How NOT to implode in the first 90 days as a Product Manager

A straight-forward guide to making a soft landing and setting yourself up for success in a new organization

Photo by ahmad gunnaivi on Unsplash

Congrats! You have pivoted into your first product role! Now the hard work begins! If you are a normal person, the tsunami of information that you need to absorb and process is going to be stress and anxiety inducing.

You’ll need to come up the curve quickly, which needs a structured approach. The faster you climb the learning curve, earlier you can begin to make good business decisions. However, many new Product Managers (PMs) don’t prioritize their learning systematically, and even fewer create a learning plan upon entering a new role. Successful PMs need to balance action with observation and reflection.

In the first few weeks of a new position, you are being sized by your engineering team, product designer, and other PMs. Those judgements form the basis of what people think you; it can take months to turn around a poor first impression. Use this as a guide to help you avoid those missteps that can derail your effectiveness as a PM.

Successful PMs need to balance action with observation and reflection.

People (Day 1–30)

Use the honeymoon period as an anthropologist sent to study a newly discovered civilization.

Often, insufficient time is devoted to lateral relationship building with peers and key stakeholders outside the new PM’s immediate organization. You need to learn the organization and culture before making changes on assumptions that have not been validated. A key trap to avoid falling to is the “action imperative” pit of near compulsive need to take action. Your two major outcomes should be to:

1. Understand the unfamiliar culture of a new organization
2. Understand how it’s manifested and adapting to it

To do this, you need to learn subtle information such as company culture, unspoken strategies of the organization, politics of the organization, and most importantly, any “sacred cows” to avoid touching. You can accomplish this by asking really great questions such as:

1. What are the biggest challenges this product or portfolio is facing?
2. What are some of the key things you think I should be working on?
3. What damaging cultural or political missteps must you avoid?
4. What are the most promising unexploited opportunities for growth?
5. In what areas (people, product, process) can I achieve some early wins?

There are many more, but these are some of my favorites that encompass the gamut from company-to-job level. My first action always is to talk to 10 or so key stakeholders provided by my manager without fail and ask them the same five to ten questions to establish a baseline.

Remember: you don’t want to be meeting your neighbors for the first time in the middle of the night when your house is burning down.

ACTIONS

1. Ask your boss to identify and introduce you to the key people you should connect with early on.
2. Schedule 1-on-1s with key stakeholders.

Remember to make a genuine connection. If your 1:1 is vibing pretty well, then feel free to drive the conversation by asking the sensitive questions above. If your gut’s telling you to keep it at surface level, respect your instinct. Some people take longer to open up and may not appreciate diving in too deep too quickly in your first few conversations.

The side benefit of developing lateral connections is that your internal network will also give you inside scoop on various potential sensitive topics or if you need to bounce ideas off someone that’s not your boss. Plus, you now know a few people so it’s not as awkward at the next company event

Product (Day 30–60)

It’s key to develop your own perspective and opinion rather than getting it second-hand from internal teams as customers often tend to provide solutions, rather than talk about the job-to-be-done (JBTD) behind the request. Practical examples to develop your product intimacy include:

• Ideas backlog: ideally, your company has a road mapping tool where customer-facing teams capture client feedback. Barring that, 1-on-1 conversations with key members from sales, customer success, or production support also works.
• Competitive intelligence: win/loss interviews are a great source of insight about why clients are choosing your product or what drives them to your competitors’.
• Helpdesk tickets: can be an awesome source for understanding pain points or gaps in your product. Often the most unfiltered source since clients are requesting help or asking questions, rather than providing suggestions.
• Sales calls: can also be an excellent source not only to understand the product, but also get a feel for the kinds of questions clients are asking.

Lastly, if you are lucky enough to have a transitioning product manager, ask for a product demo, record the session, and then play with the product yourself, using the recording as a guide to help you in case you get stuck.

Process (Day 60–90)

Every company will have it’s own way of doing things that you will need to pick up. This is simply how does stuff get done around here. The four main process skills are: customer discovery, product discovery, product optimization, and product development processes.

Each company will have it’s own twist, variation, or flavor for each of these processes that you need to learn. A big change for me personally was switching from hardware to SaaS product management. Hardware product development is almost always waterfall. In SaaS on the other hand, it’s uncommon to plan beyond 6 months.

There’s an element of continuous discovery and delivery working in an agile framework. This approach simply wouldn’t work in the hardware space as you can’t ship a half-built product that needs to interact in the physical world.

Personally, this is my least favorite part about on-boarding. I find it pretty dry and uninteresting. However, I do recognize that good processes are the key to scalability, so it’s a necessary evil that can’t be avoided.

Track Your Early Successes

Keep a record of what you have accomplished to share with your boss at your 90-day review. If possible, try to accomplish an early win that overlaps with your managers area of interest and is a low hanging fruit (low effort, high reward). Personally, I also conduct a 180-day feedback with my immediate team to get a pulse check for how I am doing and to identify any potential blind spots that I can correct.

Once you’re a few months into your new role, you can begin to discuss how you’re doing and what your developmental priorities should be. Where are you doing well? In what areas do you need to improve or do things differently? Are there projects or special assignments you could undertake (without sacrificing focus)?

Most importantly, remember to savor your new victory and celebrate your success in achieving this new milestone!

Final thoughts

You maybe wondering if your company should take the lead in setting learning priorities and providing guidance. The reality is that not all companies have sophisticated on-boarding experiences, especially those with under 500–800 employees, especially high-growth start-ups.

Even if there is a new hire orientation, it may not cover specific job or department level information. Therefore, it’s essential to take the initiative to prioritize and plan your own learning so you can ramp up quickly and contribute right away.

It’s important to avoid the mistake of assuming that what works in one organizational culture will automatically work in another. It’s better to approach each new role with an open mind and a willingness to learn. Even if you were brought in to introduce subject matter expertise, taking the time to understand the culture and politics to tailor your approach will help you enact the change quicker and with a lot less friction.

Further Reading

My tips and tricks are just one approach. There are certainly different perspectives and approaches to what you could be doing in the first 90 days. If you enjoyed this article, here are similar approaches from other thought leaders in tech:

1. Linda Z — How to spend your first 90 days — More focused on individual contributors
2. Deb Liu — Make the first 90 days count — More focused on executive level transitions
3. Marty Cagan’s People, Product, and Process
4. Michael Watkins’ First 90 Days framework