How to jump-start into a new job
The first few months as a Product Manager are the most crucial to your career. This is where people make the first impression of you. But PM onboarding is inherently vague and overwhelming. After all, it's is a broad role, and you need to learn diverse aspects of the role before you can start contributing. Plus, there are a few straightforward steps to jump-start this journey.
I recognized this during my previous roles and started building a simple framework that would help me expedite the ramp-up period. It starts with setting clear criteria for onboarding. For me, success means three things:
Do I have a grasp of my product?
Have I earned the trust of my team?
Do I have a clear strategy for the foreseable future?
And to achieve this success early into a new job, you can leverage this simple framework to ramp up effectively.
Five pillars to successful onboarding
I believe ramping up on these five areas is a prerequisite to becoming a functional PM at any org.
Customers
The market opportunity
Existing product and the ecosystem
The team
Next key deliverable
Establish a baseline
What gets measured gets improved. Assess yourself against each of these onboarding pillars and set a base rating for each. Work with your manager or your mentor to validate, fine-tune this rating. Note, this is in the context of your current role and not a judgment of your overall PM skills.
This is how your baseline could look like. The gap in each area will help you set the intention to prioritize and schedule your onboarding activities.
There’s no alternative to real customer interaction
While onboarding as a PM first time, my manager had me visit two of our marquee customers. When I was back in the office, I was a different person. Talking to customers almost re-wired my solution-oriented brain to be more empathetic and curious about their problem space. That's when I realized the power of customer interactions.
So when you are new, start interacting with customers from the get-go. Grab any or every opportunity to meet, know and empathize with your customers. This includes leveraging customer engagement programs, attending (virtual) conferences, engaging in user voice forums, or reading past customer/user research reports. It’s interesting how just a few interactions, when led with the right questions, can get the ball rolling towards building long-term customer empathy.
This customer-first onboarding strategy will unlock several other customer interactions. This will also validate the problem space and energize you to drive the product you are hired for.
Align with the business outcomes
Now that you know who your customers are and their problems, how do you bring value to the company through your product? How does solving the needs of your customers make an impact on the business? What are the key metrics your product will drive? Seeking clarity to these questions will help you align with the business outcomes.
Start with the company’s mission and overarching goals. Understand the existing strategy you may be inheriting from the former PM or your manager. Grok prior strategy materials. Speak with your peer PMs, or your adjacent teams including customer success, sales, and marketing.
Build a firsthand knowledge of existing products and services
We rise on the shoulders of giants. So, it’s important to learn the solutions that we already have. Take time to understand the core scenarios and the edge cases. Sign up for a subscription of your own product or ask for a test user and then play with the product. Explore the ecosystem and competitive landscape. If you are building a v0 product, understand the existing, often manual, processes, workflows, steps your customers take to meet their needs. This learning will ground you in reality and build a strong foundation for the innovation you will drive.
Invest time in building personal connections
Alone you can go fast, together you can go far. If you have been in a PM role before, you can attest to how product management is more about people than products. Make sure to learn about your teammates including engineers, designers, researchers, data scientists, and everyone who is part of your core and extended team. Learning about their motives, priorities, workstyle, and challenges will help you build empathy from the onset and start accruing trust from your peers. If part of your team is remote, it’s even more important to invest time in learning of the team’s unique work environment and cultures, especially if they are in a different country.
Leverage a deadline to trigger the momentum
Once the direction is clear, speed is the key to reaching your destination faster. And there’s no better way to drive urgency and focus than having a deadline. Work with your manager to understand the immediate next deliverable. The deliverable could be a P0 issue that needs fixing, building a strategy material for the leadership team, publishing a time-sensitive communication for your product, or simply releasing an urgent feature. Jumping straight into it and collaborating with the SMEs with a sense of urgency will not only lead to an optimal solution but offer you a crash course of learning along the way.
Reassess yourself post-onboarding
So, you have been in your new role for 5 months now. How do you stand against your onboarding pillars? Take that assessment again. You could work with your manager or a mentor to get another perspective. Granted, this is a subjective rating, and not fully accurate. What matters is, now you have an intentional framework to prioritize and organize your calendar. There’s value in feeling aligned, having a clear path forward, and more importantly, having a great team working towards the same mission. Learning begets more learning. Your learning doesn’t end here but you jump-started that learning in the areas that mattered most for your new career.
How do we know it worked?
How do you know you have successfully onboarded. Here are some signals that validate a successful onboarding. Your team looks up to you for the direction. Your manager is now more hands-off. People comment that you don’t seem like a newcomer. You are excited about your charter because you know why you are doing what you are doing, who you are doing for, and what are you going to do in the next 6-12 months. Finally, you have a strong handle on your own product. You know the nooks and corners of your product area. You know the gaps and edge cases. You can respond to a support case or customer question or can easily triage a bug file against your product.
Congratulations - you have successfully onboarded into your new role!