New Product Manager’s onboarding list [updating]

Your runway lights towards total immersion on the budget

I tend to move between projects much more often than my peers which opens up a different perspective on immersion into a new company’s reality. 

When you are still fresh aboard, while dragging a huge luggage of experiences from other enterprises, you have that solid momentum - and inertia if you wish - to actually see things for what they really are: be it bad practices, nonsense roadmaps, inadequate product analytics or people serving as concierges to folks making plans above. 

Things are being developed for the sake of filling up sprints and keeping people busy, for the sake of crossing out things from your backlog of antiques. 

You didn’t see it coming (or you did but you had to get that job). You are inheriting a piece of land with rocks, broken down houses with painted facades and moors of lousy politics.

Being a new landowner (PM), you make an effort to walk the line and see for yourself what’s there in your possession. 

You have to hurry though as the longer you stay, the lower the probability that you will change a thing.

6 months in and you are conforming just to avoid making waves, give it another 6 - you have a long list of things that ‘were always done this way’.

It is a normal flow of things and to see an exception is a miracle of sorts, it is really hard to keep your own voice intact, they call it a ‘team play’ wherein you end up singing along that everyone else’s favourite song.

Where am I taking you?

There is a way to make your first months on the job as a Product Manager/Product Owner pay higher dividends if you just go an extra step or two.

Some of the things below are pretty banal, I know but I haven’t seen many people doing those (or sometimes I have seen them happen way down the line).

So here it comes, fresh PM’s checklist / guide to make yourself more effective during the transition:

• Set alerts for your industry, competition and your own company

  • Google Alerts will do, really. Just add some keywords, names and organisations to stay informed via free digests; there is a better way to do it but you need a subscription on Feedly to get blogs/alerts aggregated for you.

• Google podcasts and materials which are already there

  • I have listened to podcasts with my co-workers and bosses before I was there to chat with them. You can find a long history of weirdness along with product visions, pivots, fired folks etc.

• Follow competition everywhere you can

  • This one’s obvious - the more you see in time, the better your understanding of the market and your place in it. Consider a newsletter signup, hunt down their employees on social media or check their tech blogs if there are any.

• Create accounts on platforms belonging to the competition

  • While copying stuff is a big no-no, using your competition’s work is a basically a prescription unless you are building something your users won’t even buy.

    If it is software - try them out in one way or another posing as Alice or Bob, believe me - if your product is worth the attention, their recon agents are already playing with it from time to time.

• Dive into data

  • The situation with analytics is dare at best in some cases but you have to work with what you have got. Try finding folks responsible for setups and the data collection, understand how the data is being collected and why. Based on that I’d go for my own dashboards, simple charts and tables I’d look at on a daily basis. It is a pulse of your pet dragon.

• Go see - Toyota’s approach (gemba)

  • Read the support tickets, complains, attend demo calls with your Sales staff and/or watch Hotjar recordings. What you need is a feeling of JTBD (Jobs to be done) and ways one could complete them; there is a long list of surprises here as users never use your products the way it was intended in the first place. Go places and attentively study stuff being sold and bought (the two might overlap but it ain’t happening in full).

    Make notes. Boyden’s idea is to make notes every time he has a meeting; when the meeting is over he takes a picture of those notes, stores it and shares with his counterparts / meeting partners. Papers don’t lie.

• Diagrams, flows and UMLs

  • Bother your backend folks and analyst to provide you with diagrams depicting the backend logics and processes. You don’t have to check Kafka’s queues manually but it is a good idea to know something is there. Make people draw for you to understand bottlenecks and ask what the frontend people are complaining about. Then move to another floor to do the opposite - ask your front folks about all that backend moaning they hear.

    Write it all down!

• Find the most brutal folks not afraid to be fired

  • This one is somewhat controversial. There are always folks frustrated with the state the company is in (or worried about their teams in a more local manner). The obvious thing newcomers do stick to is to avoid such personalities while trying to simulate a command player.

    But believe me, these folks are your best sources of information - the contrarians of truth. It is extremely important to gain their trust. If you do - they will save you a chunk of time because they tend to care less about politics or being liked. The contrarian coders with experience are priceless. Grab your popcorn and get ready to listen.

• Integrate

  • Not in a conventional way though, I don’t want you to attend miserable drinking parties on Friday to ‘pull’ some information from drunk employees. No-no, you have to play fair so it won’t be as easy with contrarians and people of independence as described above. Listen to them and open up at all costs (even if you hate people in general).

• Linkedin dynamics (up or down with people)

  • This one is a precursor. Sometimes you can see how the company grows or dies before you join it by reading stuff on Glassdoor, Linkedin and many other places. You will be finding all the nasty stuff in there as people tend to review companies if something bothers them.

• Learn the tooling ‘to be in’

  • Whenever you join the company chances are you will be confronted with technologies you haven’t seen before. It can be Mongo DB or BigQuery, they can run Jupyter notebook with Spark or they will expect you to understand Mixpanel/GA reporting. Learn the tooling - be it a course on Udemy or a used book you can buy on Abebooks, this effort will be of immense use for better understanding. It will get you a few reputation points as well ;)

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this list is being updated since early 2021, more is to come