Your first 30 days (1/3): Getting Aligned with your Manager

As the new PM on a team, you’ll be expected to start owning product outcomes almost immediately.  You’ll probably start feeling pressure to move the needle, and “prove yourself” (hello, imposter syndrome).  Were you really the right person to hire?

What should you focus on during your first 30 days in a PM role?

The next few posts will cover some tactics I recommend to any PM when joining a new team.  I’ll share specific tips for how to cultivate strong relationships with your manager, teammates, and stakeholders, so that you can start focusing on the important work of delighting your users.

Here are my three tips:

1. Strongly align with your manager
2. Build the rhythm and the relationship
3. Get a win ASAP

To kick it off, let’s talk about how to get strongly aligned with your manager.

Shared goals, shared understanding

It’s obvious that you’ll need your manager’s support and guidance, so what does it mean to be strongly aligned?

To be strongly aligned is to have shared goals, and a shared understanding of how you will achieve them.  It means that you grasp, across various dimensions, what truly matters to your manager (metrics, key initiatives and deliverables, and stakeholder relationships).  It means that you’re a force multiplier for your boss, rather than someone who needs to be managed.

That said, odds are that you’re new to the product, and there’s a ton you don’t know yet.  Luckily, as the new PM, now is the perfect time to ask questions and be a sponge.

Let’s get into some specific steps you can take.

Step 1: Set up an informal product strategy discussion 

Explain to your manager that you’d like to get in sync on:

• state of the business
• product strategy
• roadmap sequencing and execution

Expect this to be a wide-ranging conversation, from the 30,000 ft view (CEO vision level), down to the ground floor (how product gets built and shipped). 

Anything is on the table, but your main objective will be to understand what success looks like to your manager, and how you can start to contribute.

Step 2: Topics to cover in your meeting

Below are topics and questions to bring up in your chat.

(IMPORTANT: take notes!  You’ll be receiving a lot of information from your manager and not everything will stick, or make sense at first.)

• Product strategy for the next 1-2 quarters
  • What are the critical initiatives currently underway, and how do they fit into a longer term vision?
  • Has the strategy been documented and articulated to the broader team of builders (product/UX and engineering)?
  • Are there any worrisome execution risks?  Hard deadlines?
• Outcomes
  • What are the key user problems the strategy will solve?
  • Which business metrics will be improved?
• Tradeoffs
  • What are the important problems you will NOT tackle in the next 1-2 quarters?
  • What has been de-prioritized, and why?
• Stakeholders
  • Who are the key people you should get to know from other teams?
  • Are these stakeholders all aligned with your product strategy?
• Wrap up
  • Thank your manager for the insights.
  • Explain that you’d like to follow up with a summary of the chat for your manager to review to make sure you didn’t miss anything important.

If you were unable to cover each of the above topics, I highly recommend scheduling another session.

Step 3: Follow-up

Now that you’ve gotten a peak into what’s in your manager’s head (goals and fears), how do you make sure your manager knows that you’re strongly aligned?  Follow up and take ownership.  The way to do that now is to send a follow-up note explaining what you’d like to do next.

This is how I would structure my follow-up note:

• Summarize your takeaways from the conversation.  
  • Demonstrate your understanding by taking the time to compose a few crystal-clear sentences summarizing each bullet point from Step 2.  This is where having detailed notes is super handy.
  • Set a goal for yourself of articulating these points more clearly than your manager ever has.
  • This is also an opportunity to ask any follow-up questions that weren’t addressed in the meeting.
• Make a backlog document which captures the top 5-10 important problems to solve.
  • A google spreadsheet or shared wiki is fine, as long as it is viewable by others.
  • Prioritize the problems by using a combination of “outcome” (metrics your manager cares about) vs. “development cost” (use t-shirt sizing like S/M/L/XL).
  • Dev cost estimation takes time to refine, but start now.  Think of it in terms of complexity, as opposed to time to build.
  • Write down any assumptions you’re making around outcomes.  For example, if the outcome is x% revenue growth, explain that it will come from y% increase in transaction frequency.
  • Share the document with your manager and ask for feedback.  Use the feedback to better calibrate your prioritization process.
• If you haven’t already received marching orders, propose what you’d like to do next.
  • Keep the product strategy, and execution risks in mind. 
  • What can you take off your manager’s plate?  Does he need help bringing stakeholders up to speed?  Does he need you to write some specs/tickets?
• Finally, since you’re new, indicate that you’d like to meet key stakeholders
  • You will schedule 20-30 min. with each individual to intro yourself, hear their goals and concerns, and ensure you’re in sync re: strategy.

It may not yet be clear how you can best leverage your skills to improve and grow the product, so be flexible and ready to help.

Up next:

Think of the process outlined above as the bedrock upon which your relationship with your manager will flourish.  Like any relationship, it will require attention and maintenance, but being strongly aligned with your manager is incredibly valuable and should ultimately make you a more effective PM.

Now, being strongly aligned with your manager is just the beginning.  Next, I’ll cover ways to get aligned with the broader organization, and your key stakeholders via what I call “the rhythm and the relationship”.