First 90 Days

source: https://giddy-amusement-c74.notion.site/How-to-spend-your-first-90-days-c94c05261548403fa59a45710a953ff2

Day 0-30

Goal: absorb as much global context as you can on process, team and product

• Meet with your teammates, and whoever they recommend

• What should I know about the product / company / people?

• What's the biggest challenge you face?

• What’s been the biggest product hit?

• What’s been the biggest product miss? - What can I do to make your life easier?

• Who else should I talk to?

• Align with your manager

• What does success looks like in the first 90 days?

• What's the process from ideation to launch?

• Who vetos product decisions?

• If there's a disagreement about the product, who breaks the tie?

• (If company does OKRs) How do we create them? What does success look like? - Regularly share what you are learning with any follow-up questions

• Map out the business equation

• How does your product grow?

• How does your company grow?

• How does your product help the company grow? - You need to understand the levers to create business impact

• Shadow key members (e.g., customer success, sales, another PM)

• How do people operate?

• Play with the product

• What's intuitive vs. not?

• Map the product experience to the business equation

Day 30-60

Goal: start getting into the local details to set yourself up for a win

• Continue meeting teammates based on recommendations

• Where does influence / institutional knowledge lie?

• What viewpoints are shared across teammates vs. different?

• Review launch history to see what features and experiments out/underperformed

• What have the successes been? Were they growth or retention features, or something else?

• What patterns are there between successes vs. failures? - If there's no documentation, get the download from your teammates / manager

• Examine the product roadmap, and understand how past decisions were made

• What's the balance between big, high-risk projects vs. small, near-guaranteed wins?

• Talk to your manager about how balance has changed over time and where it's going

• Work with your manager on picking & executing on a starter project

• Sweet spot = impactful but low-risk, not controversial, can be done in 2-3 weeks tops

• Most managers will have a starter project in mind, but you're welcome to bring ideas

• Gut check: "Nobody currently owns this, and we strongly believe we need to do it" - If your starter project is big, break it into phases so you can get feedback from your manager on a (bi)weekly basis

• Set up / familiarize yourself with the metrics dashboard for your area of focus

• What's your primary metric? What blindspots does it have?

• What does the funnel of your product look like?

• What are the bottlenecks in your funnel?

• Shadow / interview customers

• What's the job they hire your product to do?

• What are their alternatives?

• What do they like vs. dislike about your product, and why? - Ideal: watch them use the product in realtime or from recordings

Day 60-90

Goal: execute on a quick win and identify a focus area for the coming months

• Get at least one quick win under your belt

• Doesn't have to be a product launch, can be a process change or insight

• Make sure you fully understand things before you change anything

• Over-index on getting feedback before making any official change - Examples of quick wins are inside the Toolkit

• Do a formal check-in with manager and teammates on how you're ramping

• What went well? What could've gone better?

• What concerns do they have about you / your role?

• How can you be more helpful?

• Collaborate with manager on a roadmap of what success looks like for next X months

• What area of the product makes sense for you to start with?

• What's their biggest concern?

• Discuss when you should start setting career goals - Working on a portfolio of experiences rounds out your skill set; working on revenue-generating products is crucial to ongoing negotiation

🧠 **More examples and templates: [product-toolkit.com](https://www.product-toolkit.com/?utm_source=preview&utm_medium=notion&utm_campaign=toolkit)**✍️ **More writing: [productlessons.xyz](https://www.productlessons.xyz/subscribe/?utm_source=preview&utm_medium=notion&utm_campaign=toolkit)**