How To Create a Successful 30/60/90 Plan at a New Product Job

Starting a new role, even if you’ve worked in product before, can be stressful. That’s why having a clear 30/60/90-day plan can make a huge difference and set you up for success. We asked our Product Makers community for their tips on how they navigated the first 90 days of their positions — here are some of their top tips. 

The first 30 days

Your first month in your new role is crucial, as it’ll set the foundation for the rest of your time at the company. You’ll want to center your time and energy on internal focus. That means learning about your immediate team, how the company is structured, and finding out which internal stakeholders you’ll need to get meetings with in the coming weeks. 

You may find it useful to create a personal user manual (here’s a sample template) to help others better understand how you operate and how you can best collaborate with others. Plus, this could be a good way for other team members to reacquaint themselves with each other’s work styles. 

But your ultimate goal by the end of your first 30 days is to develop a deep understanding of your business from every angle: 

• Can you describe the product and financial structure of the organization? 
• Do you know what the health indicator trends are in each area? 
• What’s the vision for the product(s) you’ll be working on and for the overall company? 
• What are the trends and challenges in the industry as a whole? 

You’ll want to do weekly check-ins — both with yourself and with key people you’ll be working closely with — to make sure you’re getting all the information you need to be successful. 

The first 60 days 

If the first 30 days was about internal focus, then the 30 after that should be about external focus. This is when you really learn about the company’s customers and why they’re the right customers. Take this time to empathize with the users of the product: 

• In what context are they using the product? 
• What are their business objectives? 
• What challenges do they hope to overcome, and what roadblocks are they hitting?
• What opportunities are there within existing product areas among your competitors? 

To help you better understand your customers, you’ll need to book meetings with those internal stakeholders you identified in the first month. You’d ideally find time with at least a couple of members from your customer success, sales, support, engineering, and finance/billing teams, as well as each exec team member. 

From there, it’s a good idea to join customer calls with customer success, sales, and support. This will let you hear directly from the customers and get a sense of what different teams are tackling on a day-to-day basis. 

The first 90 days

In the last stretch of your first 90 days, you should have an execution focus, where you apply all the things you’ve learned to start delivering results. Here’s where you can fine-tune the way you collaborate with your team — you should know how to navigate the internal processes, how to effectively communicate and share information, and how to get things rolling. 

Essentially, you should know the ins and outs of your organization and its business model: 

• Why are the practices put in place the right ones? 
• What are the principles and values of the organization, and how can you apply them to your work? 
• How does the current business model get executed and what levers do you have to pull to accelerate growth and results? 

The goal here is to start focusing on deliverables. They don’t have to be big ones, but by the end of 90 days, you should be building trust with stakeholders by delivering quality with integrity. 

Some additional food for thought 

The tips in this post will help set you up for success as you start your new position (shoutout to David, Vreni, Parveen, and Wes for sharing their thoughts and contributing to this discussion in our community). If you’d like some additional reading, then here are a few recs: 

• The First 90 Days by Michael D. Watkins
• Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
• This excellent 90-day product manager plan

And if you ever want more tips and insights from other product managers like yourself, be sure to join the Productboard Product Makers community.