If you’re the type that likes to google questions like this, you’ve probably been bombarded with the following must dos for a successful 90 day PM ramp:
This advice is as ubiquitous as the air we breathe, but is it realistic? Unless you’re Tim Ferriss, who seems to have the unique ability to master just about anything in 4 hours a day, I think a new PM with 0 prior product experience that tries to execute on the above list in their 90 day ramp is going to end up overwhelmed, frustrated, and unhappy. Now I’m not saying that this list isn’t a good list of things to do. This list is a comprehensive view at what the real life of a PM should look like, but these tasks never actually end. As a PM you do these constantly. Forever.
“If you don’t worry that you’re going to be fired every day you’re not doing this right”.
This is a statement I’ve heard from more seasoned PMs at several different companies and points in their careers. It’s not that all the companies that hire PMs have poor cultures, though that’s certainly true in some cases, but this job is freaking hard. It’s harder than you ever imagined it would be and at some point that realization is going to come crashing down upon your consciousness.
“The first two months you feel like a million bucks. After that, you’ll spend the next 6 months wondering if you made the right decision. You’ll either decide that product management isn’t for you and look for other opportunities, or you’ll slingshot far above that initial high into the land of unicorns and awesomeness that experienced PMs seem to float around in all day”.
If you talk, really talk, to product people managers that have been in the game for a while, you’re likely to hear something like the above statement.
Why does the trough of sorrow exist? It starts with that list. Product management is an umbrella title for a lot of responsibilities across multiple disciplines. Product managers themselves are drawn to the field from a highly diverse set of backgrounds and experience levels. At HubSpot we have PMs that have come from backgrounds in finance, liberal arts, business, customer success, technical support, and even engineering. This skill diversity creates a ton of value both for the organization and the new product manager that has an opportunity to learn about nearly any discipline of interest from their peers, but it also means that we all start with a different set of core strengths based on our previous experience.
At its heart, success in product management means mastering 3 product management competencies: building strong relationships, building great products, and delivering value to your customers.
You build strong relationships when you actively spend time getting to know your stakeholders, your customers, and your teammates.
You build great products when you master your domain, your market, your customer persona, and your business value proposition.
You deliver value for your customers and therefore your business when you’ve built a great product that solves a clearly defined problem in a way that the end user finds enjoyable.
That’s it. Every item on that must do list? It fits into one of those three buckets with items in the last bucket being the most desirable, since that’s a demonstration of your impact on your organization. The problem is that you’re a new PM, you aren’t an expert in your product (most likely), and you don’t have the foundations to deliver that value. Anything you ship in the first 90 days is most likely work that was inherited from your predecessor and meant to build your confidence in the role and process of PMing, unless you’re lucky enough to stumble across an insanely valuable feature that’s easy to implement – I’ve seen it happen, but I wouldn’t consider it the norm.
Instead of chasing a checklist that that can make you feel like slime thrown against a wall, I recommend that the new PM first identifies their core strengths. Said simply, what experience or perspective do you bring to the role and where does it fit with the 3 product management competencies and what are your personal strengths? If you don’t know what your personal strengths are, I recommend starting with Tom Roth’s “StrengthsFinder 2.0”.
When you’ve identified your unique strengths and perspective identify which of the core competencies of product management most closely aligns with them and spend 50% of your time focused on that. For example, my core strengths are: achiever, empathy, learner, restorative, and focus. My background is technical support. That closely aligns me with the relationship building competency. The goal is to put your early calories into the competency that you’re most likely to see success with to build your own momentum and to establish trust with your team. You can build trust by mastering any of these competencies, so don’t worry if your affinity isn’t relationship building. People that make great products earn trust by demonstrating their product market fit. People that deliver value earn trust by demonstrating real business results. It doesn’t matter where you start, the goal is to build trust as quickly as possible.
Once you’ve decided on your core competency and blocked off time in your schedule to dedicate to those activities, start learning as much as you can about one of the other competencies you’re weaker in. Plan on this taking up roughly 25% of your time, your remaining time will be spent in meetings and planning sessions or putting out fires.
At the end of 90 days, not only will you have learned a tremendous amount about your product, your team, your business, and your new responsibilities, you’ll be well on your way to the promised land of product bliss.