Your First 30 Days in Product Management
Congratulations! You’ve just landed your dream job in product management. Whether you’re a product lead at a fast-growing startup or with an established enterprise, the first 90 days are go-time to make an impact and secure your reputation as a leader.
Since we’re talking product management, it makes sense to approach your tenure for this 90 day stretch as if you were the product. Just as the ancient aphorism “physician, heal thyself” is an admonition to correct one’s own defects before turning to the defects in others, product managers should master their own career as a product in order to succeed.
Here’s your product leadership roadmap for the first 30 days in your new role; later posts will focus on the 60- and 90-day horizon.
Define the Stakeholders in Your Product Management Landscape
Product management is less a role than a set of principles about using power to get customers what they want - even when customers don’t know what they want. Identifying your stakeholders, learning what they need to succeed, and how they view your role in the company has a direct influence on how you use your power.
Sales and Customer Support Have a Lot of Influence on Your Success
Find out who you will be working with and identify potential allies in the different functional areas. There will likely be dependable sales and customer support people who can tell you a lot about how the software’s used, its strengths and weaknesses, why people buy from you, and other useful information. You’ll also learn if people understand the product strategy, or if there even is one.
But don’t stop at sales and customer support. Identify allies throughout the organization, or conversely, those who may have some reason to undermine what you’re doing. Build your alliances by aligning agendas and doing what you say you will. Look out for people who have power in the status quo and those who can stand in the way of your progress.
What Success Means for the Organization
What are the benchmarks leadership reviews on a regular basis? Whether it’s a board, senior managers, or a functional leader, how do they define success? You need to understand what the performance dashboard looks like right now, and what metrics stakeholders care the most about. What do they ask questions about? Gather as much data as you can, and probe until you get honest answers.
History of Product Management at Your New Organization
You may have learned this in the interview process, but confirm how people saw product management before your arrival. Was it an established practice? Understand the full story of the exit of the previous leader. If your position is new, why was it established and who advocated for it? Maybe you’re being asked to build a product management function from scratch. If that’s the case, what do all the relevant stakeholders expect from product management?
What is the Conventional Wisdom About the Product?
As you’re determining expectations and collecting data from the team — sales, marketing, dev, ops, etc.— learn the conventional wisdom about the product and what needs to be done. Research the accuracy of that wisdom. If someone claims the “software is super buggy,” find out for yourself if that’s true by looking in any systems used to report bugs. Likewise, dig into the sales system and investigate if conventional wisdom is backed up by data.
Your initial data sources could look like this:
Training and onboarding materials
Implementation plans
Enhancement requests, backlogs, and roadmaps
Customer support cases
Marketing activities and results of campaigns
Competitive analysis
Market analysis and go-to-market plans
Sales quotas, performance, and pipelines
Interviews with the most successful sales people
What you’re looking for is a clear match between how the software is managed in the backlog and how priorities and cases are collected and categorized on the front end. At the end of this investigatory effort, you should be established as the person with the most complete grasp of the evidence about the true state of your products.
If there’s not enough evidence, or if you find it’s difficult to get it, or if there’s no system for collecting the evidence in order to chart progress, you’ve got a different challenge on your hands.
Product Management Coaching
The first 30 days isn’t the time to make any big changes, or to make suggestions about new initiatives. Show competency and build trust. Build a well of good will. You’ll need that well as you embark on your next 30 days.
Sound like too much to take on by yourself? We can help. Whether it’s conducting the surveys or developing your personal roadmap, our product management coaching program is available for groups and individuals. Our three-month engagement goes beyond traditional leadership training. We connect you with an experienced product mentor to coach you towards measurable progress on your organization's goals, help you grow in confidence, and ensure you provide additional value to your organization.
In the meantime, you can download our free product coaching workbook: The 12 Steps to Managing Your Most Important Product - You. It’s designed to be either a self-directed or coached workbook to help you be the best version of yourself as a product manager and leader.
Want to delve further? Check out our book! Both the book and workbook adapt the 12 steps of recovery as a model for managing your life and your career like a product. Author and Fortune’s Path founder Tom Noser explains each of the 12 principles in terms of business situations where your career or character may be at stake. Each chapter offers guided exercises for self-evaluation and reflection. Chapters end with a “choose-your-own adventure” style test of the principles explained.
Order yours here.