Day 0-30: breadth over depth
Tip #1: avoid tunnel vision. When you’re new, it’s tempting to fall down a rabbithole and make it your sole focus. It feels productive and reassuring. But you can’t develop good judgment without broader context. The first 30 days is a rare opportunity to gain that context. It’s about meeting people, mapping the business equation, and playing with the product while you have fresh eyes.
Goal: absorb as much global context as you can on process, team and product
- [ ] Meet with your teammates, and whoever they recommend
- What should I know about the product / company / people?
- What's the biggest challenge you face?
- What’s been the biggest product hit?
- What’s been the biggest product miss?
- What can I do to make your life easier?
- Who else should I talk to?
- [ ] Align with your manager
- What does success looks like in the first 90 days?
- What's the process from ideation to launch?
- Who vetos product decisions?
- If there's a disagreement about the product, who breaks the tie?
- OKRs: How do we create them? What does success look like?
- Regularly share what you are learning with any follow-up questions
- [ ] Map out the business equation
- How does your product grow?
- How does your company grow?
- How does your product help the company grow?
- You need to understand the levers to create business impact
- [ ] Shadow key members (e.g., customer success, sales, product, design)
- How do people operate?
- How is the development process in practice?
- [ ] Play with the product
- What's intuitive vs. not?
- Map the product experience to the business equation
- [ ] Document what you learn as you learn them
The first audience is yourself — writing clarifies your thinking
A second audience could be your manager. Signaling your learnings and inviting them to edit builds trust, especially if you’re working remotely.
A third audience, down the line, could be other new hires. The best person to write an onboarding guide is usually not the most tenured person, but someone who recently onboarded because they intimately understand the struggles of being new.
Day 30-60**: dive deep**
Once you grasp the global context, it’s time to dive into the local details. There’s plenty of ground to cover from reviewing roadmaps, metrics, funnels, customer interviews & existing documentation.
The goal is to find the right starter project to mark your debut, something ideally:
- Fast & achievable: generate clear results within 2-3 weeks
- Visible: clearly helps the business or the people
- Low-risk: try to avoid controversial changes to start
- Gut check: "Nobody owns this, but we strongly believe we need to do it"