Accompanying article 📖
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