Lessons From my First 90 Days as a Product Manager at a New Company
In the past, either as a Product Manager at Workable or as the product guy in a number of indie projects I was sort of used to building products from scratch with a team of engineers and designers. This has a number of pros and cons, including the fact that you start all over again, add your personal taste in the product since the beginning, you have zero (or close to zero) traction, etc. This time it was somewhat different, as I landed a gig as a Senior Product Manager at Blueground, a tech enabled startup transforming the experience of big city living, in a team that already had a working product and, although without a dedicated product person, it had building blocks in place and traction.
These are some of the biggest lessons I learnt during my first 90 days:
Check your ego at the door
Resist your temptations to jump in and start changing things. Whatever is already in place, is there for a reason (right or wrong) be it in product, processes, people, etc. Give yourself time to get familiar with the product, team, company, and market before you start adding your own items in the backlog, establishing new processes, etc. Of course part of your job is to introduce new things and this should happen soon after you join the team. Product Managers are often people with big egos, so this is usually harder that it sounds, but much rewarding as you minimise the risk of changing things that are already established and work well or avoiding conflicts with other stakeholders.
Set realistic expectations
Do not try to impress anyone with moonshot goals especially in your first few months. Since you probably don’t have much context about what is feasible or not (in terms of metrics but also what the team can deliver), set realistic expectations to avoid getting your first big miss early on. It definitely helps if the company has a goal setting system in place such as OKRs, since this would give you a better view of the company and department goals and you can align accordingly or at least inform your decisions. In any case, as a newly appointed Product Manager you should focus on delivering value as early as possible, while not promising things you probably cannot achieve.
Get to know the product inside out
Use your product religiously especially if you are coming from a different industry. This becomes harder if you are not fitting in one of your product’s user personas. Nevertheless, you can find a way around this, by recording and testing all customer journeys, user flows, emails, push notifications, everything. This might be a very time-consuming task for most products, especially if they have a pretty wide scope. However it will reward you soon enough when you start adding the first epics that affect existing user flows.
Talk to your users, business stakeholders, team
The first 90 days should include lots of discussions and informal coffees and lunches. First of all, talk to your customers yourself if possible. Answer customer enquiries, participate in sales calls, join communities where your customers hang out, etc. By all means, try to find ways to get unfiltered feedback from your users, instead of just talking to your sales and customer support people, which on one hand is usually less of a hassle, but at the same time you could miss the bigger picture. Second, talk to key stakeholders inside the organisation, including your main business contacts, operations, sales, marketing, or whoever can give you a good idea of your product’s context. Understand what makes impact for the business, what roadblocks they have, what are the decision making principles and values. If something matters a lot during the first 90 days as a Product Manager, it’s to get clear on strategy, otherwise there’s the risk of diverting the product’s deliverables from real business needs moving forward. Last but not least, talk to your team. These are the people that build the product with you, so their ideas and feelings about the product, processes, users, market, team, company or even whether they are happy with their lives or not will affect the way you work and collaborate with them.
Review the market landscape
Your product is always part of a wider market with several bigger and smaller competitors and substitutes. What are the solutions people find these days to ameliorate their pain points and your product is trying to solve? The first 90 days are ideal for mapping this landscape, accumulating the bigger picture, reviewing features that your competitors have, what are the existing substitutes, and understanding where you win and where you lose.
Earn the trust of the team and company
Aim for one big win! First impressions are usually hard to change, hence it would be great if you can deliver significant value and prove yourself through your contributions during your first days in the company. This could be everything from a new feature that your team released, helping with a big hire in a key position for the company, delivering a great product analysis where you identified certain strengths and weaknesses, introducing a much anticipating user research process, etc.
Be of help where you can
This lesson can closely be linked with the one above, earning the trust of your teammates. What can you do to make people’s lives easier? Take a load off their back. If you want to establish this as one of your principles moving forward in the organisation, then your first 90 days are crucial for setting the scene. Understand what are the main problems that your managers, colleagues currently face in their day to day and help if you can. This could be things such as helping to attract & retain talent, communicating company vision, etc .However, try not to become the owner of tasks whose responsibility falls outside your realm of expertise, as you might end up putting extra load on your back!
Take advantage of your fresh eyes
Record and share what you have learnt with the rest of the team. Especially in a team with an existing product, the feedback of a Product Manager is valuable around both what works well and what doesn’t. From a UX glitch and the latest trends of the industry, to the feedback your customers are sharing during discovery calls and the improvements that can be made in your agile processes, you should take advantage of your fresh eyes and share your feedback with your team or other stakeholders.
