Plenty of people have provided their advice on how to prepare a 30-60-90 Day Plan before starting a new job. (See Resources below.) Here I will dive in a bit more about why planning head is important and how to address the biggest time commitment you will have in your first 30 days: The Listening Tour.

Why 90-Day Plans are Important

Before you start your next role, you want to think through what is ahead of you. The idea of a 30-60-90 day plan is to document a rough map or outline of your goals and strategies within the first 90 days of a new job. You set yourself a few milestones and pre-think your approach based on concerns you had during your interview.

In theory, the plan will help you start out on the right foot and maximize your time while you are still in the grace period for your role. It will help you prove quickly that you are adding value to the team while helping you have those hard conversations early on before anyone’s opinion of you had hardened. Leverage that ‘honeymoon period’ at work with a plan.

While you will be focused on how this role get you to the next level, don’t forget to be truly successful, you will need to align with your manager and the organization. Setting the plan before you arrive is good, but you will need to adjust it as you learn.

The Listening Tour

The most important part of your first 30 days is listening to others, your teammates and cross-functional partners alike. A good manager should give you a launch guide with a long list of people to meet in your first few days and weeks.

Deb Liu shares (see resources) some wisdom from Gokul Rajaram on a Leader’s Listening Tour, but for individual contributor PMs, I like to add a pre-work requirement and two extra questions.

Pre-Work: Have a nice brief overview of your initial area of scope ready to go, (don’t worry, it will expand) in terms that make sense to them not just in terms that make sense to you. Avoid saying you aren’t really sure what your scope is.

Often times PMs walk into products very much in flux and they need to figure out their scope, but you don’t want to sound as if you are lost from day one.

Come up with a quick elevator pitch (2 to 3 minutes) that talks about yourself and your general goals/mission as you understand it. You are looking to get information from them to be successful but they are looking to figure out what they should or shouldn’t tell you early on. Understanding your scope helps them. (This is less crucial when you are a leader and the title is typically a bit clearer.) Help out your new partners while sounding confident but not arrogant. Help them figure out what they need to say.

The question list:

1. What is working well? 

1. What is not working? 

2. What should we do that we aren’t doing today? 

3. What would you do if you were in my shoes? 

4. What should I learn about (company or product name) that will be helpful to me in my role?

5. What did the previous PM do that you loved?

6. What did the previous PM fail to do effectively?

For the questions about the previous PM’s failings, you need to navigate that one carefully. Consider a soft warmup touching on how you respect all that your predecessor accomplished but you want to make sure you avoid mistakes or can try to fill in gaps. Sometimes you get most of this from what isn’t working or should be done differently but most of the time I find this one uncovers a lot more than you might think. But never ask without first asking about what they did well.

I find this last question one particularly helpful if delivered appropriately, to find out a few things:

• Does the team hate PMs? (often the case, particularly with platforms)

• Did your predecessor fail on something import to the engineers or cross-functional team?

• Get a sense of the aforementioned items while it is early and you are just innocently trying to figure out what needs to be changed rather than avoiding the blame that belonged to someone else.

If there was no PM before you, consider asking what they believe the responsibilities of a PM are. This can inform you if your partners see PMs as project vs product-focused or other issues that could hinder your forward progress. You may find you have to win them over to what a PM really does. This subtle focus on PMs is important for ICs but not leaders. For leaders, the first five items on the list are typically sufficient.

Resources:

Deb Liu: 30-60-90 Day Plan - Easy Spreadsheet you can download with a PM focus.

Hubspot: 30-60-90 Day Plan - Four Goals: Learning, Performance, Initiative and Personal. They provide small tweaks based on roles such as: IC, Sales, Manager and Executive

GetGuru: 30-60-90 Day Plan - Focus, Goals, Priorities, Metrics. Great focus for Individual Contributors (IC) in Tech, really breaks things down

Deb Liu: The Listening Tour - Credit goes to Gokul Rajaram. Nice list, particulalry for leaders. I tend to add a few more things to the list for ICs.

Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash