Your First 30 Days as a Product Manager
Landing a job as a product manager can be both exciting and daunting. It can be especially scary for people who are working in the role for the first time. However, even for experienced ones, a new job can require a different approach to succeed.
What we do in our first 30 days in a new role lays down the marker for what is to come. Our actions (or inactions) in the first month will determine whether we succeed or otherwise. Here are some tips from leading PMs that can help us to get off on the right foot.
Seek to Understand Your Role
The exact responsibilities of a product manager in two different companies aren’t always the same. In some organizations, PMs and product teams are given significant autonomy in terms of what they work on and how to allocate resources. But that doesn’t apply everywhere. It is, therefore, important to know where we fit in the scheme of things. How does the organization regard our role and how much influence can we wield? We should learn and pay attention to this.
Meet Everyone
Another crucial step is getting to know everyone you will be working with. You should try to have one-on-ones with the rest of your team. This is not something we should look to do in a single day; it could take several days or much of the first 30 days. This affords us a good opportunity to assess the personal attributes and personalities of everyone on the team. It enables us to ask questions and learn how we can help them do better.
Meetings shouldn’t just be with product team members only. It helps to meet everyone that has a part to play in the product. Executives, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success are among the stakeholders we should try to have meetings with.
Learn the Strategy
We must ensure that we are clear on the strategy right off the bat. We should try to grasp the organizational strategy. What are the company’s goals and how does it aim to have an edge over the competition? We should seek to know the strategy behind any product we are taking over and see how it links to the overall company’s strategy. Efforts need to be made to understand the market, our target audience, and the competition. This will help for creating effective roadmaps and strategic plans.
Learn How Things Work
There is a way things are being done before we joined an organization. It helps to take time to learn more about that. We should take a step back to see what leaves more to be desired in the current process. Questions should be asked when we notice things we don’t understand or can’t see clear reasoning behind them. We have to play our part in ensuring that things are done correctly. But we might not do well enough at this without first taking the time to assess the existing process.
Show Interest in Customers
Our job as product managers should ideally be to please our customers before anyone else. Therefore, we must show a special interest in them.
It is crucial to examine how the company interacts with customers. We should consider observing calls to customers, such as those by Support, Sales, and Customer Success. How do customer-facing teams interact with end-users? What can they do better?
It is not enough to just observe the interactions, though. We need to go further to talk to customers directly! This helps us to learn first-hand what they think about the product and things that we can do better. Of course, this doesn’t just present us with an opportunity to listen but also to observe.
Get Familiar with the Product
It is expected that you should know the product you will be overseeing like the back of your hand. So, you want to ensure that you get to know the functionality and features well enough as soon as you get on the job. Learn what problem the product solves and how it works. Read existing documentation and review the current roadmap – try your best to fully make sense out of them.
Getting to know the product isn’t just about documentation or even asking questions; we need to use it as well. Put the product to use as often as possible – every day if you have the time. This will give us an idea of the customer’s experience. Interactions with customers become especially important here if it’s a product that we cannot use.
Know What’s Being Measured
We also have to learn what is currently measured and the reasons for that. What are the current strategic goals and how do product KPIs tie into those goals? There is a need to review all this. The organization might have been tracking too many things or maybe even nothing.
Whatever we meet on the ground, we need to have an intentional plan on how we are going to measure success. This starts by deciding what unknowns of the product we would be interested in finding out more about. Then we ensure there are methods we can use to learn those things.
Being clear on the metrics can help us to better pinpoint what effects any actions that we take produce. It aids in validating assumptions and knowing whether what we are building resonates with end-users.
