30 Day Plan For Your New Product Hire
After months of searching, screening and interviewing candidates, the offer letter was counter-signed and your new Product hire is starting in a couple weeks. Awesome!
Dozens of ideas in your backlog will get an owner. You will be able to finally focus on more strategic initiatives. The team gets a new go-to for much of the tactical stuff. Distractions. Small feature specs and JIRA back and forth. That’s all done.
That would be great except most of the time new hires ramp up much more slowly than expected. What’s even worse, our new teammates quickly find themselves lost, frustrated and kind of stuck.
Is it then a surprise that one third of new hires start looking for their next job within a few weeks of starting their current one? (source)
Not if you know how lacking a lot of organizations are in their onboarding practices.
And if you think that “onboarding” stops with HR paperwork, a tour around the office and a couple of hours of chatting during the first day then you are the problem why your new hires are already thinking about the next gig.
Onboarding and orientation are not the same thing.
So, how are you going to make your new hires successful?
When you bring on a PM you know so much more about priorities, team dynamics and company goals than they do. Don’t throw them into the mix to figure things out. Leverage your knowledge to create a clear and efficient 30 day plan.
This plan should challenge new hires across all areas of expertise. It’s a great way to get them started and it will also help you understand how to best structure their future work.
In some cases this plan will quickly help you understand if you have made bad hire!
Replacing a bad hire takes time.
How do you actually implement a 30 day plan?
Give your new hire an actionable list on day 1.
I suggest doing this with a simple Trello board. Free and simple to create, they’re easy to maintain and convenient to share.
You can jumpstart yours with my “starter pack” of tasks which I’ll explain a bit more below.
Public access to the board here: https://trello.com/b/ZWNd1xAo
Tasks for first 7 Days
#1. I believe that it’s crucial to have one of the first conversations cover the company’s Vision and product Goals. This lets your new teammate have more informed conversations from that point forward. The additional context will also be powerful in helping understand priorities and how projects relate to each other.
#2. Meeting key representatives of every team can quickly help the new hire learn roles and responsibilities in your organization. Make this step easier with a simple check list with people’s names and roles.
Tip: help set some of these meetings up by making an intro first. Better yet, outline some key topics to discuss (e.g. “Hey Jamie, meet my new hire Jennifer, she’d like to learn more about your role and our recent progress on the sign up page A/B testing”). Remember that your current teammates have not been preparing an “info package” for your new hire. Give them talking points to work with.
#3. Get things rolling by spending an hour or more going over one of the hot projects that’s in the works right now. Don’t transfer ownership, but set up a situation where a new hire can shadow you and learn more about how you handle things. It’s a mix of process overview and knowledge sharing.
Pick a project with high likelihood of your new hire tackling a significant portion of it later on.
#4. It’s great to help someone new complete a task within their first week. Engineering teams often do this by assigning small bugs or tasks like a simple copy change. This opens the door to understanding the process, learning some of the tools and satisfaction of getting something tangible done quickly.
Tasks for next 7 days, learning continues.
#1. It’s hard to imagine a position in a tech company where measuring success with concrete numbers is not a must. This is why regardless of the role I try to familiarize new hires with some of the tools we use to measure core business metrics.
Metrics review makes Vision and Goals from day 1 more tangible. “Our goal of getting more high spenders in 2017” becomes “Our vip user segment has been growing at 23% and most of it coming from our social channel”.
#2. Meeting with the tech lead might have happened in week one, however I’d suggest a separate session where the engineering development process is explained in more detail.
Environments, task workflows, sprint planning process. All of these will enable the new PM to quickly understand how to tackle upcoming tasks with developers.
#3 With the priorities and process knowledge in hand, don’t just target small “trainer” tasks. Quickly get the PM into a medium sized project which will challenge her. Better yet, pick a project with some executive team visibility. Remember that the execs are just as curious about the increased output of your growing team and how your new hire is kicking thing off.
#4 Ride-alongs checklist is slightly different from the meeting checklist in that the purpose should be seeing other teammates in action. This is an hour of shadowing folks while they carry out some of their most frequent tasks. It gives a good visibility into process as well as tools.
Best outcome of these is when your PM comes back with some ideas on how to improve the things she observed.
#5 Taking a look at what competitors are doing with fresh eyes is always great. Try to get this done before the PM has some level of certainty of how thing are at your company. Get her to think of how some things should be based on what she’s seeing in the industry. Yes, you’ll hear some ideas which have been brought up before, but it’s a good conversation to have. It’ll also be another opportunity to explain how your approach to the problem is different from your competitors.
Tasks to get done before end of the 1st month
#1 Full roadmap review. I’m not 100% set on timing for this and you might want to do a detailed product roadmap session earlier. Getting new hires to explore as much as possible before setting them on a concrete path might unlock creative thinking. After all, you’re hopefully hiring for more than just execution.
Tip: check out Aha! which is what I’m continuing to use for all Vision, Goals and Roadmapping need. I’ve written about it about this time last year.
#2 For backfill positions you might already have OKRs prepared but I’d suggest you review them based on what you now know about your new hire.
Goal setting and performance evaluations are huge topics but I’ll say one thing right now — don’t just fill out a sheet which you revisit around compensation review time once a year. Develop a path, a plan and review it frequently to measure progress. You’ll get better results and happier teammates.
Tip: If you’re not familiar or have struggled with getting OKRs implemented, check out this write up from First Round Capital.
#3 Tools training seems like something that happens organically over the time. However if you simply front load learning all the systems in the first couple months your hire will be much better equipped to effectively carry out tasks. Some of this might have already happened during ride alongs.
#4 Last but not least, at the end of the month put aside a couple hours to review all the questions your PM collected so far. Depending how strapped you are for time in your day to day, this could be a great opportunity for one of the first brainstorming sessions or simply to remove confusion and early misconceptions your hire picked during the first 30 days.
There might be more..
Depending on your business there might be more industry specific parts to onboarding but this should cover the core tasks of helping most Product hires hit the ground running.
Curious to hear if you have other important components of onboarding which are missing here.
Once again, you can use the Trello onboarding starter pack board by going here: https://trello.com/b/ZWNd1xAo/
If you are interested in joining me or my other teammates at Ebates, check out our job listings here: https://www.ebates.com/jobs.htm
