 Hi everyone. Today I'm going to talk to you about your first 90 days as a new PM. I'm excited to share with you some tips that have helped me transition into new product roles over my career. A little bit about myself. I'm Swaroop Desai and I'm a product manager at Meta. I work on Facebook Watch, which is a video and entertainment platform for Facebook app. A little background about myself. I started my journey as an intern product manager at Thomas and Reuters and have navigated my way through various different industries and companies over the course of my career, from media to consulting to finance and finance. There were some key learnings along the way that I picked up over the course and I would like to share those with you and hopefully help you transition easier into your new role. Regardless of the industry or the level of role, these guidelines should help you reduce the ambiguity and give you some structure as you embark on a new journey. Here because you either got a new role as a PM or you're on the path of taking the next steps towards your new role. Either way, this is a great first step. What I'm going to discuss today applies to a broad spectrum of PM roles, whether you're a fresh graduate or taking on a senior leadership role. The key ingredients to starting off right as a successful PM stay more or less the same. And the first impressions that you make are here to stay. So it is worthwhile and it pays off to put in that effort in your first few days. A senior leader actually said this to me once when I started on your role and this has stuck with me. He said, Swaroop, the amount of time and effort you put into your first 90 days at work has the ability to generate disproportionate returns over the time period that you hold the job. And this is so true. So I think this is something that you should keep in mind as you start your onboarding journey. So what should your first 90 days as a new PM look like? I'm going to take the next 20 minutes to share top 10 tips to transition into your new role. And I'm going to wrap this up with five key takeaways that you can walk away with. So let's get started. First, I want to say congratulations. Congratulations on the new role. Going through interviews, negotiating salaries and landing the job of your dreams needs a lot of grit and hard work. But thankfully, the hard part is behind you and the good part is coming up. As exciting as it is to start a new role at a new company or even at your existing company, it comes with its set of challenges and anxiety. It's almost like the first day of school, that kind of feeling. So as a product manager, this adds another level of complexity. As a role itself needs you to have a good breadth and depth of knowledge in the industry space. So till the time you feel onboarded ramped up and relevant to the team, this can induce a lot of stress and anxiety. Add COVID to the mix and remote onboarding that throws its own set of challenges. So I'm going to try and simplify this for you by sharing my experiences and tips so that you can make your transition fun, memorable and hopefully a time of no stress or may I say no stress and anxiety. So let's begin with the top 10 tips of a PM in a new role. Number one, learn, learn, learn. Two, roadmap for product you. Three, build relationships. Number four, establish credibility and secure early wins. Number five, align with your team. Number six, focus on execution. Number seven, strategy. Number eight, take charge, take control. Number nine, launch your feature or product. And number 10, land and celebrate. So let's break this down. Breaking this up by the timeline to give you some sense of milestones. Your first 30 days are all about learning and preparing yourself to take on the role. Your next 30 days are going to be all about understanding the fine print and starting with baby wins. And your last 90 days are all about making a mark, launching and landing a product. Breaking down your transition into key milestones as Michael Watkins breaks it down into his book, The First 90 Days. Your phase one is when you're just being considered for the job or you're considering yourself for a new role. Your phase two is your pre-entry. That's when you're learning behind the scenes. You know that you have the job and you're preparing yourself to take on the new role. So this includes a whole set of challenges including your mental preparation, understanding what the role expects from you and all those kind of things. And finally the phase three, which is the most important one, which we are going to focus most of our conversation around is your first 90 days. So what does your first 30, 60 and 90 day look like? So let's begin with the first one. Learn, learn, learn. Where should I start? Peak of Product Manager is fundamentally about how technology can support and drive the business forward by building amazing products for customers. To effectively contribute, you need to understand where the organization is and where it wants to go. Understand the destination relative to where you are today. This will help you get a sense of how you can contribute to this destination. Regardless of the size of the company, you must understand this delta. So how can you do this? One, learn about your role and responsibilities. Understand what the leadership expects from you and also what the team expects from you. Two, ground yourself by getting a good industry context. Read about the industry, research, important posts about prior milestones. Three, understand your team and responsibilities. It is extremely helpful to have a good understanding of what the org structure is. One, upward, what does your leadership look like? Two, lateral, your day-to-day. Three, your cost-cross-functional peers. What's the privacy, legal, any other partner teams that you need to work with on your day-to-day? Four, your direct reports. If you are a manager, understand what your direct reports are and what their expectations are from a manager. Five, your peers. It's extremely important to have a good relationship with your peers because they're going to help you get through your role. One tool that I find useful is called the career cold start algorithm. The concept is simple. When you start a new role, pick five people and ask them to tell you everything you should know to perform your role efficiently. Ask them a prepared set of standard questions, such as the challenges they face, the opportunities that exist, etc. And ask each of them the same set of questions. Then at the end of the conversation, ask them to refer you to five new people that you should talk to and continue doing this till you reach a point of diminishing returns. What this technique does is it allows you to ramp up very quickly in your understanding of the space. It gives you a quick sense of what the challenges are and understand those challenges and opportunities through the lenses of people in different roles that you have spoken to. And all of this while talking and covering a lot of ground in terms of the team that you should know. So as I say, get ready to drink from the fire hose. One book that I highly recommend that has been particularly helpful for me is The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. It has some good suggestions to help you hit the ground running in your first 90 days. Learn the three P's, your product, your process and your people. In terms of your product, dog food product, read previous product dogs. Play with the features till you get a good hang of the workflows. A great way is also by starting to do like a quick audit review of how you find the product to be. Understand who your customers are. Extremely, extremely important and something that will come in handy for you throughout your product journey. Understand the metrics. How do you measure success? In terms of the process, you need to understand the process that the team has in place today. This will help you understand if there are any gaps and if you should be fixing anything. Take copious notes. Hold back from trying to point out the obvious flaws. This is your time to understand and identify. Be patient on sharing your thoughts with the team. In terms of the people, understand your people. Understand what motivates them. What is that each engineer's unique skill set so that you can help them reach their best by understanding how you can best support them. Accelerate hitting the break even point. What we want to do here is to accelerate hitting that breaking point. What does that mean? You want to reach the point where the value you consume is equal to the value you produced for your team as quickly as possible in your 90 day onboard vehicle. At this point, your net contribution is still zero. But it will start picking up and you will eventually reach the point where your output significantly outpaces the value that you consume. Next, putting together a roadmap for product you. Roadmap for product you. Your first roadmap should be for product you. Define what success looks like. What does 2.0 version of you look like? The ramp up version of you. Set milestones and goals. Share this plan with your manager and team. This will help you hold yourself accountable and also build trust. Here's a quick roadmap template that I like. Think about the learning objectives that you want to accomplish. Set milestones for yourself against those learning objectives. Try to put together an estimated timeline to diagnose yourself. And have a POC that you know you can rely on to get some support on. Having such a roadmap template definitely helps you guide and structure your onboarding much more. Something that's also helpful is having a 30-60 90 day plan. In my previous roles, I have tried to put together a 30-60 90 day plan and I typically like to share it with my manager and get their inputs. This helps you quickly put forth your ideas on how you would like to accomplish your onboarding. While also giving your manager a chance to provide more inputs and help you course correctly. So some elements of a good 30-60 90 day plan is what are your priorities? How are you planning to achieve those priorities? What are your learning goals? And how will you have some milestones to measure success? So next, build relationships. Building relationships is usually the easiest, takes little time and goes a long way. So make sure you do that and invest time in doing this. Let your team know that you genuinely care about them. Know them as people. Be a good listener. Understand everyone's point of view. Each person on the team brings in a different point of view. Show them that you can be trusted and that you will represent them accurately and that you are a good sound leader to guide the team towards success. Next, establish credibility. Secure early wins. Secure early wins. This is something that can be any small successes that you can help the team accomplish. Demonstrate that you are invested in the team's success. Help them make small decisions. At this point, you should have enough context which will help you make some small, tiny decisions for the team by helping them evaluate the trade-offs. Use suitable decision-making frameworks and bring in the fresh perspective and share those with everyone. Next, align with your team. This is extremely important. Aligning with your team. Develop a shared vision and get a buy-in from the team. Deep alignment comes from strong processes where people have had a chance to express their perspectives and understand others well. Build inclusive processes. Allow people to share their thoughts in multiple modes. Async via docs or in-person meetings. Different people on the team communicate differently and it's your role to understand them. Ensure that everyone who wanted to had a chance to speak in the meetings. Sometimes, this means a longer or follow-up meetings as well. Go out of your way to make sure that everybody feels accommodated. Be mindful of developing biases. This is something that happens so subconsciously but if you're aware of this, you might be mindful and prevent that from happening. Provide that psychological safety for everyone to be able to share their ideas and give them the credit for that. This will help you bring out the best ideas and build truly inclusive and successful products. Next, focus on execution. This one's my favorite. This should be easy, right? It's simple. Keep things simple. Have a good process. Make sure you have a good understanding of workflows and have an understanding of the design. Improve processes. Identify any gaps that are missing in the current process and modify and make changes to suit the team. Run efficient and effective team meetings and escalate whenever necessary because this helps the team speed up things and continue the pace and momentum going. Strategy. Understand the current mission. What is the goal? The vision. What does your product look like five years from now? The strategy. How is the play of team planning to meet the goal? Identify the gaps in the current strategy. It's important for you to understand certain things that did or did not work well with the strategy that was in place. Bring some problem space with the team. Make sure that you stick to the problem space and not let yourself or the team jump into a solution. Build a solution and a point of view together as a team. And then this will help you tweak the whole strategy so that you can come up with a new strategy which will actually work. Next, now that you have the learning under your belt and you also have a small few wins and you have a handle on the execution, it's time for you to take charge. Take charge. You got this. Start driving meetings with minimum support. You should have a good layer of land by now. Practice written collaboration on critical documents. This is a good practice. It will not just help you keep your documents organized, but it will also help new hires joining the team ramp up easily if you have all your documents ordered. Share your ideas verbally written and visually through designs and examples. This helps reach your message to everyone in the way they like to communicate best. Drive consensus on ideas within the team and externally. This is extremely important. As a product manager, you're not there to make the decisions for the team. You're there to make sure that the team is able to come to those decisions together and also make sure that you're taking your stakeholders along with you. And finally, take charge of all the PM duties. You need to help the team and so that the team can focus on the important deliverables that they need to focus on. Make sure that you are removing all the blockers that you possibly can in your limits for your team. Next, launch your new feature or product, but it'll be too soon for a product in your first 90 days. So let's say it's a new feature that you already have a good understanding of that you're ready to launch. Work on your PRD. Put together your product spec. Share this with external stakeholders and get alignment, especially in the world of remote. Make sure that you over communicate. Always err on the side of over communicating. Roll out your first new feature or idea. Follow a pre-agreed process of deployment so that everybody is aware of what the next steps should be. Communicate the launch internally as well as externally. And this could depend on the type of team or product that you're building. But make sure that you are, again, trying to err on the side of over communicating. Make sure you plan for your public tests. Have a test plan. Do all the user testing wherever applicable. Monitor the dashboards for critical metric movement. This is extremely important to know how the new product or feature idea that you are launching is impacting. And lastly, don't forget to monitor the guardrails so that you're not negatively impacting anything important. And last but not the least, land and celebrate. Land and celebrate. Share results for the launch with the team and the leadership and do this on a cadence. Help the team see how their efforts laddered up to the broader goals and always iterate as needed. Finally, and most importantly, take the time to celebrate your wins as a team and reflect on the learnings. There's so much that you can gain from just looking at what went well and what didn't go well to help you improve and build even better processes and products. So wrapping up, five key takeaways. The sooner that you hit the break even point, the better it is for yourself as well as the team. This will make you and the team perceives yourself as someone who doesn't need too much handholding and you will feel welcome on the team. Make sure you build your relationships because that's going to take you a long, long way. Ramp up your learning and make sure you focus on the product, the industry and the process. Establish credibility with the team through early wins. Take ownership once you feel ready. And finally, be your team's advocate and support them in every way possible. Thank you everyone for your time today. I hope these tips come in handy and make your onboarding experience simple and fun. Enjoy your onboarding. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or if you simply want to connect, you can find me on Facebook or LinkedIn. That's Varuk Desai. Thanks.