First 90 Days as a Product Manager

So, you got the news about being able to start as a PM - hopefully, it’s something you had been looking for and not an unexpected demotion, of course - but what do you do now?

After a few hours of excitement and overwhelming joy, it’s time to sit down and sketch out a plan.

Back in 2017, when I was offered to move away from leading a happy customer success team to managing the product, this was exactly what I did: I allowed myself think about it pretty hard for a few hours, told my boss that it was a ‘yes’, opened my laptop and started a Trello board named “First 90 Days of PM”.

At this point, your first impulse might be to google “Product Manager” only to get hundreds of pages in results. Some of those articles might be pretty good, some just repetitive, but if you need to act fast, there is no time to waste and sift through the piles of data that might or might not be relevant.

Here is what worked for me:

Reads:

1. Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager by Ben Horowitz - this article has not dated at all, and is good to reread every now and then throughout the product career;

2. What does a Product Manager do - a classic Intercom blog post that takes off a veil of some of the PM’s duties;

3. Intercom on Product Management book that I downloaded and read quite a few times back in the day on my commute to the office;

4. Burndown - A Better Way to Build Products breaks down the way Drift approaches product delivery.

LinkedIn:

1. find the people to follow and read their blog on how they started

2. join PM communities:

   The Accidental Product Manager;

   PM Community;

   PMO Experienced

3. connect with the people in these communities.

Medium:

1. Julie Zhuo the former VP of product design at Facebook has been writing a lot of content since 2013. Her articles elegantly marry design, data, and business;

2. Gibson Biddle, mostly known for his achievements as a VP of Product at Netflix, uses a lot of examples and is heavy on marketing.

Slack:

1. Join The Product Coalition;

2. Join Product School community;

3. Join Mind The Product and check out their “tools” channel.

These resources will leave you intrigued and longing to learn everything at once. The trick here is to not get sucked in to reading all the posts and following every thread, but rather get inspired and focus on the task at hand: plan for the first 90 days.

The way I approached it was by creating columns for tackling the areas of product management that seemed most important: Development, Roadmapping, Customer Feedback, Analytics.

It looked something like this:

Example of the first 90 Days of PM board

The columns and the tasks in them are pretty self-explanatory.

The idea is to:

• talk to everyone,

• learn everything about how the things have been handled so far,

• compare to the industry standards,

• propose better ways to do so as an outcome of your first 90 days.

No matter how great the current process is, there is always room for improvement. Shaving off a few days of the delivery cycles or cleaning up the metrics will prove to your team that you are dedicated to making things better.

One other thing, these 90 days are not the time to show off your critical and analytical skills. Listening and soaking in as much as possible without trying to criticize, give suggestions or jump on solutions is key to get people to open up and share. These are the relationships that will be the foundation of success as a product manager.

Good luck!