Things to do when starting a new Product Manager job

Before joining Vimeo, I mostly worked with products that I started from scratch. And during onboarding, I realized there’s a lot to take into account when inheriting an existing product with a team around it. So to all PMs starting with new products out there, to all employers onboarding new PMs, and to all PMs who want to health-check their products, here’s a checklist of things you should consider when starting with a new product as PM.

Sync Up with Your Manager

You should start with this, as you’ll reuse this in each of the next stages. Do you best on agreeing with your manager on these as early as possible:

• Your mission in this role (it will often be smth like maximize the potential of product X)
• Your area of responsibility (expected output, types of decisions you’re expected to make)
• Your goals for the next 3 months
• List of people to meet with
• Weekly status report at least for the first few months (What you did in the week, What you plan to do, What blocks you)

Get to know the team

This will take you 2–3 weeks, so you want to start as soon as you have a high-level understanding of your mission in the role and your goals. Again, it’s fair to expect your manager to share this list with you, but if she won’t for some reason, here’s whom you want to talk to:

• Tech lead
• Tech lead’s manager
• Every engineer & QA in the team
• Designer
• Designer’s manager
• QA Lead
• Product Marketer
• Support Lead
• Documentation/copywriting team
• Adjacent PMs
• Growth (if any)
• Sales (if any)
• Research (if any)
• BI (if any)

Key questions to ask

Before meeting with every colleague, try sending agenda upfront (bonus points), personalize the questions below, and I’d advise writing them down in your notepad. Start by introducing yourself, your background (with some impactful achievements if you have some), and your mission in this role. Below are some of the questions you might want to arm yourself with at each meeting but again, make sure to personalize them.

Understanding their area of responsibility:

• How much time do you dedicate to my product?
• How many other products do you work with?
• How many people work in your team?
• How long have you been in the company?
• What are your goals/KPIs?

To give you an example, if a designer works full time on your product you’d want to involve them much more in the product or customer development, you could expect short response time from them and have a bigger say in their priorities. If a product marketer works with 4–5 other products, you have to be very selective in what you can ask and what response time you can expect.

Understanding how they interact with your product:

• What are your touchpoints with the product or team?
• How does my product affect your job? 
• Is contributing to this product your primary job?
• What input do you expect from me (e.g. user stories), what output do you produce (e.g. designs), in which timeframe?
• How long in advance do you usually expect to be notified of your expected involvement (e.g. marketing)
• At what stage do you prefer to get involved in the feature development process?
• Do you need me (i.e. PM for this product?) and if so, why?
• How did you work with my predecessor?
• What would you keep and what would you change in this cooperation?

Sales folks’ quotas might depend on you prioritizing their feature requests so they might expect to have a say in the roadmap. Support team might be impacted if you’ve released a critical bug. Marketing might need 2 months in advance of feature release to prep go-to-market artifacts. VP engineering might expect to take 1 week of your team’s time each month for education/code review/test coverage etc. Designers might want to get involved in user research at early stages or rather join when you have a clear scope. Engineers or QAs might want more clarity on a roadmap and why it’s shaped that way.

Asking their advice:

• What do you think are the first priorities for the product rn?
• Who else should I talk to within the company?
• Do you have any recommendations for me?

Wrapping up:

• Make sure to set the right expectations on the timeframe to implement changes discussed above
• Share your objectives for the next 3 months (if you‘ve agreed on those with your manager)

After you’ve asked their opinion on what needs to be changed and how they prefer to work with you, it’s very important to set their expectations that it’s gonna take a while before you can implement it. Sharing your goals for the next 3 months usually helps explain and justify your priorities.

Get to know the customers

You won’t be able to get the respect of your teammates if you can’t speak for your customers in-depth. You won’t have confidence in making product decisions unless you know what your customers need. And it’ll definitely take you a while before you gain insights that your team has, but you can’t let that stop you from digging in. Some activities I’d recommend:

• Run 5–10 customer interviews, or watch existing ones (template)
• Look at all available surveys
• Observe your customers using the product
• Use your own product in real life
• Bonus: invite team members to customer interviews

Key questions you’ll want to answer:

• Why customers love the product
• What they used before your product
• What problem it solves for them
• How they use it
• Who are they
• Why they prefer it over alternatives
• What’s lacking in the product

Get to know the product

In parallel with meeting the team and learning about customers, you'll want to dive into the product & numbers.

An obvious first step is to understand product functionality with all the features, it’s fair to expect someone in your team to walk you through it. Documentation helps to answer follow up questions (in my case it was 800 pages :O ).

The second step is to get familiar with the current roadmap. There’s likely enough stuff planned for the next 2–3 months. If there’s not, I don’t recommend rushing to building a roadmap without doing a proper analysis first. Let the team catch up on tech debt while you do your homework. Otherwise, it’ll be chaos. I learned this a hard way.

Next, you want to check product health. This will define what you want to do with the product next, and how you want to reshape the existing roadmap. Here are some questions you’ll want to answer:

• Is retention flat?
• Is NPS positive?
• Is product usage growing?
• Which acquisition channels work best, are they scalable?
• What’s LTV, CAC, do they make sense with this retention rate?
• What’s the most frequently used functionality?
• optional: best performing segments (retention and growth)

If retention isn’t flat, that’s your #1 problem. You can’t go on building new features, taking on new markets, or acquiring new customers if you can’t retain them. You haven’t found a product/market fit yet (or your industry/use case doesn’t expect retention like dating apps or flight booking, which is a whole other conversation). You’ll want to dive deeper into why customers aren’t retaining. That’s another reason why you need to do this in parallel with interviews, that’ll be a good chance to dig into that.

Sidenote: when studying retention you'll have to do a bit of homework of understanding core action to track it around and what the natural frequency is. If you need help with that, the best place in the world is Reforge, from whom I also borrowed most of the slides below.

Another thing you might wanna do is look at retention cohorts over time. Is it getting better or worse? Do customers who signed up in March retain better than the ones who signed up in January?

Similiar approach goes to NPS. And most likely it will correlate with retention. If your customers aren’t happy, they will likely not retain for long. So if NPS is negative, you might want to invest in bug fixing and dive deeper into understanding why that is.

There’s often a question of “what NPS/retention is good enough?”, and there are different ways to approach this. For retention, one of the ways to say if it’s good for you is to compare acquisition cost with lifetime value multiplied by retention. For NPS, many companies use their previous year/quarter NPS to compare to, and make sure it’s growing. The bare minimum is for NPS to be positive, for retention to be flat(or flattening).

Then, you want to look at your growth rate. Both subscription-wise and usage-wise. Generally, if growth is flat (and never was high) while retention is flat, you likely haven’t found product/channel fit yet. If retention is low, but growth is high, you’ve likely found a market but your product doesn’t satisfy it yet. If retention is flat and growth is high, congrats, you’re in a great place! You can work on accelerating that growth or taking on new markets.

Next, you’ll want to a breakdown of growth AND retention by acquisition sources to see where the strongest fit is. For example, you might be surprised to learn that most growth comes from FB ads, but this segment remains the worst while costs the most. All of this will define your next steps with the product.

Last but not least, you might want to check adoption/engagement/retention by the most popular features. Based on the product tour you got form your teammates, and things mentioned at customer interviews or surveys, you can look at the actual usage of each feature to understand where the true customer value is.

Balance short term vs long term

Lastly, once you have all this data, you’ll need to show your prioritization abilities:

• Figure out what’s working and don’t touch it
• Figure out what’s not working and start fixing it
• Find low hanging fruits to show quick results
• Invest in long-term trust via overcommunication
• Be careful with setting expectations

If there’s one message I would like you to take away from this article, is invest in trust. You’re likely here for a while, and you won’t be able to do anything without people around you. They likely have their own process, culture, and history which you weren’t a part of, and they might’ve seen a couple of your predecessors. So to sync up with them and gain their trust I’d recommend overcommunicating at the beginning: explain your thought process, why you chose to do this or that, which arguments and data you operated with, double-check if anyone objects with your plan, and if so talk it through with them and change your plan if their argument is stronger. Take that extra time in communication to ensure your team is on board with you, and it’ll pay back in multiples in the future when your team starts trusting you on larger bets.

Hope this was helpful! I’d love to know what you do differently, what I might’ve missed, and if you have any follow up questions, please do feel free to ask/comment!

p.s. you might’ve noticed that I didn’t mention competitive research much. My personal opinion is that you’re already overwhelmed with new info during onboarding, so pushing competitors back is a fair thing to do.

p.p.s. Vimeo is hiring PMs in New York and in Ukraine, feel free to message me for details!