Your First 90 Days As A New PM Hire
This piece contains actionable tips on how to shine and build quick wins at your new PM role
Having led about a dozen product teams and hired multiple talented product managers, here are a few skills you must hone that will help you stand out as an excellent product manager:
- Product Sense: How you quickly develop familiarity and intuition about product/market landscape, from competitors to new technologies which may be of use in the pursuit of org mission.
- Collaborate and communicate: Your high agency in being able to influence people and help them achieve their goals you will collaborate with all teams within the company and all parties outside of the company to be most effective in your role.
- User understanding: Your strength in determining what’s highest-leverage for users and for the company and deriving key insights from large user data-sets.
- Execution style: Critically, you should be obsessed with getting value into customer hands. As much as you plan and coordinate, the last mile of delivering improved solutions and experiences every day is important.
- Manage a roadmap: you will prioritize all potential projects for our product area, and focus on those with the largest impact.
- Growth: Deep familiarity with growth frameworks like cohort analysis. Also building value velocity with clear iteration methods.
Your First 90 Days
In your first 30 days, get accustomed to company goals and the product:
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• In the first two weeks, be sure to immerse yourself in an onboarding program that introduces you to the company and the product.
• Spend time in support, helping customers work through issues. There’s no better way to get a holistic understanding of the product, and to get to know your customers.
• Be introduced to everyone you will need to know in order to be successful in your role.
In your first 60 days, you should be a core member of the team:
• Take ownership of a key area of the product, and become the go-to expert for that area. A slice at a time is important to note (Avoid burnout).
• Have quick impact by spec’ing and building your first product features.
By the 90 days mark, you should now increase your influence:
- Formulate the strategy and roadmap for your product area.
- Start contributing to knowledge sharing with the larger product team.
I hope this article was helpful.
If it was, please share with other PMs.
I’d love to hear from you — drop a comment and let me know which product topics you’d like me to cover next.
