How TravelPerk Supercharged Engineering Onboarding

March 12, 2025

TravelPerk’s travel management platform helps thousands of businesses book, manage, and optimize corporate travel. While much of the travel industry downsized during COVID-19, TravelPerk expanded—launching innovative products that fueled its continued growth.

As TravelPerk grew, so did the complexity of its product and tech operations. With a distributed Builders team of over 400 employees across 9 global hubs, scaling engineering onboarding became critical. New hires struggled to navigate the codebase, find documentation and understand key decisions.

Luca Sale, Director of Engineering at TravelPerk, introduced Unblocked to connect engineers with the knowledge they needed. The impact was immediate - engineers onboarded faster, worked more independently, and spent less time waiting for answers.

“It’s like having an extra senior engineer who knows everything and responds instantly.” — Luca Sale, Director of Engineering from TravelPerk

The Challenge: Scattered Tribal Knowledge Slows Onboarding

Getting new engineers up to speed on the context and evolution of TravelPerk’s codebase was time-consuming.

Like most growing teams, TravelPerk had years of tribal knowledge spread across Slack, Notion, Jira, Google Docs, and other collaboration tools. Despite having an onboarding wiki, new hires had to search through multiple sources to find the context they needed. To fully grasp why the code worked the way it did, they often had to schedule 1:1s with teammates to fill in gaps.

Issues with navigating documentation and understanding the codebase repeatedly appeared in TravelPerk’s quarterly Developer Experience survey. The time spent manually piecing together answers delayed new hires from contributing and pulled senior engineers away from their own tasks.

It was clear the team needed a more efficient way to onboard engineers.

The Solution: Unblocked as an Always-Available Onboarding Buddy

“Unblocked’s context is essentially infinite. Integrating multiple of our data sources makes the answers richer and more accurate.” — Luca Sale, Director of Engineering from TravelPerk

To solve its onboarding challenges, TravelPerk made Unblocked a core part of its onboarding checklist, giving new hires access from day one.

New hires ask Unblocked about custom components, best practices, and past decisions, just as they would a senior engineer. Instead of waiting for a response or sifting through scattered documentation, they get instant answers from Unblocked.

One new engineer explains how they rely on Unblocked to quickly make sense of TravelPerk’s internal terminology: “I used it to clarify all the acronyms I come across in Notion docs and meetings. It’s much faster than searching across glossaries and gives me useful examples."

Another engineer highlights how Unblocked keeps them moving on tasks: “It helps me get on the right path when I’m figuring out where a business rule is implemented, or how two systems work together. It’s invaluable for any question where the answer is spread across many different places.”

The Results: Faster Onboarding, Fewer Interruptions

“Unblocked has been valuable for a number of reasons—new hires onboard faster with easy access to knowledge, teams update documentation when they spot gaps, and engineers stay in flow with less interruptions.” — Luca Sale, Director of Engineering from TravelPerk

Since adopting Unblocked, TravelPerk has seen a significant shift in the onboarding experience and overall productivity:

Time to a new engineer’s first 10 PRs dropped by several days
Onboarding satisfaction rose above the 75th percentile
Engineers stay in flow instead of pausing work to ask or answer questions

“With almost 4000 questions asked in a month, the usage data speaks for itself,” Luca adds, “The engineers who use Unblocked can quickly understand technical topics on their own, allowing senior engineers to focus on deep work.”

By making it easier for engineers to understand the codebase, Unblocked helps TravelPerk scale their engineering team and focus on their highest priority tasks.

Want to see how Unblocked can do the same for your team? Get in touch with us today.