The 3 Contexts. Part 1: Business

Let’s start with the business.

Following on from this series’ intro post, here’s an overview of some ways to quickly figure out the business context, and make the most of the pile of (or lack of) documents that were shared with you when you joined.

Recapping quickly - creating context is vital to you onboarding and creating impact fast as a PM. Breaking your time down into figuring out 3 key aspects can help you move quickly and ensure you get valuable answers to the questions you ask.

You probably got sent a huge pile of documents when you joined. Your calendar is full of meet and greets with people who you don’t know. I remember starting at Spotify and being given an excel list of 100 people to meet, and an entire Google Drive folder of reading material. The first doc I opened was about the definition of a SLO for a dataset. ??

Your job is to crisply understand what the business needs and work with your team to create products that anticipate what the business needs to create value. So figuring out the business context is vital.

Your job now is to find out two things:

1. Which people can give me the most, or the most important information about the business?
2. What are the most important questions to ask when I read the documentation, or talk further to more people or users?

Often these people, and these questions aren’t the ones you would expect, so be open minded. It may be that the Customer Service team has the most insightful understanding of how people really think about the product, not the CMO.

How does your business make money? Is it sales-led? Or product led? This should affect who you engage with, to understand what will drive value for the company.

Think about where the influence lies in the company, and calibrate how you engage with your stakeholders accordingly so you can get a rounded picture of the state of the business, and start to understand some of the dynamics of how decisions get made.

Ask your team who tends to have the most questions about the product you’re running. Who is least happy? Use your experience to date to make some guesses if nobody is there to lend a hand. Most important is to not spend weeks reading through docs that will make no sense to you anyway, and are possibly out of date. You need to find the right people, and ask them the right questions.?Then the reading will make more sense, and you will get clearer answers quicker.

It would be great if there was a perfect set of questions but there aren’t. My advice would be to build an understanding of how your stakeholders think, what they care about and the things that motivate them. Then you can talk in their language.

This is why startups can move so fast. If you can easily turn around to the person next to you (who you are working incredibly tightly with) and get all your context, then you can move incredibly quickly.

Investing here lets you get some of that startup speed in any situation. Breaking it down and spending time finding the right people gives you the ability to create a sense of the most important opportunities and challenges to the business, and identify where you might need to spend more time in future.?

NEXT: Part 2 - Data