Part 1: Onboarding a Product Manager

A series of lessons from the front lines of managing teams

Welcome back to our weekly newsletter. For those of you who are new here, I’m Helen, one of the co-authors of Mind the Beet. Adam and I are full-time working product leaders, parents to two kids under 10, and partners to each other. We write about our lived experiences in the arena.

This week, I’m kicking off a series of posts about supporting product managers through the employee lifecycle. While the cycle is the same in many information worker realms, I will share what has worked to support product folks specifically.

This topic is near and dear to my heart because what has emerged clearly for me in my career is that I get the most joy out of leading and supporting teams. The biggest gift any of my co-workers can give me is to say that they’d want to work with me or for me in the future and I strive to earn that right every day.

Over the years, I have actively participated in every part of the wheel - from attracting great people all the way through to them leaving my team. So, as in the true spirit of Mind the Beet, I want to share what I have done that worked well in each phase of the lifecycle.

Part 1: Onboarding a Product Manager (aka Get Me Started)

I find the onboarding phase to be critical to the success of a Product Manager and I take it very seriously given the time and effort it takes to hire. If the new hire is wildly successful, it will be in big part because I was able to set them up for initial success but if they don’t onboard and thrive, it will be in big part because I didn’t do my job well as a manager.

In this post, I will cover how I approach the first 90 days of a new hire on my team. However, before I dive in, here are the three things I remind myself every time a new person joins:

1. Do not use a one-size-fits-all approach - I think differently about onboarding a Senior/Staff PM, a Junior PM, a Career Transitioner, or a Manager. Specifically, I think about the onboarding projects, people to meet, and context needed differently and personalize the playbook for best results.

2. Be intentional - There are two main differences in how I think about the immersion of the new hire into my team. Sink or swim approach or gradual onboarding. I opt for a gradual approach for new hires and more junior folks, while throwing more senior folks into the fray quicker.

3. Be patient - I have a strong conviction that it takes 90 days for someone to find their feet, 6 months to start adding value, and a year to run at full speed in their role. I have tried to beat this pace and I keep coming back to this being the truth. Therefore, I have to remind myself to not jump to quick conclusions on the quality of the work or the new person on the team until at least 90 days.

Let’s now dive into what I do for the first 90 days and how I support a new hire in 30-day increments which I refer to as the sponge, the analysis, and initial action periods. After 90 days, I expect the new hire to function as a fully ramped member of the team - fully ramped, delivering and always learning.

30 Days - The Sponge Period 🧽

As an employee, I love the first 30 days in a new role. It is this magical period of everything being fresh and exciting, the calendar is not yet filled up with meetings and I am not yet committed to deliverables (or if I am, but I don’t quite understand what they mean yet).

During this period, I expect a new hire to spend 80% of their time in meeting people, understanding the organization, listenening, and learning - like a sponge soaking in water.

Here is what I do to help my employees during this time:

1. Provide the list of people to meet with and write out how that person can be helpful to them - including their role, what they work on, how their role is relevant to the new hire’s role, and some primer questions to start with

2. Share context on the organization and the product team - I have a packet ready with an org chart, links to previous All Hands decks, strategy documents, examples of briefs/one-pagers/PRDs, and directions on how to access the product so that the new hire can touch it as soon as possible

3. Build in support - before a new hire starts, I identify an onboarding buddy that this person can turn to with basic questions as well as a team buddy/peer mentor. I meet with these team members and ask them to support the new hire and also share about the new person’s role and what their onboarding project is all about

4. Be available - For the first 30 days, I try to meet with my new hires 2x a week for 15-30 minutes and then pair down to once a week (or every 2 weeks depending on the size of my team). Tactically, I schedule those times because the new employee doesn’t know what they will need and they often don’t want to impose

60 days - Analysis Period 📈

One thing that I have seen taken for granted is just how quickly the fresh perspective passes and the organization’s culture (and baggage) permeate one’s thinking. While it is a necessary evolution because that means that you are onboarding to the context of the team, there is a lot of value in getting these reflections written down.

To capture the early insights, during this period, I expect to get a read out from the new hire of what they have learned and an analysis of the “so what.” This is also a first chance I get to see how an employee thinks and synthesizes lots of signals into a coherent story to give back to the team.

Here is what I do to help my employees during this time:

1. Make your expectations clear and that this is an onboarding deliverable. Provide examples and templates (past onboarding projects are helpful as a reference point).

2. Make it safe to share learnings. As a new person, it can feel scary to make observations that may be too basic, not well-informed, or offensive for some other unknown reason. My job as a manager is to put all that aside and create space

Examples:

Here are some examples of insights that I have created as part of my onboarding or received from team members who joined my team:

Leader onboarding: When I came to Guild (as a Sr. Director), I did a 30 day listening tour and then sent around my insights to everyone I talked to as well as to the leaders of the organization. The benefit of this approach was that it forced me to stay curious and synthesize what I learned before jumping into action. This helped me build credibility and trust with my team as well as with the broader organization.

Senior PM onboarding: One of the people on my team went through the product experience end to end and used it to question historical decisions, identify and document bugs, and use his “new guy” card to improve the product experience. He instantly got credibility because he understood our product, showed curiosity, and got context.

Career Transitioner onboarding A project that I love giving to transitioning PMs is to do a functional diagram of the product they work on and present it back to the PM, Design, and Dev leadership. It gives the new hire a forcing function to get comfortable with technology that they need to understand at a functional level and helps stakeholders understand how the product actually works from a customer-first lens.

90 days - Take Action 💪🏻

I expect by the end of three months, a new hire will be fully ramped up and is delivering value to the business. I have extra bonus points if the value is customer-facing, but internal process improvements can also be really helpful especially if this is a culmination of a manager ramping up.

During this period, the new hire may be exiting their “honeymoon period” and they realize that it is hard to get stuff done and move the needle. However, this is the time to start showing value to the team and the organization and to push through real or perceived obstacles.

Here is what I do to help my employees during this time:

1. Just as the 60-day readout, hold the 90-day “value delivery” as a core deliverable for the new hire. By this time, it is easy to lose focus and get caught up in the day-to-day urgent matters, but I have found that if I make my expectations clear that this work is important, it will come to fruition.

2. Provide hands-on support and coaching to drive a project to a conclusion at the 90-day mark. This is the time when the reality of how hard it can be to get stuff done shows up. For me, this often means doing more dot-connecting and blocking and tackling to help my teammate get to an impactful outcome.

3. Celebrate the win - No matter how big or small the value that was delivered, as long as it happened, I celebrate this moment by acknowledging it as a graduation from initial onboarding. For me, this has been an official milestone at work via a performance review, public kudos or private recognition of the path traveled in a 1:1.

Examples of what delivering values in 90 days could look like:

1. Collect customer insights and share out learnings and action plan around them

2. Stand up an experiment based on learnings from onboarding, get it into the hands of users and share out learnings

3. Fix a problem that has been painful for a team - a broken planning process, consolidate relevant customer insights into one place that’s easy to find and use, create a sizzle video explaining the roadmap in a novel way to stakeholders - pick a pain point and address it.

Additional resources:

1. The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins

2. Deb Liu’s Perspectives: A Guide for Onboarding to a New Role

Thanks for reading! Drop me a comment with any feedback or thoughts on your experiences and I look forward to covering the rest of the employee lifecycle wheel in future posts.