After you joined a new team as a product manager
You finally joined a new team as a product manager. Congrats! Here, we discuss what you should do as a product manager in the first week, the first 30 days and the first 60 days after you joined the team.
In a week - Set the stage!
At first, you need to understand basic things: team members, product and development process. You have coffee break, lunch and 1on1 meetings with many members in the team in order to get to know each other. Remember the names and faces of everyone you meet, and have them remember you at the same time. You can get the reporting lines in the team during the conversations or you may discuss the pain points faced by the team members at work. If you have never used the product, you might be lucky! You cannot be a good product manager for sure unless you use it a lot from now on, however you can get the real impressions with unbiased view. Then, write down your impressions of the product about anything good or bad and any questions for the time when you can ask to the team members. In addition, you need to understand the development process as a product manager. You should get the permissions of development tools as well as join the meetings of ongoing projects even though it is hard to understand what they discuss. After getting the permissions to access the repository, you can read the prior PRDs. What were developed or not scoped and why would be figured out through the PRDs.
In 30 days - Deliver the quick win!
You can work on a small feature that affects something positive to the users so that you can experience a whole development process. You can learn how the team communicates and writes documentations. The documentation describes well the team's cultures. After releasing the feature, you learn how to collect statistics on the product and actually measure the impact of the released feature. In addition, you should investigate the behavior of bugs that are already reported so that you prioritize the bugs as well as understand the technical architectures as much as possible, which will be essential to define the specifications for more complex features. If you have still leeway, you can start market research and product planning. You can investigate the user experience from user interviews, the tech trends from news/communities or the competitors from some analysis frameworks. You may be able to propose interesting hypotheses to make the product more interesting. Moreover, you can join the business unit's meetings in order to know what KPIs are concerned by marketers or how the roadmap for the company's growth is like.
In 60 days - You are the product!
Finally, you can work on a big feature or new product that affects something on large scale to the users. You know how to communicate smoothly with every stakeholders, so you need to acquire trust from them. You take the lead of the product team from planning to releasing. In addition, you should report the impact of KPIs by your release. Even though it failed, you cannot hide the failure but share what you learn from the failure to the organization instead.
Failure is not a failure as far as we can learn something.