30-60-90 Day Plan For Product Managers: Key Milestones For Success
Product management is a highly sought-after profession, considering its incredible impact on digital products and highly competitive salaries.
So, if you are one of the lucky ones to land your first product job (congrats!), or you’re a seasoned folk who’s simply entering a new company (congrats to you too!), you must show your worth to the company and succeed at your new role.
The best way to achieve this is by making a 30-60-90-day plan, and that’s what we're here for today—ensuring you have all the tools to successfully navigate your first three months at the new job.
Why Is a 30-60-90 Day Plan Important for Product Managers?
A good start is half the battle in product management (among other areas).
Being able to quickly understand what the product at the new company is about, learning what your users want, and delivering early wins within the first 90 days creates a solid foundation for you as a PM in the new company.
If your organization hasn't already handed you one, this 30-60-90 day product management plan is a great starting framework to get off on the right foot in your new role.
Your First 30 Days: Learning and Observing
Whether you’re an associate PM or a seasoned senior, your first month at the new company will certainly be the most overwhelming. It is, however, probably the easiest one, considering that everybody’s there to help you and you have not taken on any significant responsibility yet.
That said, it does not mean that you can relax and do nothing. On the contrary—the better you onboard within your first month, the easier things will get during your tenure at the company. So, let’s take a look at three key tasks that you need to complete at this stage.
1. Product Manager Onboarding Plan
You will most likely have a standard one prepared for all new product managers before you join the company. But if you don’t, schedule a meeting with your direct manager and prepare one together.
No matter what you include in this plan, the most important outcome that you want to achieve is the alignment with your manager on their expectations of your first 3 months in the company.
2. Internal Processes and Tools
Before you begin the adventurous journey of learning your product, you must figure out how things work in your new company. Specifically, what are the rules of the company culture, bespoke processes, and specific tools that are relevant to the product management role in the company? You usually spend your first day and up to your first week on this.
The company will most likely have an internal wiki where they document their processes. You should read it. If there is none, please ask your manager who your point person is to pass that information along. It might be the operations manager in the company, the team lead, your manager themselves, or somebody else.
Hot tip: Schedule meetings with each of them and ask a ton of questions!
Regarding the tools, the company will most likely provide you access to PM-related software they use, such as Jira, Confluence, Asana, or others. Work with your manager to ensure you have all the logins and permissions you need.
3. Product Deep Dive and Market Research
Finally, the most interesting part of your onboarding can begin! A good PM knows their product inside-out. If you wake them up in the middle of the night and ask how their onboarding works, they will cite you the journey by heart in their sleep.
To learn about your product, the easiest first step is to read the help center articles and product documentation, then test the features out in your test environment.
After finishing this part, you can then ask your manager to present you with the product vision and long-term roadmap. Finally, you can dig deep into the current backlog of the team to understand what are the specific features that they are planning to work on.
Learning about the way your product works is not enough though. You should also understand how your market works. I’d not call this process market research. Rather, it’s about identifying your competitors, signing up, and playing with their features, as well as interviewing a couple of users to understand their key needs and pain points.
Stakeholder Interviews and Team Alignment
Stakeholder alignment is the element that will either make or break your tenure at the company. If you don’t know what your stakeholders want, no matter what you deliver, somebody will be unhappy. So, pay extra attention to this one.
You can take a page off Google’s book and begin this process by identifying your key stakeholders. Typically, these are:
- Your C-team (if the company is small).
- Product Team and Leadership (e.g. Head of Product).
- Technical Leadership (e.g. Engineering Managers, Architects).
- Cross-functional teams collaborating with you.
- Head of Design.
- Head of QA.
- Sales Team.
- Customer Success team.
Then, folks at Google recommend setting up a meeting with each one of them and conducting an informal interview. There are three topics on the agenda:
- What does the collaboration process between PMs and them look like?
- What are their expectations from the PMs?
- What are your expectations from them?
You can technically do the same interviews with your team members too. But there’s something more critical for you to accomplish with your new team—befriend them. So, ask your company to organize an informal get-to-know-each-other activity somewhere outside the office. Spend quality time with your team and connect with them emotionally.
Believe me, befriending your team makes your life significantly easier in the long run.
To sum up, these are the key tasks you must accomplish during your first month at the company.
60 Days: Planning and Strategizing
As soon as you have finished researching your product and building an image of who your users are and what they need from your product, you will spend the second month of your time at the new company to materialize this knowledge. Specifically, you need to focus on these key activities.
1. Translating Observations Into Actionable Items
Knowing about the day-to-day struggles of your users is critical, but it is of no value if you cannot act upon it. After all, as (my favorite author of all time) Eric Ries puts it:
If you don’t, all you have is a meaningless bunch of video recordings and survey results.
To do this, you will need to use the second piece of knowledge you had gathered during your first month—how your product works. The logic is the following: you look at user feedback, group and prioritize it based on the user journeys they refer to, and ask yourself this question:
Given the way we have built our product, what is the cheapest way to solve this user issue?
While you can start by asking yourself this question, you should arrange a brainstorming session with your design, analytics, and development teammates and ask them as well.
The result of this session should be a list of hypotheses and potential solutions that you can then build and test.
2. Prioritizing Features and Building a Product Roadmap
Once you have your hypotheses along with the features that will help you test them, it is time to prioritize them.
We have covered the topic of feature prioritization in great detail here at the productmanager.com. So, I will be short here. The two main frameworks you can use are:
- MoSCoW: When you assign “must have”, “should have”, “could have”, and “won’t have” priorities on features based on their ability to solve the problem, feature complexity, and alignment with your product strategy.
- KANO: When features are classified as must-have (user experience is terrible without it), performance (experience gets better with it), or attractive (no direct impact on experience, but makes the product more attractive).
Just like acting upon user insights, this process is more effective if you involve your design and development teams and run a prioritization workshop with them.
3. Setting KPIs to Measure Success
I consider KPI development for product managers to be one of their core skills.
While the area of KPIs is something that I could write an entire book about, the main ones that you need to set and track for your features are the following:
- Activation rate: The percentage of users who have found and used that feature to solve their problem.
- Engagement rate: The average number of times a single user engages with your feature (e.g., the average number of files uploaded to Google Drive every day)
- Retention rate: The percentage of users who have been continuously using your feature in the long run (usually the last 28 days or 90 days)
To make this process smooth, I suggest using a product analytics tool such as Amplitude or Mixpanel.
To summarize, your second month is about acting upon the knowledge you have gathered. Here’s the first 60-day checklist for you to keep, too.
90 Days: Executing And Delivering Results
Let me give it to you straight: the number-one product manager goal you are trying to achieve at this phase is building trust with your stakeholders and team. You will always be able to add new features, develop personas, and reach product success. But you won’t always have the chance to create a solid foundation regarding trust in the company.
No matter where PMs stand in their career path, they are high-impact positions in the company—for better or for worse. Your leadership knows this. So, their confidence in your ability to be a great product leader and move things forward is one of the main ways they evaluate your performance.
So, how do you build credibility? In his famous HBR book “The First 90 Days”, Chris Watkins mentions that one of the most effective ways to demonstrate your competence is achieving early wins and driving results as a product manager.
So, let’s focus on how product managers do this during the execution phase.
1. Implementing the plans developed in the 60-day phase.
We begin by turning your plans into designs and requirements that your product development team can act on. The first phase is the parallel development of product requirements and design with frequent check-ins (I do these daily, for instance).
Working in parallel with your designer is crucial, as design may affect requirements, and requirements may affect design. Generally, you first make high-level requirements that the designer can use as a basis, but low-level ones are highly interdependent.
When the design and requirements are ready, you arrange kickoff meetings with your development team for each feature to gather their feedback and answer their questions.
Lastly, if you use an Agile product management framework (which I recommend), you turn these into user stories, pass through refinement and planning meetings, and hand them over to developers.
Since you want to show early wins, I recommend you start with features that give you the most product outcomes for the least development and design effort.
In an example of Spotify, imagine that you have two problems to solve:
- A sleep timer is used so that when people listen to music while falling asleep, the music stops and does not waste device energy and internet traffic.
- Weekly personalization of playlists so users get more relevant song suggestions.
Between these 2, the first one is far easier to ship and improves user experience, translating to better business outcomes (e.g., revenue retention).
2. Aligning with Company OKRs and Product Vision
This step consists of two elements:
- Showing your leadership that the feature you shipped aligns with the product vision.
- Showing them that it also contributes to the OKRs set for your product.
For the first one, I recommend you physically demonstrate the feature. Record a demo video from the prod environment, show how the feature works, and explain how it improves user experience. Finally, point out how the improvement of the UX is aligned with their vision.
For the example of the Spotify sleep timer, would align with the vision of Spotify being the source of music for all occasions for people.
For the second one, take advantage of the product analytics software in your company. Show a chart where the release or usage of the new feature is correlated with an OKR metric increase.
For the same sleep timer, let’s imagine that you had an OKR of increasing streaming rates during nighttime. If you show a chart where the streaming rate has gradually increased along with the number of users activating the sleep timer, it would show that the feature was able to contribute to the OKR.
In short, your 3rd month is about delivering results, and here’s the checklist that you can follow to achieve it.
Moving forward...
The first 90 days are the most challenging part of a product manager’s job. Despite that, doing every right during this phase will significantly improve your working environment during the many years you are planning to work at that company.
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FAQ
What should a product manager focus on in their first 30 days?
New PMs need to dig deep into the product, learn it inside out, as well as research the market and users to understand the environment in which they will operate.
How do I prioritize tasks in my 30-60-90 day plan as a product manager?
Use the checklists we have provided for each phase. Consult with your line manager to understand which aspects are the most important to the company.
What KPIs should a product manager track in the first 90 days?
While it depends on your product and company, the main success metrics you need to pay attention to include activation, retention, and engagement rates of the features you build.
