I recently passed the 90 day mark in a new PM role at a medium-large size company. The first 90 days in a new role can be a roller-coaster of emotions and activities! Below, I reflect on what I found most helpful to get started.
Start with relationships
Whether you are an individual contributor or manager, team & cross-functional relationships are key to success as a PM. Work with your manager & peers to identify the folks most relevant to your work, and set up 1:1s with them. During those 1:1s, ask for intros to more people.
The goal of these 1:1s is to learn how your team collaborates with other teams, to start building insights into how things are going & what could be better. This is also a great time to ask any & all questions and there are “no dumb questions”. Be curious, bring positive energy, and establish mutual goals in these conversations.
Maya Angelou’s famous saying is appropriate here:
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Talk to customers & prospects
An early effective tactic to understand your product & problem space, is to get direct customer and prospect conversations going. There are a few different ways to do this-
Leverage your personal network
Plug into ongoing user research
Attend marketing events
Build relationship with sales
Email & social outreach to prospects
Dogfood your product
There is no substitute for knowing the product you are going to be PM-ing inside out. Hopefully, using the product is something you already started doing during the interview & company evaluation process. Sign up for your product as a new user and start documenting all the questions and pain points that come up for you. Get intimate with the user experiences your product enables. If your company uses internal communication tools like Slack or Teams, there will be channels where employees share product feedback- join those.
Get into the data
Using data to make decisions is a core part of the PM job. Understand what product data is available and what the data gaps are. Work with your colleagues in identifying & prioritizing critical data work that will help in understanding product metrics. Learn which metrics have historically been used to measure success and identify improvements.
Pick a focus area
PM roles can take take a while to hire for, and it is likely you are joining a team that has built up a backlog of things they’d love for you to solve immediately. Resist the urge to immediately offer solutions. The “fresh eyes” perspective is real, and can be quite helpful as you onboard to the team & product priorities. Take notes and understand the macro context of the team, the history, and operational context.
Using this context, pick a focus area where you can start driving value. Good candidates include areas with existing customer feedback, measurability, and clear outcomes. Picking a focus area as a starting point can serve as an anchor, while you and the team figure out longer term roadmap & strategy.
Small wins
Just because you’re not going to come in with big solutions on day 1, doesn’t mean you can’t start supporting the team in small ways. Whether this is a process win, unblocking the team, or a small feature launch, identify ways to start moving the ball & help your team be successful. This helps build trust with team members and also helps you understand what it takes to execute and ship in this new environment.
Understand how decisions are made
As a PM, a key success metric is the quality and volume of product decisions you are able to push through, driving team velocity. Each company has different frameworks for making decisions, but most fall into some mix of small decisions being made at team level, bigger decisions require leadership buy-in. Understand what your internal process is- e.g. product reviews for big decisions vs. team discussion for small decisions, and how you can start driving decisions forward.
Be consistent
One of my favorite quotes is from Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn-
“Trust = consistency over time.”
To me, this really translates into being reliable. Show up for the meeting, execute on your commitments. For PMs, being consistently reliable is how we earn trust to influence product direction, and especially important as a newcomer.
Have fun!
Starting a new role is an exciting time as you meet new co-workers and learn new skills. Don’t forget to cut yourself some slack (being new is hard!) and have fun with your team (use those team building budgets!).
These are just some of the things that helped me ramp up in a new role. I also find this post by Dan Shapero to be really useful on this topic.
Have you started a new PM role recently? What did you find most helpful in your first 90 days?