How to Survive During the First 30 days in Product Management?
What to do if your first month in product management has begun? How to win the confidence of all team members and show that you are a motivated and important player?
Here we list simple tips by Ken Norton that will be useful for young product managers.
How to approach that first month?
- Set clear expectations and smart goals TOP management. Remember that your primary goal for the first month is to effectively join a team.
- Schedule face-to-face meetings with all team members. Find time to meet with everyone individually.
- Ask everyone “What can I do to make your life easier?” You’ll get a true indication of how your colleagues perceive the product manager role, and what they expect.
- Take a load off their back.
- Learn technical architecture in details. Ask questions or drilling down on things that didn’t quite make sense. Usually, engineers are much more impressed with product managers who are willing to ask questions.
- Do not jump in and start changing things with an extreme passion. Your ideas and thoughts will be better formed after you’ve had a chance to settle in, gain credibility, and absorb all of the nuances.
- Know your users. Go on sales calls and customer visits, take some support tickets.
- Try to fix. Set up a dev environment and ask for something bite-sized that you can do.
- Read a lot. Read anything you can get your hands on and write up what you’ve learned and how things can be improved for the next hire.
- Set some personal goals.
- Configure your support systems. Set up all your tools and devices in order and install the required software you need.
After all, everyone understands that you need some time to adapt to a new role. That’s ok to ask questions and try something new. The first month will pass quickly and you will soon become a confident and efficient product manager.