Mastering PM Onboarding: A guide from Chen, Product Director at Netflix - Part 3

Joining a new company as a Product Manager can often feel overwhelming, from understanding the organizational dynamics to familiarizing oneself with the projects at hand. Product Pub invited Chen Zheng, Product Director at Netflix, to share her approach refined over years as a seasoned Product Leader. This article aims to serve as a practical guide for PMs to ace their onboarding.

Part 1: Identifying and Engaging Key Stakeholders

Part 2: Adapt to the Company Culture

Part 3: Securing Quick Wins

How to define Quick Wins

Quick wins offer an immediate boost of confidence in your new role and are essential for building credibility. You will need to align with your manager whether the emphasis should be on 'quick' or 'win' as each team might be different.

Generally, quick wins fall under three categories:

• Enhancing team organization, such as streamlining meetings or organizing documentations.
• Contribute to strategy or product, like defining the roadmap.
• Identifying and bridging organizational gaps: In general, identify opportunities where without you, certain things won't happen or change. For example, if you have deep domain knowledge, you can leverage expertise to kick off certain projects.

How to identify Quick Wins

Your goal is to find opportunities with high upside and low downside – tasks that everyone agrees with but are blocked. Whatever that is, it’s your job here to remove these roadblocks. Find 3 - 4 such opportunities to 'test the waters' and collect feedback.?

You can identify opportunities through volunteering on smaller tasks and collecting context from the one-on-ones. Many easy and small tasks can be a great way for you to build up your context and influences:

• Start with simple tasks such as taking meeting notes, organizing documentations, or volunteering on cross-team collaboration.

• Proactively share your knowledge and insights, particularly when your expertise aligns with your teammates' needs.
• Connect the dots. You will inevitably see many challenges the organization faces. Try to zoom out to connect the dots and ruthlessly prioritize and simplify.
• Reflect what your unique strengths and value-add are to this new team.?

In addition, one-on-one sessions are great ways to build context on the team’s needs and opportunities. Typical questions Chen asked included:

• For Engineering Managers - What's your management style?
• How do you envision PMs working with you?
• What do you expect from your PMs?
• When would you like me to involve you?
• What's your decision-making style?

How to execute on Quick Wins

Chen shared her strategies on the early projects during the onboarding stage:

• For projects in your expertise areas, share your opinions early.
• For new projects or product areas, lead with a calm and curious attitude.?

For long-standing projects that carry legacy context or areas demanding deep domain expertise, try to focus on learning first. Making decisions without sufficient context may lead to team resistance and potentially damage your reputation.

If you like this post, please like and comment to let us know. We will share part 4 of this guide soon.

What is Product Pub

Product Pub is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that empowers professionals with global perspectives and product minds through bi-weekly events covering trending industries, product methodologies, product teardowns, and career development. Our community has 3000+ members, including product managers, engineers, designers, researchers, data scientists, entrepreneurs and others from leading Bay Area tech companies and startups such as Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, Lyft, and more.

https://www.productpub.org/

Author: Lydia Tang