levers. Each part owns one of them in depth.
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The Labs drop you into Northline Pay, a fictional payments platform with an OpenAPI contract, Kafka events, logs, and a database, exactly the material a new analyst has to make sense of in week two. A free account saves your progress and, if you tick the box, sends you new parts as they publish.
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Parts 6 to 10
The levers are the same; what you read first, who you ask, and what you ship first are not. Each role guide opens with a real-life payments scenario and ends with a 90-day plan for that seat.
Work in four phases. Week one is orientation: access, the approved tools, a glossary, and a list of who knows what. Weeks two to four are mapping: read the documentation in a deliberate order and record how far each page can be trusted, keep a questions log, follow one real transaction end to end, and map the stakeholders. Days 30 to 60 are contribution: present what fresh eyes noticed and ship one small deliverable. Days 60 to 90 are ownership: take a piece of the work as your own and prove the onboarding with evidence in the 90-day review.
Use only the assistant your organization has approved, and only with the data classes it allows. Then use it to build a personal knowledge pack: a glossary of every acronym the team uses, explanations grounded in the team's own specifications rather than generic training data, a list of questions to ask rather than answers to trust, and structured notes from every onboarding session. The main risk is an assistant explaining the generic standard, such as ISO 20022, when your organization's implementation differs, so verify every claim against internal evidence.
Ask each person what they own, what breaks regularly, what they would never let a newcomer change, where the documentation is wrong, and who else you should talk to. For specific questions, show your work first: say what you checked, what you think the answer is, and ask them to confirm or correct it. That format respects their time, gets faster answers, and shows you can investigate on your own. Log every question with the answer and the evidence, and turn repeated answers into documentation.
Yes, but with timing. Risks to customers, regulatory deadlines, and data protection issues should be raised immediately and privately with the person who owns them. Everything else goes into an observation log and is presented together at a 30-day readout, framed as observation, evidence, impact, and suggestion. Fresh eyes are valuable for a short window, and a structured readout uses that window without making the team feel judged by someone who arrived last month.
When they can explain the domain in the team's own vocabulary, trace a real transaction through the systems without help, know who to ask for each kind of decision, have shipped at least one deliverable the team relies on, and work in the team's tools without friction. A scored self-assessment across domain, systems, people, delivery, and tooling, backed by evidence for each score, turns that into something a manager can review at day 90.
Go further
The AI guides for onboarding faster on approved tooling, the tool guides for the systems your new team already lives in, the payments domain guide for the vocabulary, and a direct line if you want help with your own first 90 days. Or start with the free downloads.
Tool guides: Jira, Confluence, SQL, and automation. All of them: the Complete Tech BA Bundle.
Related paths: The AI Analyst, The ISO 20022 Reference, and the technical analyst roadmap.
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A free account, no password: an email link signs you in. It saves your steps and self-assessments on the Labs, shows your missions on a dashboard, unlocks the solutions, and, if you tick the box, sends you new missions and articles when they ship.
Your email is used to sign you in. Nothing else, unless you ask. Privacy.