Growing as a PM
The last lesson of the track is about the long game: starting a new PM role well, reading a career ladder, coaching other PMs, building a small product team, and moving a team from building lists of features to owning outcomes. It ends with what to do next with everything you have learned.
By the end you can
- Plan your first 90 days in a new PM role: learn, secure an early win, then own the plan
- Read a career ladder and collect evidence that you work at the next level
- Coach another PM with weekly one-to-ones, a coaching plan and their written work
- Set up a small product team's outcomes, rituals and documents
- Move a feature team towards an empowered team, one step at a time
The everyday picture
A new head chef joins a busy restaurant. In her first weeks she changes nothing on the menu. She tastes every dish, works a shift at each station, asks the waiters what customers send back, and reads the supplier invoices. Then she fixes one thing everyone has complained about for a year: the dessert station that holds up every table on Friday nights. After that, the kitchen trusts her, and her new menu in month three gets cooked with care instead of resistance.
A year later she is training two sous-chefs. She doesn't tell them every recipe. She gives each one a goal ("lunch tables should be served in 12 minutes") and helps them work out how. That is the whole arc of growing as a PM: learn before you change, earn trust with an early win, then build people and teams who can decide well without you.
Your first 90 days
Michael Watkins' The First 90 Days (Harvard Business School Press, 2003; updated 2013) is written for any new leader, and most of it fits a new PM. Watkins describes a breakeven point: the moment when a new person has given the organisation as much value as they have taken in time, attention and mistakes. Your aim is to reach it sooner. His advice includes accelerating your learning, agreeing with your new boss what success means (he calls it negotiating success) and securing early wins.
First, work out what kind of situation you have joined, because it changes the plan. A brand-new product needs you to find the first users who care. A failing one needs fast diagnosis and hard choices. One that is drifting needs the team to see a problem it has stopped noticing. A successful one needs you to keep it working while you look for the next thing.
Then plan in three phases.
- Days 1 to 30: learn. Hold 15 to 25 conversations: frontline users first, then the team, stakeholders and any vendor. Ask everyone the same five questions, so you can compare the answers. Read the strategy, the roadmap, the decision log, the last few incident reviews and the main metrics. Do the users' job for a shift if you can: receive a delivery at a store, ride along with a driver. End the month with a one-page "what I heard" note and share it with the people you talked to.
- Days 31 to 60: agree expectations and get an early win. Agree with your manager what success at 90 days and one year looks like, how you will communicate, and what you will not do. Pick one early win that is small, visible, valued by users, in line with the strategy, and delivered with the team, such as fixing the top cause of support tickets.
- Days 61 to 90: own the plan. Write the product strategy on one page, the outcome goals, a Now/Next/Later roadmap and the team's rituals, and review them with the people you met in month one.
The common traps: changing things in week one to look decisive; carrying over the answers from your last job; an early win that nobody outside the team cares about; and a listening tour that never ends.
Quick check
In week two of a new PM job, you see that the team's release process is slow and you know a better one from your last job. What should you do?
You may be right, but in week two you don't yet know why the process is slow; there may be a reason, such as an audit rule or a vendor contract. Asking first teaches you about the team, and the change may become a good early win. Changing it immediately risks breaking something you don't understand. Staying silent for 90 days wastes a useful observation. A mandate spends your manager's authority before you have earned any of your own.