10 Tips for Success in Starting a new Product Manager role

Feeling lost when starting a new job or joining a new team? You're not alone. A friend started a new job as a product lead last week, and our conversations since have been those i've often felt as well: "Why do they need me? What am I supposed to be doing? How do I add value immediately?"

Imposter syndrome, desire to make a good first impression, and add value quickly often cloud our confidence. Below are 10 tips on how to set yourself on a path of success in a new product manager (PM) role.

10 Tips

1. Be a customer (i.e. "dogfood"): Your job as the PM is to be the voice of the customer. Go through every part of the product you can, and take notes of: (a) what didn't work functionally; (b) what was confusing; (c) what questions pop into your head like why a feature exists, or is placed where it is, (d) what needs you sensed you wanted but weren't delivered on; (d) what is done well. Then, ask these questions to your peers or direct reports. If they don't know the answer, ask who they can connect you with so you can build more connections in the company while learning who are the right people in the org to support you. Sharing these learnings as a newby are invaluable because the team may be so deep in the product they forget how a user may experience it. In delivering the feedback, be mindful there may be legitimate reasons for why things are the way they are. Ask for the data and research behind the decisions. Additionally, see if you can get to the root cause for challenges the team may be facing in product, people, and process that may have contributed to your experience not being what you expected it to be (e.g. is there a gap in product testing before launch? Do they lack sufficient design resourcing to optimize the experience? Do they not utilize data enough in how and what they decide to build?). These are all potential areas of improvement that you can bring visibility to, and influence as a new leader on the team (see #10).
2. Understand the goals and objectives of the organization and team for the immediate term, and next year: All organizations and teams should have goal metrics and/or outcomes they can measure that demonstrate how well the team is achieving the company / team's missions. Ask your leadership what these are for the immediate and long term at both the company and team levels. Then, ask the same to your product teams to understand how well they internalize and focus on these goals, and/or how operational metrics they may use ladder up to those top line goals. Understand how they are measured and why, if they are reliable, if they can be used to detect and measure impact of new features/changes to your product. Creating awareness around lack of and/or gaps in metrics is a great place to start. Pull in your Data Scientist, Engineering Lead, and Researchers (if you have them, else see who supports these functions) to discuss how to get crisper on the mission, key goals, and how you'll measure success against them. Then, start understanding how the features and products may or may not be driving those. With this, all other decisions around product direction become easier.
3. Understand how decisions are being made for what to build: Ask your key partners to send relevant vision, strategy, roadmap, goals, and operational documents to help you learn about the space quickly. In this, both understand what has been and is being built, and why. Understand if the team has gone deep on customer needs, pain points, and competitive landscape using data and research as the first step. If not, why not - are decisions made top down with someone saying "just go build that"? Or if data is used, validate if it's being used to inform the product roadmap. Ask the team: (a) how did y'all prioritize and decide on this solution? (b) did y'all explore other options and if so, why and how did y'all decide against them? (c) is it clear how this product decision will drive the desired outcome (i.e. goals/operational metrics) and how we'll evaluate it? Just by asking these questions you are adding value by influencing the teams to think about their work more strategically. These gaps can also be key areas of focus for you in subsequent months (see #10).
4. Meet & understand your team's role in the organization: Ask your boss for a list of who to meet, and ask each of those people to recommend 2-3 people to meet. Ask those people what each of the people's roles on the team are and how they work with them. This will start to give you a sense of the key folks you'll need to engage with and how teams work together.
5. Listen to what they're focused on and concerned about re: product/people/process: Ask each person "what challenges are you facing with people, product, process?". Once you've collected these from your team and XFN, there should emerge a few themes that may be areas you can take on to improve. Be mindful not to step on anyone's toes and work collaboratively in this effort being the new person. Assume positive intent, and that they are the experts - not you.
6. Understand how performance and career progression works - for yourself and your team: This will inform what motivates people and team / company culture. Is it a more subjective, relationship based evaluation (i.e. "how good is it working with this person?)" or is it a metrics based evaluation (i.e. "you hit X goal, you get Y). If you're a people manager, identify if there a rubric to follow on which your team will be evaluated. Set up 1:1 career sessions monthly with your direct reports, and manager. For direct reports, this shows immediate intent to care for their career growth and creates enough space in between for development. For yourself, this sets the expectation with your manager that you expect consistent feedback so there are no year-end surprises. Review and/or create an expectations document (work on this collaboratively with your direct reports). Validate these are the right expectations with your boss and boss's boss if possible such that there's alignment early. If this isn't the culture, see how you can bring accountability, clarity, and transparency to personal performance.
7. Examine how well product development goes from understand --> identify --> execute: Are each of these phases in existence, and who is executing them? Are there good processes around each phase to ensure smooth, efficient, and effective execution? You can understand this through asking questions and observing meetings to see where/how the set of meetings you're in gel together. Note, that often there are parts of a product in one part of the phase, while others are in others. This is okay, as long as what's being executed now isn't directly dependent on research that hasn't happened yet - this is a failure in process unless the scale of your user base, ease of implementing the feature, and A/B testing is so vast that you can learn faster by building and testing it in production. Gaps in these processes, or how they're being managed will reveal opportunities for you to jump in to set up/better that process.
8. Figure out the execution challenges/blockers the teams face: This may become clear in discussions above, but sometimes teams are blind to their own challenges or don't feel they're changeable. e.g. Are there processes that are just unnecessary? Do we have too many people in a meeting to productively make decisions? Is there a decision making framework (e.g. via a traffic light) that enable the team to have sound, objective rationale to decisions? Is there a lack of tracking detailed outputs to know if the team is on or off track? Are meetings well led with outcomes or are they endless discussion in circles that don't go anywhere? These are areas that you can help improve efficiency.
9. Help unblock the team wherever you can, no matter how big or small: Be it taking notes, scheduling meetings and follow ups, brainstorming with the team, or cleaning up slide formats, no task should be below you. Doing so may seem like you're not doing the right thing, but there's so much to learn in the small tasks and they're opportunities to show that you're one of the team, willing to roll up your sleeves and do anything necessary for the success of all.
10. After doing the above for a few weeks, identify where you can add the most value and align on a plan for the next few months: Synthesize the top product, people, and process opportunities for improvement to reach the organizations and teams goals. Prioritize them based on the expertise you can bring, ensuring the team meets their short term goals, and filling gaps in forward thinking. Review and align these with your core partners and align with your boss. This will set you up for your focus over the next ~6 months. Off you go! :).

Hope this helps! Feel free to share additional tips!