A Guide to Product Management Success: Your First 90 Days at a New Company
The first 90 days at a new company are crucial for setting yourself up for success as a new product hire. Find out what you need to do before you start, within the first 30 days, 60 days and 90 days.
Congratulations on your new role as a product manager, senior product manager, or product owner!
The first 90 days at a new company are crucial for setting yourself up for success. As you embark on this exciting journey, it's essential to navigate the organisational landscape, build relationships, understand expectations, and familiarize yourself with tools and processes. Here I'll provide you with a comprehensive guide on what to do before joining the company and during your first 90 days to thrive in your new role.
Before You Join the Company
Before your official start date, take the following steps to lay the groundwork for a successful transition. Ask a few questions to the hiring manager. Get answers that are publicly available about your new company and the market or industry it operates in. See if you can meet the team you’ll be working with to get a sense of the culture and how things get done in the company.
a. Ask for the Organisation Chart
Request an organisation chart to understand the company's structure, reporting lines, and teams you'll be working with. Use tools like LinkedIn to get a background view of the people in the roles crucial to your success. Look at the reporting lines and the titles that sit on the leadership team to get a feel for what’s important. A good relationship with people within these teams will be important to the success of your products.
b. Find out about the Product Mindset
Find out how important good product management is seen within the organisation and whether there is a product led thinking that seeks to create customer value while creating business value. Questions to begin with is whether there is a Product Vision and/or Product Strategy. Ask whether there is customer data, insight, regular research conducted to validate what gets prioritised for building in the product. Without the North Star Vision and deep customer understanding, the risk is the product team wastes time shipping features without creating customer value that users are willing to pay for. If these don’t exist, the opportunity is to set this up. Ask whether the company is open to having a Product Vision, Strategy and becoming more Customer centric with data and insights to inform product and build decisions.
c. Understand the Different Teams and Work Processes
Familiarize yourself with the various teams you'll collaborate with, such as engineering, design, marketing, and sales. Understand their roles, responsibilities, and how they interact with the product team in the company. Ask questions to gain insights into how the different teams operate and engage with the Product team.
d. Clarify Success Metrics with the Hiring Manager
Ask your new boss, What does success look like? Are there key performance indicators (KPIs), objectives and key results (OKRs), or goals that define success in your role? What are her expectations of what you’ll be doing in the first 30 days, 60 days and 90 days. Understanding these expectations upfront will help you align your efforts and measure your progress effectively.
e. Create a Company and Product Map
This includes analysing publicly available company reports, press releases, financial reports and any media articles. Start creating product analysis artifacts such as reviewing the sign up process, what a new customer experiences, reading the product terms and conditions, reviewing pricing against features or experiences. Conducting a strengths, weaknesses, opportunity, threats (SWOT) map as well as listing potential jobs to be done (JTBD) for the different user personas the product is targeted at. Consider who the competitors (alternatives, substitutes) may be and how their product (pricing, features/experience, value) compare. Review customer feedback within product review sites, public groups and app store reviews. Start creating a map of the company and product you’ll be managing.
First 30 Days: Setting the Foundation
During your first 30 days, focus on building relationships, understanding the company culture, and getting familiar with your new environment. Ensure these expectations align with what your new boss expects.
a. Identify Critical People and Build Relationships
Identify key stakeholders, including senior executives, product team members, and cross-functional partners. Schedule introductory meetings to understand their roles, learn from their insights, and establish rapport. Cross reference your list of key people with whom your manager believes you should work closely with and align the two lists. Look to set up ongoing check-ins with crucial stakeholders.
b. Learn from Your Predecessor
Find out who your predecessor was and look to get an insight from them about the role, teams and company. Ask about their successes, challenges, and lessons learned. While this isn’t always possible, this will shorten your time to onboard and can provide valuable context to help you avoid common pitfalls.
c. Work with your Manager
Find out how your manager prefers to be engaged, communicated and updated on your progress. Are they available for weekly one on one check-ins or do they prefer email updates? Can you slack them with questions as they arise or do they prefer formal meetings? Work with your manager on the best way to work together to get the best out of the relationship. Likewise, communicate how you’d like to work with them. This will be the most important relationship in the organisation, as they’ll often be advocating for you, your product and/or your team when you’re not in the room. Your success largely depends on how well you work together.
d. Understand Management and Communication Preferences
Talk to your team members and colleagues to understand how they prefer to be managed and approached. Adapt your communication style and build rapport based on their preferences, which will enhance collaboration and teamwork.
e. Familiarize Yourself with Tech Tools and Processes
Learn about the tech tools and platforms used for communication, project management, and collaboration. Understand any existing templates or processes in place for product development and documentation. This will ensure a smooth integration into the company's workflows.
f. Orientation and New starters program
Check whether your organisation has a new starters training or orientation program you need to complete within your first 30 days. Your manager can point you in the right directly here. Larger organisations will often have an orientation program, training or new starters set of tasks to complete. These may include industry or company training, compliance training and information on company policies. Keep a list of them handy and work through these in the first 30 days.
g. Build your knowledge of your customer
Find out what problems your product is solving for them. Familiarise yourself with existing internal customer data - reports, usage behaviours, research (surveys/questionnaires). Meet with the Sales teams to hear from them about who the customer is, what they’re asking for, what they like/don’t like about the product, how they pay for it and anything else. Meet with the Support teams to learn what customers are calling about, common complaints/issues, the positive and negative feedback. Seek to build strong relationships with these teams so that you have an open flow of communication on opportunities and problems they hear from customers.
h. Build your knowledge of the market and industry your product operates in
Understand your market, industry, regulatory/compliance and competitors. Gather this data through publicly available information as well as internal company data. Start to build relationships with the internal marketing, sales, regulatory teams as you build up your knowledge.
Days 31-60: Gaining Momentum
During this phase, you should aim to deepen your understanding of the product, company goals, and expand your network
a. Dive Deeper into the Product
Immerse yourself in the product you'll be working on. Understand its features, functionality, and value proposition. Understand which features/experiences are most to least valued by customers and which are most in demand from customers (experiences they are willing to pay or stay for). Engage with the development team, review user feedback, and own the product roadmap.
b. Align Goals with Company Objectives
Gain clarity on the company's overarching goals and how your product contributes to them. Ensure your priorities and roadmap align with these objectives to drive meaningful impact.
c. Know the Crucial Meetings
Identify and attend crucial meetings, such as team stand-ups, lead product roadmap discussions, and cross-functional collaboration sessions. Actively contribute customer/market insights, potential product ideas, ask questions to validate and clarify solutions, and seek feedback to ensure the right thing is built (effort is focussed on creating value).
d. Grow your knowledge of the Customer
Continue to grow your knowledge of the customer and what they value, who they compare your product to, what would make them stay, pay and refer others to join. Engage the support teams to continue to provide you updates on customer pain. Work with the delivery team on designing experiences within the product that would support the behaviour you want. Look for ways to align your knowledge of the customer to achieve the product goals or OKRs set.
e. Grow your knowledge of the Market
Continue to grow your knowledge of the market, industry and competitor movements. Look for opportunities to position your product to win in this space - this may mean working with marketing on messaging and positioning, identifying strategic channel partnerships, providing Sales with material to help them win over customers against competitors.
Days 61-90: Driving Results
As you approach the end of your first 90 days, shift your focus towards delivering tangible outcomes and solidifying your presence within the organisation.
a. Execute on Priorities
This is the period the training wheels come off and you’ll be expected to show value. Start to showcase and present product demos. Continue to execute on the product roadmap and prioritize initiatives based on their impact and alignment with company goals. Leverage your learnings from the past weeks to make informed decisions and drive results.
b. Seek Feedback and Iterate
Actively seek feedback from stakeholders, users, and team members. Embrace a growth mindset and iterate on your strategies and approaches to continuously improve.
c. Leverage Unofficial Channels
Understand the unofficial communication channels and informal networks within the organisation. Building relationships beyond formal hierarchies can help you gain insights, navigate challenges, and create more significant impact.
d. Continue with your regular check ins with Stakeholders
Have your weekly meeting with your marketing counterpart, a fortnightly meeting with Sales and Support, a monthly check in with your legal and financial stakeholder. This will keep communication lines open and provide you with any heads up on rising complaints in support or requests to sales, legal changes coming up or financial considerations you should be across. This also means you can share the product vision and strategy and help sales and support teams align their feedback and request against the strategic product pillars - making sure that request for product build are aligned with the product goals
e. Reflect and Plan for the Future
Take time to reflect on your achievements and learnings during your first 90 days. Identify areas for growth, set personal development goals, and outline your vision for the upcoming months.
The first 90 days in a new company as a product manager, senior product manager, or product owner are crucial for establishing a strong foundation and paving the way for success. By proactively understanding the organisational landscape, building relationships, aligning with expectations, and familiarizing yourself with tools and processes, you'll be well-positioned to thrive in your new role. Remember to adapt these guidelines to your specific company and leverage every opportunity to learn, contribute, and make a lasting impact on the organisation. Best of luck on your new journey!
Where did this list come from?
Over the last 3 years, during my time consulting to multiple product teams around the world, this is the list I created for myself to help me set up for success in every new company. Over the last six months, I’ve been asked to share this with friends who’ve started new roles as well as early career product people I’ve mentored. This provides a mix of how to onboard successfully in a large company as well as a small or mid sized business.
In many of my roles in large organisations or corporates, I’d always ask mentors, what does success look like here? Who becomes successful in this company? What behaviours are rewarded in these roles?
For every organisation, I’ve noticed that it depends on two things:
The Company Goals - which, for someone in a product role, should be translated to the specific Product Vision, Strategy and OKRs (or KPIs). This measures the What.
The Company Culture - this is often team agnostic and identifies the behaviours and ways of working that lead to success in the organisation. This refers to the How.
Need help planning your product management 30-60-90 day onboarding plan? Let me help - contact me