I have recently joined a new company: EV Connect. This is my 3rd role as a Product Manager, so I have had couple experiences and learning of starting fresh. As I am taking my first steps on my new venture, I thought I should map how I want my first 90 days as a product manager to be and share the journey.

To support this post I have also created a Miro, feel free to check it and add your thoughts: First 30, 60, 90 days as a PM.

30 days

I know I am suspicious, but being a product manager is probably one of the most fun roles on an org. It is often described as a mini CEO, but even CEOs need to start somewhere. Lets start with the first 30 days.

Meet your Co-workers

Product Managers are frequently the “glue” of a number of departments. They need to be the advocate of the customer, combine perspectives from development, design and management teams. Being on this position requires a lot of engagement with multiple people, so meeting people and nurture connections is key.

Starting connections at the age of COVID can be quite challenging and take a lot longer. Here are a few tips to get started:

• Join grooming/planning sessions from multiple teams – This gives a chance to present yourself to multiple people, meet the development and product teams and understand what everybody is working on.
• Get key stakeholders from manager and team – If you are working remotely, or if the pandemic is still a thing when you read this, the odds are you will not get the usual office walk-around and general meet an greet. This means it can take a while to meet everybody. Prioritizing the most important people to meet helps.
• Schedule 1-2-1s with all relevant people – Starting by the persons of interest, it is useful to create connections early on. In the first meeting make sure to: give a brief overview of yourself and your experience, let people know what your focus will be (product/ areas you will work on), understand the role of the person you’re meeting, their motivation, their pain points and how they feel you can help.

Learn

Especially if you are starting on a new industry, there is likely a ton to read and learn about the product you will be managing. Among the learning, make sure to pay attention to:

• Understand the Company Mission and Vision – It is important that your initiatives align with the overarching vision of the company
• Get familiar with Product Vision and Roadmap – Evaluate where you can contribute and understand the synergies, dependencies and impacts between your future initiatives and the rest of the roadmap
• Use the product! – Ask for access on a staging environment and explore as much as you can. If you can use the actual product as well.
• Read Internal/External Documentation on the product
• Understand the Industry – At least glance through the specifications on relevant industry standards. Subscribe to industry publications and relevant newsletters
• Research competitors – Explore their public facing information
• And most importantly make notes!

Understand the Process(es)

Regardless if you are stepping into a formed team, or you are establishing a new one, there will be processes that you either need to learn or create. Here’s a list of useful processes to learn or establish are:

• What product management frameworks are used – Agile, Waterfall, Scrum, Kanban, OKRs, PRFAQs?
• Understand how initiatives are prioritized – what infortmation is required to prioritize one initiative vs. others
• Resource Engagement – In case of shared resources, what are the steps to get a team to work on something
• Documentation Requirements – What product documentation are you expected to have to update
• Internal/External Set Communications – Are there any formal communication points for feature announcement? Are you expected to support any internal/external regular presentations about the product: QBRs, All hands, customer presentations, etc?

60 days

30 days in, you understand the business, you know the product and your co-workers, time get serious and get the hands dirty.

Start to Contribute

At the 30-60 day mark is probably hard to establish all the ground breaking initiatives that will make you successful on your role. However a good way to make sure you are on the right path is to figure out ways to contribute, even if very lightly. Here’s some ideas:

• Create/ groom small stories – this is a great way to validate your learning about the product company and processes. It will also give you a sense of accomplishment.
• Bring your “fresh look” ideas – Wherever you go you will be bring a fresh perceptive. Having an outsider looking at the problems can help find new answers. Do not be shy to bring your ideas, this will expose but at the same time will force you better understand the challenges. Ultimately it could even help the company.
• Suggest improvements – success company processes should and will always evolving. Bring your insights of what works and what does not.

Know your Customers

At some point in time, you will start putting together initiatives, which eventually will be part of product roadmap that will be implemented by the development/engineering teams. To avoid falling into build traps, it is key that you understand your users and their problems/challenges/needs. Focus on:

• Segmenting the customer base and create relevant cohorts – possible ways to split customers: big customers, small customers, early adopters, one time users, engaged users, …
• Conducting user research on the cohorts or on accurate representations of cohorts – look into into data analytics; follow the news and social media about the customer; get insights from field teams (sales, customer success, operations).
• Creating User Personas – isolate their needs and behaviors; create stories and scenarios; map user journeys.
• Understanding if there are customer engagements that you can use to collect feedback – customer success meetings, QBRs, upsell meetings, customer feedback sessions, etc…
• Getting direct feedback – create user surveys and product discovery Product Discovery
  All product teams do a set of activities to decide what to build and then do a different set of activities to build and deliver it. While you’ll learn that these activities can and should overlap and interweave with each other, the work that is required to do each is fundamentally(…)
  scripts; use feedback collection tools like Hotjar, Prodcamp or UserTesting; present your roadmap plans and collect feedback; meet customers 1-2-1 talk about industry trends, ask exploratory questions and do wishful thinking exercises.

Understand your KPIs

It is important to understand what success looks like. By the 30-60 day mark it should clear of what the role should be, but it is important to map out what metrics need to be driven to make the role successful:

• Understand what can move the needle.
• List out the key Input Metrics and Output Metrics.
• Identify desired outcomes and align them with senior management.
• Get feedback from your managers and peers on what metrics meaningful and their perception on realistic targets can be.

90 days

Flesh out your initial Discovery

By this time you probably have already directly or indirectly conducted some level of product discovery Product Discovery
All product teams do a set of activities to decide what to build and then do a different set of activities to build and deliver it. While you’ll learn that these activities can and should overlap and interweave with each other, the work that is required to do each is fundamentally(…)
. By the 60-90 day mark you are probably expected to start scoping out roadmap plans. Make sure to double-check your product discovery Product Discovery
All product teams do a set of activities to decide what to build and then do a different set of activities to build and deliver it. While you’ll learn that these activities can and should overlap and interweave with each other, the work that is required to do each is fundamentally(…)
efforts thus far, ask yourself these questions:

• What are we trying to drive for users?
• Who’s the customer/ customer persona(s)?
• What are the customer problems, needs or opportunities?
• In what can we address customer needs?
• Which attributes are critical for meeting the needs?

If you want to be more thorough, check out the Product Discovery Product Discovery
All product teams do a set of activities to decide what to build and then do a different set of activities to build and deliver it. While you’ll learn that these activities can and should overlap and interweave with each other, the work that is required to do each is fundamentally(…)
Questions of our (PR)FAQ Database. In case there are gaps on your initial product discovery Product Discovery
All product teams do a set of activities to decide what to build and then do a different set of activities to build and deliver it. While you’ll learn that these activities can and should overlap and interweave with each other, the work that is required to do each is fundamentally(…)
, make sure to come back to Understanding the KPIs and Knowing your customer. In addition, think about doing opportunity solution trees Opportunity Solution Trees
Opportunity solution trees are a simple way of visually representing the paths you might take to reach a desired outcome. The root of the tree is your desired outcome—the business need that reflects how your team can create business value. Next is the opportunity space. These are the(…)
with your team and other relevant stakeholders.

Plan your Roadmap

Things just got very real, brace yourself for impact. It is time to plan out what you want to do to address customer needs and meet your target KPIs. At this stage, it is key that you have nailed your initial product discovery Product Discovery
All product teams do a set of activities to decide what to build and then do a different set of activities to build and deliver it. While you’ll learn that these activities can and should overlap and interweave with each other, the work that is required to do each is fundamentally(…)
and have a good understanding of the KPIs. When planning your roadmap make sure to think about the following:

• Engage with design teams – Design and UX teams can help a lot with user journeys, intuitive design for easier user adoption and engagement, etc.
• Involve all relevant stakeholders – product management should not be an island. Other departments and even customers can add further context and provide feedback on what you wish to build. Getting everybody on the same page provides further validation over what is being built. PRFAQs are a great vehicle for this.
• Prepare all the materials – Write your stories; gather all the design and mockups; Identify the key indicators required for prioritization; identify risks and dependencies.
• Understand capacity and technical limitations – unfortunately you will not have infinite development capacity and there will infrastructure and framework limitations over what can be built. Make sure you can be impacting and hit the time to market on your initiatives with the resources you have at your disposal.

Impact !

The 90 mark has arrived and you are ready to shine. Now it is time to make an impact and deliver. Think about the 90 days milestone as a point where you can show all your hard work thus far. Here is a list of possible things that you can do that can cause impact straight away:

• Establish your OKRs for the next quarter
• Discuss your first PRFAQ PRFAQ
  […] how new ideas and products are developed at Amazon: Working Backwards from the desired customer experience. Before we start building, we write a Press Release to clearly define how the new idea or product will benefit customers, and we create a list of Frequently Asked Questions to(…)
  
• Do your first customer presentation
• Support a RFP response
• Present your current roadmap plans

Not all companies are the same and there will be on-boarding processes that will take longer then 90 days. It is possible that by the 90 day mark you do not feel comfortable to commit to any impacting initiative. Nevertheless, it is important that you keep your eyes on the prize and make sure you have worked on all the building blocks required to make you successful on a product manager role.

Feedback

In between all of the above, it is important to guarantee you are headed on the right direction. A good way to understand is to ask for feedback. The earlier you get this feedback, the sooner you can use the information to correct course.

Shortcut

A good shortcut to success on the first 30 days is to learn as much about the industry, product and market before stepping into the role. In addition you can engage with the hiring manager to understand what will be your focus and start defining what will make you successful as product manager even before you join.

It also does not harm to go beyond what is technically expected from a product manager and enroll in courses that can teach you more about the technologies, tools and frameworks used by the company.