What you need to think about in your first 60–90 days on a new job: product management (leader) edition

pranav khanna

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Product Coalition

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6 min read

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Mar 21, 2018

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I’ve recently transitioned into a different role and have spent some time thinking about how to start this new job. A mentor advised me to think about three broad categories — the content that you need to learn and develop, the learning plan you need to follow and finally the team and people aspects of the job that you need to sort out. Listed down those elements below — some which I had thought about, and others that I wish I had considered more proactively. Hoping that others can learn from my mistakes!

A few context setting notes on this list

• Safe to assume that the bullets are arranged in sequential order of time
• Some of these bullets are likely going to be true for any new job. I have italicized those that are true specifically for product leader jobs
• Written from the perspective of a product leader, who is taking on an existing product team

Content

• Anything burning you need to jump on asap? Are there upcoming deadlines, deliverables or releases that need your attention right away? Figure out how to get up to speed on those as soon as possible — leveraging your predecessor, or current team. Might feel like trial by fire — but will go a long way towards shoring up your credibility and ability to show up as a leader if you take these types of challenges head on.
• Thoroughly understand current work in flight: Disaster averted (bullet above), you need to develop a deep understanding of all the current work in flight — goals, status, how it fits into the overall picture for the product or product line. A good way to do this would be to set up learning sessions with team. Great opportunity for the team to showcase their work, and for you to evaluate the work and talent.
• Understand the technical architecture for the product: Get an engineer to sit down with you and explain how the product works under the hood and which major technologies and frameworks have been used. Its important to understand strengths and opportunities for the system — especially the elements that could be the single point of failure that brings the whole system down (e.g. a vendor or system that can’t deal with bursts / spikes of usage)
• Quick wins — focus on a few near terms wins — could be a low risk product / feature release, or a presentation to senior stakeholders. I’m believe strongly that in any new job — even if its in the same organization and you’re a known quantity — it is incredibly important to hit things out of the park early on. Helps you gain confidence, build momentum and establish credibility. So be creative about the work-plan, and make sure that in addition to the bold / high beta initiatives — you have something near term / more certain in your portfolio of projects. Another way to think about this is to pick something that caters to your strengths.
• Understand or build the mission and vision for the product — goals, strategy and resourcing: What problem is your product (or product line) trying to solve, what is its core purpose? What are the goals, how do you define success? Can you articulate the strategy or the key imperatives? Are you adequately resourced to achieve those objectives and strategies? And finally are there any major near term changes or pivots you need to make? This last one might take some time to figure out — I caution product leaders against knee jerk changes to the strategy — unless absolutely warranted. Change just for the sake of change can be counter-productive.
• Understand leverage: Be very clear on which aspects of the strategy will have an outsized impact on the final outcome or goals for the product. Double down on those — which may imply making some organizational changes or people movements.

Learning

• Set up a structured learning plan: Its important to be intentional about your learning plan vs. leaving it up to chance. This is also not something that should end after the first 90 days — ideally you set up an on-going learning plan, that helps you to go deeper on a specific area or wider on different areas.
• Read recent work / decks: Review all the recent work from the team — product strategy decks, go to market plans, monitoring dashboards / decks etc.
• Get close to the user / customer: Sit in on user research, get your hands on actual user feedback, not synthesized — but actual user complaints, or verbatims. It’s important to be able to identify with the voice of the user. As an aside — I’ve often found it helpful to understand how users describe your product in their own words, as a way to think what kinds of jobs are the most important to them and to help content strategy for the product or marketing.
• Operations: If there is a significant operational component to your product — spend some time in that area, maybe doing some customer support yourself or at the minimum following a support ticket from end to end to see how things work behind the scenes.

Team / people

• Meet everyone — team, extended team (engineering, design, operations, marketing) and other stakeholders: Goes without saying, this should be one of the first few things you do.
• Establish the operating model for the team: understand or build an operating model that works for you — what are the meetings you want to establish? How is information flowing up / down and across the team? OKRs are a great tool to drive alignment across the team.
• Establish the culture on the team: Don’t leave this to chance — build the culture you want. Culture is the sum of various things — how you do performance management, what kind of behaviors you reward, what kind of symbols and rituals you establish (e.g. focus on monitoring through Metrics Mondays, or customer focus through user testing Fridays or establishing a customer centricity award). This is a very rich topic — might do a whole post on this.
• Change the organizational structure if you need to: Once you build the strategy, and have a thorough understanding of areas you need to focus on — you may need to change the organizational structure to ensure that there is adequate focus on the highest leverage initiatives, and that you have the right and right number of people lined up against those. Ask yourself — are people working on the highest leverage things? Are the right people working on those things?
• Understand personal leverage — where do you need to spend your time early on? Of all the areas your team needs to work on, what do you differentially need to focus on?
• On-going recruiting / networking: Always be selling your product and your team to internal and external talent. Even if you don’t need to hire right away, if you have a good network and reputation — will be much easier to get quality talent for when you do need to hire.

A few general tips:

• Set up a few near term deliverables as a forcing function to learn quickly — may be a product release, or a presentation to a senior stakeholder group. There’s nothing like the pressure of those situations to speed up the learning curve!
• Don’t be afraid to ask questions: everyone knows you’re new — and will give you the benefit of the doubt; don’t be afraid to play the “newbie” card and ask the questions that will help you get up to speed.
• Respect the past, but create the future: Don’t show up like a bull in a china shop, intent on changing everything. No quicker way to lose the existing team that made some of the decisions you are now criticizing. Develop empathy for the context in which those decisions were made, and if you do need to make changes or express disagreement — do so in a fact-based and respectful way.
• May feel overwhelming at times — but will get better. If you picked the right opportunity that takes you out of your comfort zone, then it should feel like drinking from a fire hose! It will get better over time, as you find your footing.
• Do some introspection on behaviors you want to bring over and those that you want to leave behind: Think about what made you successful in your last role, and what didn’t. Role changes are always a good time to do a reset. You should bring over some strengths — and at the same time be mindful of things you actively want to change about how you work.