When starting a new product management role (whether you are new or have some experience under your belt), the first few months are critical as you will spend your time building your reputation within the company, getting to know the company's goals and values, and ultimately getting to know the product(s) you will be working with.
In light of this, it is key to have the first 90 days strategically planned out. Your main goal is to get involved with as much as possible in terms of networking, knowledge gathering, getting to know the tools and processes you will be working with, and ultimately planning ahead for how you will make a difference and initiate growth.
There are some key questions you will be asking yourself:
- What should my strategic plan look like?
- How should I balance my time?
- What are my main priorities and focus points?
From reading lots of articles online and looking back on my experience of starting entirely afresh, I have outlined some points that will be helpful for anyone stepping into their new role.
Why you should create a 30 / 60 / 90 day plan
Putting a plan together helps you organise your thoughts and identify your goals for the next three months. Ultimately, it provides a personal definition of success for your first three months on the job. The plan doesn't necessarily need to be anything fancy, but it should be something that makes sense to you, can be referenced to track your progress, and should be flexible should anything change as you discover a new direction or unearth something hidden in your first few days.
Days 1 - 30: Learn!
During the first month, the goal is to learn as much as possible and understand the most important strategic areas of the job. This process involves learning about the market and your company's main competitors, the users of the products, your team's strengths and weaknesses/gaps, and the overall company culture.
Team
Start by getting to know your team by arranging conversations with key stakeholders:
- Other product team members
- Developers
- Sales and Marketing reps
- Customer Success team / Account Managers
You can use your time with other PMs/POs to get a grasp of the general workflow and processes in place at your company. Time with the developers can be spent talking about the tech and getting to know how they work and how the product works.
Product
Spend some time getting to know the product by using it extensively. Learn the product from top to bottom from a user experience point of view, and look for things you think could be improved upon and/or anything that is producing bugs or not working as it should be. Make a note of the things that need to be changed in case they have not been documented. A new/outsider perspective can be key in picking up on these things. If there’s a product vision and product strategy, then read through them to see if it provides a good description of your product's future state.
Whilst you are in the early stages of getting to know the product, have a look through the product roadmap, product backlog, and any product specs. These documents should give you an idea of the possible changes that you could make to the product. As you get more comfortable with your product, you’ll be in a position to change those plans, avoid some changes, and introduce others initially.
You know you’ve made progress in this learning area when you can describe your product's functionality and how it contributes to solving your customers’ and users’ problems.
Metrics
Measuring performance is critical when analysing the product and the company's success, so spend some time getting to know the company metrics used to determine how the company tracks success. Analyse how the product has performed against those metrics and determine where and why it falls short.
Customers / Users
Product Managers ultimately focus on solving problems for their customers and users, so it is key to understand your customers and users as soon as possible. Go through any documentation related to users, such as user personas, to get ahead of the curve and identify successes in the past as well as pain points to be considered in the future. If your organisation has created personas, start with those and supplement that information by talking directly with users and customers. Of course, if your organisation does not already have personas created, jump straight into interacting with users and customers. The quickest way to do this is to shadow your customer success team and your sales teams.
Competitors
If not before you start, then definitely within the first week or two, learn about the industry and market your company sits within. Learn more about the main competitors, their strengths and weaknesses (SWOT analysis can help with this), what their customers and users comment about them online, and use their products too. Competitor analysis is incredibly important in the first stages of learning about your working environment, as it could help shape the changes you want to make in the future. There might be some competitor analysis documentation already, but often it is old or incomplete. Go play with rival products, join forums, read industry news. With this information you can get inside the needs that drive the space by researching how the market is solving these needs.
Tools / Processes
Additionally, in the first 30 days, you should become familiar with the tools and processes that your team (and the rest of the company) uses day-to-day. From product management tools such as Jira and Trello to collaboration apps, you will be using these tools every day, so getting to know anything you have never used before (as well as how your company uses those you have used in the past) is integral to working in sync with the rest of your team.
Set Goals
Finally, set yourself some goals to achieve within the first 30 days. The first month is going to involve a lot of information gathering. You will be talking to a lot of people and receiving a lot of information. Setting and completing some personal goals will help keep you organised as well as track your progression, especially in the early days. Your manager, or your team, can help with this, but some goals you might want to consider include the following:
- Scheduling one-to-ones with key members of each team
- Read any documentation related to your product
- Achieve an end-to-end experience of using the product as an external user, noting your observations.
- Achieve an end-to-end experience of using the product as an internal user, noting your observations.
- Write a SWOT analysis of your main competitors (up to 3 will do)
- Write a SWOT analysis of the product
- Investigate the backlog and analyse any requested feature requests/changes that have not been worked on or prioritised.
Ultimately, you will want to share everything you have learned during your journey within the first 30 days. Present them to your team, document what you have learned, and always take feedback on board. Your first month is about asking and understanding WHY on everything so that you can make meaningful decisions (including compromises). It's about learning how to be a communicator and facilitator by making sure everyone feels heard and understood whilst also knowing how to say NO when needed. Most importantly, manage expectations up and down the company from the get go.
Days 31 - 60: Contribute and get involved!
During your first 30 days, you spent a lot of time listening and learning about the product, the company and the users. During the next 30 days it is time to start taking action by demonstrating what you’ve learned, contribute and showing leadership.
For example, you can start by running your team’s next sprint planning session. You might not have all of the strategic answers yet. But you can show your team you’re getting up to speed and that you can help keep their progress on track. This may feel like throwing yourself at the deep end, but this is a great way of getting out of your comfort zone early on, and when you put yourself in this leadership position you will start to unearth more questions that you hadn't thought of, and you will begin to get a better understanding of the product, what questions and answers your team needs from you, and what you need to prepare in the future.
You can also start looking at the backlog items that your team have coming up in the pipeline. Look at what is coming up and how these features were written and specced out. Identify what information is needed, how things like the description and acceptance criteria are written, and research how certain conclusions are made. Things should start to click into place during this period.
During this month, you are going to continue your learning activities by learning about your customers and users, getting familiar with your product, and meeting with stakeholders. The main difference from the first three months is your primary activity switches from watching to learn to doing to learn.
The goal is not to change anything at this point - you want to run through processes as they stand to get some perspective on how the organization does things and identify opportunities for improvement once you’ve established some credibility.
Days 61 - 90: Build, develop and advance!
At this phase, you should be continuing to do many of the things you started in your first and second month on the new job—including researching your market, becoming familiar with your products, their success metrics, and having productive conversations with stakeholders.
But now it’s also time to do some real work on your product. Start making strategic decisions and drive progress. Your first steps in making strategic decisions about your product will involve finding the right processes based on your observations and experience for working with your team and be sure everyone is communicating clearly.
Get together with your team and identify a small new feature, or enhancement, that you can work on together from start to finish, but that won’t upend the existing product. Being able to take one of these items and spec it out, help describe the feature / enhancement in detail and adding all of the necessary descriptors such as steps for creation and acceptance criteria, will prove valuable for quick progression and understanding. You will then share, discuss and teak that feature with your team, which will help drive your understanding of the product, how your team works, and the direction of the product moving forward.
Once you’ve determined what this small initiative will be, you can develop all of the processes you’ll be using on much bigger projects later. You can establish a cadence for sprint meetings, for example, and the most effective way to update and share priorities on your roadmap. This exercise will also allow you to watch your new team in action, and learn everyone’s communication styles and preferred processes for working.
There will be other responsibilities that you will be getting on with within your third month. For example, if there are certain documents that have not been produced / updated (such as user personas, the roadmap, etc.) then your efforts may lead towards pulling that information together or updating it.
It is important to ensure that all upcoming backlog items are ready for development and start adding to the backlog. If there isn't a product discovery method in place at your organisation, then put one in place through your own research, or start to integrate what worked at your previous company.
Also, go through all of the available documentation, research, communicate, and soon you will be making a real positive difference to drive the product, and the organisation, forward.
When the first 90 days are done, you’ll have shipped a real piece of functionality for your product. You will have also cleared the first major hurdle of any PM / PO in a new job: working with a cross-functional team to release something to the market. By the end of the third month you should be considered an experienced, contributing product team member. You will have a feature or product that you’re leading, and you should have a good handle on the product lifecycle at your organisation.
Some last advice
Your value as a Product Owner is to make the pipeline clear and to clean up afterwards. So, you live in the backlog - always refining requirements and making sure the next sprint is ready to go and in-line with the client's expectations. It may not be 40 hours worth of work, but that’s okay. Your job isn’t to build, it’s to make sure the builders have everything they need to build smoothly. You’re also the information officer and it’s your job to know the vision inside and out and liaise between the Development team and the business/key stakeholders.
You may spend most of your days in the backlog grooming, cleaning up documentation, making sure everyone on the team is synced and prioritising what needs to be prioritised.
Product Owner, as a job title, is getting more and more traction (especially with global workforce and different time zones). They may do a lot of the logistical things in Jira like cleaning up labels, prioritising issues, tracking against Sprints and releases, and they may go further and be a bit more technical in certain aspects. But the Product Owner should be proficient with Agile lingo, such as burndown and velocity, as well as be able to research, discover, strategize, and understand priorities, product vision, roadmap and requirements.
