Your first 90 days as a product manager in a new job

TLDR: Take this diagram as an example, copy it and apply it to your workplace. You can now get on with being awesome at your work! If you want more help and support, read this article and please reach out. 

Imagine the following, you landed your dream Product role, at your favourite company. Congratulations, you made it! 🥳 Now you can put your feet up and go with the flow, see what comes at your feet or inbox, or Slack DMs.

Alternatively, you can get as prepared as you possibly can by creating a plan for your first 90 days on the job as a Product Manager. This will support your onboarding journey to your new role, build strong business relationships and discover the true challenges of the product you are working on. Most importantly it will make a good use of your time and make a great impression on your new boss!

How do you get started with making a 90 day plan?

First, define the categories for your goals and milestones you want to achieve. I recommend splitting them into these key areas:

• Relationships
• Data and Reporting
• Product & Market Familiarity
• Strategy
• Product Marketing
• Experiments

Relationships

Focus on meeting the right people in the organisation and scheduling conversations, online meetings or in person when possible to get to know your team and colleagues you will be working with regularly. Once you get familiar with the group you work with, grow your network further and start introducing yourself to relevant stakeholders and clients. These 1:1 introductions could evolve to regular updates if and when needed.

Data and Reporting:

In order to understand the status quo, how your product is currently performing and what are it's performance ambitions you need to get to grips with data. This often involves using analytics and reporting tools such as Google Analytics, MixPanel, Heap, Amplitude or a similar platform. Initially focus on understanding the products key performance indicators (KPIs), the product's primary goal, and any reporting dashboards available to you.

Once you have are comfortable shift your focus shifts to evaluating product and initiative performance. This could be by creating performance reports, identifying new metrics and events to track. These activities will help you set performance goals for the product & be able to evaluate the success of the product over all as well as newly released. 

Product & Market Familiarity

You may have landed a role in an industry you are not familiar with. Even if you are familiar with the industry, it's good to have a fresh look at the market you operate in. Start by doing a competitor analysis, if possible signup to competitor products, learn their onboarding experience and what they offer users.

Create a report for your self and colleagues on how does your product compare to other options on the market. Document what are potential features and solutions you could add, remove or improve following your study. 

Strategy

Before diving in to the product strategy, first and foremost you need to define your own path, your own role.  This you should do with the support of your manager. The first 90 day plan can help too! Defining your role and setting your own strategy can truly help when approaching the product strategy. The next steps include understanding the current roadmap, what are the short-term strategic goals? try to identify quick wins, with the help of your team, eventually leading up to defining the long-term roadmap and upcoming initiatives. 

Product Marketing

An important part of understanding a new product that is sometimes overlooked is product marketing. As a new joiner spend time studying current and potential growth channels. Discuss these channels with fellow product people, customer success and marketeers to get to grips with how things work today and what potential product marketing channels have in the future. This could also involve identifying and evaluating your first product growth campaign! Further more you can continue learning and experimenting by defining the next product growth opportunity.

Experiments

As you start to learn of what is going on at your new organisation, how the product works, what are the key metrics you are responsible for and more. You can start to experiment, make small bets, to try and make an impact on your product.

With the support of your team, use the advantage you have as a new joiner with a new perspective and try to try things out! See what experiments could you run to validate hypotheses held by your peers, or something you think your team has overlooked. It will show your team and manager you are keen to learn, and not afraid to experiment. 

Now that the themes of the 90day framework are explained a little further. Here is how your first 90days could look like in your new role:

The First 30 Days: Listen, Learn, and Map the Terrain

The first 30 days are about about observation and understanding. Start by scheduling conversations with your team and stakeholders. Not only are these meetings a good for introductions, they’re your first chance to understand the current work rhythms, the slight history of how things work, and the challenges your colleagues face (if not 1:1 online).

Next Dive into the data: familiarise yourself with the main KPIs, define the primary goal for your area, and set up dashboards that will become your compass. Use your product, play with the product (perhaps only not in production mode), test it & try to find it's limitations. Once you got to know your product, create a study benchmarking it against competitors. These activities should help you settle in.

Days 31–60: Build, Experiment, and Refine

As you get comfortable with the basics , it’s time to start shaping your influence. Evaluate performances of both your product and it's growth initiatives. This can be done by digging into the data and creating actionable reports.

Take the opportunity to branch out: talk to customers, gather feedback from sales and customer support. Use these discussions to  identify pain points and opportunities for your product.

Continue your momentum of stepping out and define your first experiments, run them, and let the results guide your next steps.

Finally take some time to focus on short term strategy. What could be short-term goals that would result in perhaps small but quick wins that build your credibility and momentum?

Days 61–90: Strategize, Scale, and Set the Vision

The third month is about cementing your impact. Evaluate the effectiveness of your changes and your own performance. Use the insights you’ve gathered to define the long-term product roadmap and upcoming initiatives.

Spend time with product marketing to identify channels that could drive product growth. Continue with experimentation mindset: Develop, deliver, and iterate on experiments, creating a culture of continuous improvement. 

Wrapping Up

At the end of your first 90 days evaluate your performance, for yourself & your own learning, by running a short survey or by gathering feedback with your colleagues 1:1. This way you will learn how you have done so far, what went well and what you can do to improve.

Landing your dream Product role isn’t easy, once you made it you want to make a strong impression. The first 90 days are your launchpad: a chance to listen, learn, experiment, and make your mark. Use this framework as your compass, build relationships, dive into the data, and experiment.

Remember, nobody expects you to have all the answers on day one. What matters is your curiosity, your willingness to try, and your drive to make things better. Take bold steps, celebrate small wins, and .

You’ve got this. Now go and rock your new product role!

And if you need a sounding board or a nudge in the right direction, you know where to find me. 🚀