 Hi everyone, my name is Suman Sehshadri, Lead Product Manager at Dock Assign. Today, I will be talking to you about creating a plan for the first three months of your new PM job. So, you've worked really hard, you've gone through several rounds of PM interviews, and you've finally landed your dream PM job. Now, you're ready to start your new adventure. Why are the first three months of your new job important? Well, in many companies, the first three months is an assessment period where your manager is trying to assess whether you're a good fit for that role and whether they made the right hire. So, they are trying to assess your performance, how you are working with the rest of the team, and whether you are able to pick up the domain in which the product works. Therefore, the first three months are very important as they set the tone for what is to come next. Of course, it's also an opportunity for you to figure out whether the company that you've just joined is a good fit for your needs. In order to give your manager the confidence that they have made the right hire, it's important to earn the trust of your manager and your team, to build relationships with your stakeholders and also establish credibility in your product area. Now, that said, it's important to remember that every product management job is different and every company works differently. I've put together this plan from the perspective of a mid-size to a large company. But if you are working in a startup where there are only two or three product managers and no elaborate onboarding process or training, you may be able to get through the plan a lot faster. So definitely tailor what you see today to match your unique needs. First and foremost, it's important to understand the role of a product manager. It is an elaborate role and the product manager is responsible for a number of things. But I would like to boil it down to these three points. Number one, understand the needs of the customer. Number two, aligns teams towards a common visual goal. And number three, is able to deliver value to the customer. Our goal is to be able to get a quick win by the end of the third month. And so what we do in the first month, second month and third month should lead up to that outcome. In order to be able to do that, by the end of the first month, you should have a good understanding of the big picture. And by that, I mean have a good understanding of your own roles and responsibilities and how that pertains to the overall mission of your company. By the end of the second month, you have a deeper understanding of your customers and their needs and you've already identified opportunities. And by the end of the third month, you're actually executing to get the quick win. So what exactly do I mean by a quick win? So what I mean by a quick win is low hanging fruit, which is fairly easy to get done and that will yield in a positive result for your company. Typically these are low effort, very low complexity and that are low risk. For example, it could be a feature enhancement or you could be maybe coming up with an experimentation roadmap or you're presenting a business case to adopt a new tool. All in all, you're trying to deliver something that is visible and concrete that you can speak to as a quick win. All right, so let's take a look at what we wanna accomplish by the end of the first month. The first month is all about understanding how your role fits into the big picture. So here is a visual representation. So you are a product manager, you are responsible for managing say one product and it would be important to understand how your product works with the rest of the products. Maybe there are multiple products in your company or maybe your company has only one product and you may be responsible for a part of the whole. For example, let's say that you're a car rental company, there could be one product manager responsible for search on the website, another product manager responsible for personalization another product manager responsible for actual payments and another product manager responsible for notifications. All of this is just one product, that could be a scenario or your company could be a really large, mature company that has multiple products or maybe you own a product entirely and there are other product managers who own other products. So it would be very important to also understand what the other PMs are working on so that you can understand dependencies and how each fits into the entire puzzle of what your company is selling. And outside of this, of course, you have stakeholders from other departments. You have engineering, of course, this marketing analytics, the UX department, maybe content, GTM, go to market teams. Of course, last but not the least, you need to understand the company's strategy, your company's goals so that you can align your product's strategy and initiatives to the company's strategy and goals. So let's say that this is your first week at work and you've completed your onboarding paperwork and hopefully you've documented, completed all the mandatory training and you're now having your first one-on-one with your manager. So what are some questions that you can ask your manager so that you can have an effective onboarding and so that you can ramp up quickly on your product and on your job? Can you think of some? So first and foremost, it's important to understand your own roles and responsibilities. What will be the product that you are managing? Maybe you already have quite a good knowledge of it from all of your interviews, but it would still be good to get this clarification because it's possible that there's been a reorg or somebody has left the company or maybe needed to increase the scope. So it's good to get that clarification right in the beginning and also understanding what your areas of responsibilities are and what the expectations are in the first three months. The second area is to ask questions about how you can get started. You can ask your manager if there's already a strategy document or a strategy deck that you can look into. You can also ask them if there's already a roadmap that's available for you to look at what projects are in progress, which stakeholders you should meet and who is responsible for what, and you'd want to ask them about the org chart because then you can look up who is reporting in which org and when you go and set up one-on-ones with these stakeholders, you can prepare and ask intelligent questions as you're trying to ramp up. The third area is to understand the style of management and communication. How frequently would your manager like updates? Maybe your manager will say, hey, set up a one-on-one for 30 minutes per week or they may come back and say, you know, you don't have to set up a one-on-one. You can send me your updates via email once a week. We'll set up one-on-ones on an ad hoc basis. And finally, to get an understanding of who the working team is. Who are the people that you would be working with on a day-to-day basis? Who should you be contacting for what? And are these people that you'll be working with, are they full-time members or are they contractors or are they shared between teams? It's possible that the UX designers are responsible for two teams. It's possible that engineering work is outsourced. It's possible that you work with vendors for certain projects. So getting all of that knowledge ahead of time would also be helpful in many cases. Now, let's say you're in your second week. You've done all the meet and greet with your team and you have, you know, the basic information of how to get started. Now you are meeting with other PM teams and you're probably also getting pulled into a lot of those meetings. So what questions would you be asking your PM team? So here are a few. So the first thing is to understand what their areas of responsibilities are, what they are working on, and if they have road maps. You can ask them to share it so you can kind of get an idea of what initiatives are currently in progress or what are being planned. You can also ask them what tools they're using. For example, are they using Confluence or Jira or Trello or are they putting together any wireframes? Getting an understanding of the tools would be helpful as well. As the days go by and you're kind of ramping up, you're also probably meeting with a lot of your cross-functional stakeholders. So as I mentioned before, the product management role is a very centralized role, sort of the glue between all these different departments. And of course, if you are in a small company, you may not be having all these different departments. Maybe there is no content team. Maybe there's no separate go-to-market team. So it would vary, but if it's a much larger company, you'll have all these different departments. So one thing to clarify is what are the different departments and who you should be working with? So when you do speak to these stakeholders, what questions would you be asking each of these departments? Let's say engineering. What questions would you be asking, say, your engineering lead that will help you ramp up quickly in your first month? So first thing to ask engineering is to ask them for a demo. I mean, it's possible that you have tried out the product yourself, you already have prior knowledge, but when you ask engineering to give a demo, they will also talk about the challenges. You can ask them, is the system performing well? How are the systems speaking with each other? And you can kind of learn about the backend and how systems are working. Now, you may have technical background or you may not have technical background. Nevertheless, it's good to have that sync with engineering. So you'll also understand the lingo because I have noticed that especially in big companies, there are a lot of acronyms and there's a lot of terminology. Even terms that engineering is using could be different from how sales is calling it. So understanding how people are using and speaking about your product is helpful. And other things that you can ask engineering is around instrumentation. Because as product managers, we keep saying that we want to understand data, right? A lot of times you even find that your product is not instrumented. So getting that information ahead of time would be helpful for you to plan as well. How old is your tech stack? If it's a new startup, they may all be using the latest and greatest technologies. But if it's a fairly mature company, there may be a lot of legacy code that prevents your company from going fast. So that's also a question you can ask. And how frequently are the releases happening? Are they working in sprints? When do the releases happen? Is it every two weeks? Is it every week, every day, every month? So those are some questions to ask as well. It'll give you a good idea of what's going on. The other department, a very helpful department is a UX research. If there is a UX research department in your company, you can ask them for any past research. And so that you can look through it in your own time. You can ask them about previous surveys that have been conducted and what the survey results are. You can ask them about the process to set up a new study and how frequently you get to speak with customers. The other thing is around competition. And certain companies may have different ways of sharing competitive news. Maybe there's a Slack channel where there are a lot of competitive news put in for your teams to read. Maybe there are distribution lists. So you wanna make sure that you are added to those distribution lists as well. As you speak with the analytics team, you can speak to them and find out what key KPIs are being tracked for your product. What the formula is, especially for technical products, it's important for your analytics team to understand the funnel and what the end state is. Understanding the formula is also helpful for you to validate that it's being tracked properly and also for your own understanding. So based on insights from the data, where do they see opportunities? And then the fourth is speaking to marketing and GTM to understand what the marketing strategies are and where the leads come from, what the go-to-market strategy is, how expensive or how costly it is to acquire new customers. So these are all some of the questions that you can ask your stakeholders. So as you have been speaking to your stakeholders, you should ultimately be learning more about these areas. You must be familiar with the three Cs and the fourth piece. So three Cs is about the company, the competitors and the customers and the four piece are the product, price, place and promotion. So all the communication that you've been having internally with your stakeholders and the communication that you've been having with your customers and reading about your customers should all give you more information about this. So who is your customer? What are their customer segments? What is the value proposition? Who are your competitors? How does your company make money? How does your product make money? And what are the marketing channels that are being used? What is the pricing model? Maybe it's a flat rate. Maybe it's tiered pricing or it's paper click. So understanding what the pricing model is, what the costs are, all of this will help you understand the big picture. So by the end of the first month, it could look something like this. Pretty much the first week, you are completing your onboarding documentation, training and trying out the product. The second week, you are meeting with your product managers within the team, understanding about their tools and the company's vision and mission. The third week, you are meeting with your stakeholders, trying to understand more of how the company is working. And the fourth week, I would highly recommend that you attend an all-hands meeting and know a little bit more about your company strategy and how your role fits into the overall goals of the company. So another thing to remember is also as you ramp, there's going to be a lot of information and it could get really overwhelming easily. So it's important to stay organized. All right, moving on to the second month. The second month is all about rolling up your sleeves and diving deeper to discover more opportunities for improvement. So when I say dive deeper, first you need to get a good understanding of the current state. When I say current state, it's the current state of your customers, users, partners, current state of your product and current state of the processes and how you all work together. The important thing here is to understand the distinction between a customer and a user. In a B2C scenario, it is possible that your customer and the user is the same. The customer is one who's actually paying or buying your product and so the customer and user could be the same in a B2C scenario. However, in a B2B scenario, the customer may be the CEO who's buying the product but the users could be the employees of the company. The partners are different and they come in different shapes and sizes. They could be resellers or they could be ISVs or system integrators or you could be buying tools from certain partners. So there are different types of partners. Therefore, gaining a deeper understanding of your customers and users is very important. The second area is the product itself. The internals of the product, how it's working, whether it's performing well, what is the pricing strategy, what are the key differentiators, what does your product do better compared to the competition? All those sort of things. And the third thing is about processes. The engineering processes, the discovery process, communication process and so on. So let's say that you do have a user research department. In that case, you can work with the user research department to maybe craft a survey or conduct a user study. If you don't have a user research department, you may be the ones directly interacting and engaging with your customers. So let's look at some of the questions that you can ask your customers. And it's important to note that it's better to ask open-ended questions to your customers so that you can get a much more detailed answer. If it's very pointed, it would just be yes or no, sort of boolean, which is not very helpful. So the first is to ask them to describe their buying experience and that's where you may learn their pain points or what they liked or what they disliked about your product. You can ask them what was challenging about the product. If they're working with multiple products, you can also ask them if there are other complementary products that they're using. And you can ask them if your product sees to exist, what are maybe some of the alternatives that they would use? It's also a great question to see what they would do. Is it really valuable? Do they find it really valuable? Or there are other means by which they can fulfill their needs. I think that's a very powerful question to ask. And what would they like to see changed or improved? So all of this, these are sample questions, of course, and this will give a good idea of how your customers perceive and use your product. And the overall sentiment towards your product. As part of assessing the current state of the product, I would highly encourage you to think about the jobs to be done by each of those user personas. There are a couple of ways to approach this. Your researcher could have already done this as part of a prior research, or you could talk to your customers to build the jobs to be done or you can brainstorm with your stakeholders and then schedule formal research in the following month. Basically, the goal is to get a quick understanding of your user personas and you can always work on refining it as you go because speaking with your customers is something that you would want to do continuously. It's not like a one time thing. Let's say that you are going to be building a school website. What would be the user personas for that website? Can you think of any? So the user personas could be the teacher, student and parent. And here I have the primary jobs to be done for each user scenario and also the ancillary jobs to be done for each user persona. For example, for a teacher, the teacher may want to upload course material and they may want to prepare grades for their report card. What is a user persona that is not mentioned here? The admin persona, but there's usually an admin who does user management, sets permissions and so on. So that's also another persona. Once you've completed the jobs to be done exercise, you may be able to see gaps in your offering. And maybe there are things that the user wants to get done that is not available today or maybe there's an opportunity to wow your customer by giving additional features and enhancements. So here's where the opportunity solution tree really comes in very handy. This is a visual representation created by Teresa Torres and she talks about this in her book, Continuous Discovery Habits and I enjoyed reading it. The opportunity solution tree is about first determining what the desired outcome is and then determining what the opportunities are that will contribute to that desired outcome. And once you have these opportunities, you can come up with solutions. So there could be multiple solutions for a certain opportunity and all of those will also be part of this tree. And for each of those solutions, you can in turn build experiments that you can run to validate which of those solutions are valid and good to pursue. So this is a great visual representation. I really like it. So once you have this in place, you will be able to determine which solutions to pursue. And of course, you can come up with a full experimentation roadmap. And that's also a good thing to do. So what are some of the opportunities and what are the angles from which you can think about? First and foremost, of course you'll be talking to your customer. You will be understanding what their pain points are, what they're looking for, where the challenges are, what could be something that would really delight them. All of those are opportunities. And so there are lots of opportunities. You can also look at other opportunities. Maybe there are things that are performance related. Maybe there are compliance things that need to be taken care of. Maybe there's an opportunity in pricing. So you can think about it from all these different angles and put it all up in your opportunity solution tree. Once you do that, then it is time for you to actually do a prioritization exercise and then pick what you want to pursue. Because now you have a lot of things to do, but you have to get really focused because your goal is to get a quick win. So let's look at how you're gonna be doing this. Can you think of some factors that you will be using for prioritization? What factors would you use? There are several prioritization frameworks available. But when I think about prioritization, I usually look at these factors. So one thing is customer impact. Maybe there are opportunities that will impact the entire customer base. Maybe there's an opportunity that'll give you a lot of revenue. So looking at business impact, what the level of effort is, the complexity, the criticality, whether there are security implications to it, whether it's a legal or a compliance issue, whether there are alternative solutions, what the cost is and what the opportunity cost is. So I hope that you understand the difference between cost and opportunity cost. The cost is something that your company will incur or your product will incur. For example, let's say that you will have to use a vendor to accomplish something. The vendor is charging $50,000, that's cost. The opportunity cost is what else could you and your engineering team be working on instead of this initiative? Let's say that an initiative is taking six months and if you have to set it out to a vendor, that's $50,000 cost. But maybe there's a greater opportunity where if you build something, the revenue could go up by $600,000. So that's the opportunity cost. So if you're instead spending time on this effort, it might not be a good thing. So that's also something that you wanna assess. Ideally, for the quick win, you will be picking out opportunities that are high impact and that are low effort and not very complex. These kind of really fit well for what we wanna accomplish as a quick win. So your second month could end up looking something like this. For example, in your fifth week, you're learning more about the internals of your product and deriving insights from the data. In the sixth week, you're continuing to speak to your stakeholders and customers. In the seventh week, you've started collaborating and conducting those brainstorming sessions with your customer and stakeholders. The eighth week, you're identifying opportunities and prioritizing them. Another thing to remember is to continuously get feedback from your manager and from your stakeholders so that you can course correct as needed. Maybe you're taking up things that are too elaborate or maybe that there is something that you're not aware of that you should look into. So always gather feedback and course correct as needed. The third month is all about getting the quick win. By now, you have identified exactly what you'll be working on and you've sort of communicated this plan with your manager and now it's all about execution. By the end of the third month, your goal is to deliver the quick win and also measure the impact. And once you do that, you can work on setting greater goals for the following quarter. And last but not the least, by the end of the third month, you also have a good understanding of the culture and how everybody works together in the company. And you're sort of very comfortable with your work at this point. So therefore your third month could look something like this. So week nine, you've sort of got buy-in and you've aligned with your stakeholders towards the initiative that you wanna drive and implement. By week 10, you're already thinking about change management in case it's a significant change that you wanna execute. There could be a lot of preparation and letting your stakeholders know about it. Week 11 and 12, you are in full execution mode and by week 13, you are done. So that was it. To summarize, the first month, you got a good understanding of a big picture. You understand your roles and responsibilities with respect to your company. The second month, you'll kind of roll up your sleeves, dive deeper and discover opportunities to implement. And the third month is all about implementing and actually getting the quick win. And all along you're working to earn the trust of your manager, to earn the trust of your stakeholders, building relationships with other employees in the company, bringing them along the ride and you're also establishing credibility and knowledge in your own product area. I hope you enjoyed this session and if you'd like to learn more about me, you can look up my profile on LinkedIn. Thank you and take care.