Product Manager Onboarding: Set Your Team Up for Success
Background
Product roles take a long time to fill and are almost never opened proactively before a need exists - this means from the perspective of the rest of the business this person is catching up even though they just started. Resist the temptation to get a bunch of immediate work product out of your new people and get them properly set up with a thoughtful onboarding plan.
Starting With Goals
The primary goal of an onboarding plan is to get a product manager to a state of autonomous decision making as quickly as possible. The job requires making several impactful decisions every day, and as their manager you don’t want to be involved with most of them - your team doesn’t scale until they reach some level of autonomy. Change the frame of how you are building an onboarding and ask, what would they need to know to be able to function autonomously for most decisions?
I would argue the secondary goal of onboarding is to make sure all of this happens in a “reasonable” amount of time. This one is the most subjective, and the one people struggle with the most, but I find that’s actually because they didn’t focus on solving for the first two goals. Trying to make someone do this job faster without proper context is nearly impossible.
Assuming you have a qualified candidate and you dump a ton of necessary, but not super high value work on them day one (e.g. go to all of these meetings, right 20 user stories about something you don’t understand yet), they will get sucked in and never consume the context necessary to do the job well. I’m shocked how many times I find product managers who have been at companies for years and they don’t know the basics of the company financial model, they don’t talk to sales or marketing, or they are unsure how their work ties to the bigger picture.
What I have found to be successful is to put people on a very aggressive context-gathering tour in their first couple of weeks. I want them to pull in as much as they can in terms of knowledge, connections and interdependencies, and personal contacts as they can so that they have a better chance of making the right decision on their own, and knowing how to find additional data or information if they need it.
The sample plan below assumes someone that is fairly junior and this may be their first product management job. Assuming you’ve done a good job hiring based on all the factors that predict success, a qualified person without a ton of PM experience should still be able to ramp up under two months. If they have more years of experience overall or prior product experience you can frankly expect them to go a little faster or hit this plan without struggling much. The onboarding plans I’ve put together for product managers are typically written documents that are 3-4 pages in length. Once you make the first one you can reuse 50%+ from role to role, but building the first one is the hard part. Remember, the more time you invest in this person upfront, the more you will get out sooner as they ramp up.
On the PM’s first day, you should walk through this plan together, discuss why each element is in there, and specifically go over the “checkpoints” and what is expected of them. I realize some people feel like this is putting people on something that looks like a performance improvement plan on their first day, especially telling them they will have to prove that they have absorbed materials each week. The plan is aggressive, because frankly the majority of qualified PMs can do it. The small number that struggled up front had problems being successful in the role during their entire tenure and if that is the case it’s better to know early, hopefully to coach and help but also to spot potential mis-hires before multiple quarters have gone by. Be clear that the plan is there to help them ramp up, and if they are struggling with any of it, they should ask for help, but the entire company expects a lot of this role, so you need to be comfortable expecting a lot from them.
Finally, I’d say what you are expecting from them is actually just learning, not performance in the actual role (yet). If you throw people into the decision making of the role on day 1 with little to no context, while it happens plenty, you cannot fairly say they are “not ramping quickly enough.” If you give them some time to learn the necessary context before they are fully in the role, then I think it’s OK to hold a high bar during the onboarding period.
Guidance on How to Use the Template
Please use the outline below as a guide that you can customize for your new hires. Once again I based this on someone with ~5 years of work experience who is new to product management. Less overall work experience and this may be a little aggressive, more prior product experience and this may be fine or a little slow, mainly in how quickly they can jump into the day to day of the team. Overall you are trying to accomplish a few things:
They are getting customer interaction and data
They are learning their product area and the technical details
They are meeting the right people to understand how the business runs and know who to ask when questions pop up
You are setting an expectation that they need to know more than just their specific area
You expect them to self-serve and get this done
That their decision making and judgment is improving and they are ready to fly solo
I break the plan down into sections by week for the first six weeks they are on the job and then after that it’s by end of month 2, by end of month 3, etc. What follows is a rough guide to the types of things that would be included in each week. When I say “meet with” you should just include the name of the person and their title. The new PM should be getting used to making things happen and introducing themselves to new people that they’ve never met before.
I find it helpful to remind very junior PMs to no just execute on the plan, but also to be thinking about a few themes as they do:
Stakeholder Empathy - what drives others? How can you help them achieve their goals while achieving yours?
Don’t waste anyone’s time - the company is investing a lot in getting you up to speed so show up to each meeting prepared, with at least some questions ready to go
Interconnections and dependencies - learn how changes you make in the product will impact others?
PRODUCT MANAGER ONBOARDING PLAN TEMPLATE
Week 1 - Getting Started
Context
Meet with members of your triad (UX, eng lead, analyst, ux researcher) for 30 min each
Get customer calls set up for week 2
Get access to product instrumentation and analytics
Review product vision, strategy, and current high level roadmaps as well as what’s on deck for the next few sprints for your team
OKRs / KPIs that directly apply to this role
PM responsibilities - Start attending agile rituals in listen only-mode - feel free to speak up if you have some prior experience on the topic, otherwise don’t feel the need to jump in and start making calls yet
End of week 1 meeting with manager topics
Questions on vision, strategy, and roadmap
Week 2 - Information Overload
Meet with key go-to-market contacts
Product marketing contact - how do we position your product? Why?
Sales leadership (VP or director depending on company) - someone who can help aggregate feedback and give a balanced picture, help with customer introductions - how do we pitch your product? What works, what doesn’t, why?
Customer Success leadership (VP or director) - Why do people churn? What are the primary drivers of retention?
Customer Support leadership (VP or director)
Technical deep dive
Get 1 hour with the engineering lead or designee on their team
Have them walk you through the architecture, code quality, deployment pipeline, quality and test processes
What are their biggest concerns?
What parts of the code are solid, which parts break things all over the place when touched?
How has the team worked historically
PM Team
Meet with 2 other PMs on other teams - learn about how their team works, how they’ve shipped, how they measure
PM responsibilities - figure out with existing team and triad where you should start to start jumping in-flight discovery projects, story writing, etc to support the teams operations - ideally not everything at once but more feathered in over time
End of week 2 with manager topics
Based on what you learned, do you think the roadmap for your product is correct? Why or why not? Even if you agree with it, you have to explain why you do. This is key - you are starting to inspect whether the context is translating into them drawing the correct conclusions
Week 3 - Getting Hands On
Meet with business stakeholders
Finance rep - get the most senior person you can get, ideally head of FP&A or CFO at a smaller company - walk me through the whole business model and the top level KPIs that the executive and board are focused on
Executive intro - this depends a lot on the company size and culture - in general, even the most junior PM on the team has the potential to impact things positively or negatively that would affect the financials - you want to start building trust so figure out the right time and forum introduce the new person, but make sure they introduce themselves and speak to what they will be focused on.
Schedule “ride-along-time” with customer support - listening to call recordings is OK but if possible sit with the rep so you can ask follow up questions between calls
PM responsibilities - should be starting to act as the day-to-day PM at this point for the team, and begin to suggest courses of action within the triad (and back it up)<-- critical learning part - early suggestions will be bad, are they self-aware?
End of week 3 meeting with manager topics
Demo your product and explain all the features and small details
What works, what doesn’t, what’s a risk?
Explain where there are interdependencies with other teams and systems (e.g. marketing attribution, customer support, etc).
Week 4 - Market Awareness
PM Responsibilities - now acting as the day to day PM in all rituals and interactions with the team – if this has not already happened, they are now the primary POC in the company for their product area
End of week 4 with manager meeting
Part 1: Talk to me about our customers - who are they, what are their pain points, how does our product (your product area) help address those problems?
Part 2: Pitch me your product as if i was a new prospect
Part 3: Tell me why I should renew if I’m considering canceling
Part 4: Competitive / customer alternatives - what are our biggest threats?
Part 5: How and where do we acquire new customers?
Week 5 - Setting Up for Autonomy - Micro Level
End of week 5 with manager meeting - tactical level decisions, are they demonstrating the right attention to detail and using what they have learned?
For whatever is the first “new thing” you are going to work on with your team, walk me through it in detail
What is the customer problem?
Why are we solving this one?
What are the solutions we considered?
What are the dependencies on other teams / systems?
What is the communications plan?
What is the measurement plan / goals / measure of success?
Week 6 - Setting up for Autonomy Macro Level
Can they work with the triad? What’s their chemistry?
Are they able to use all of the pieces to put together a long term vision
Are they aware of bias and bla
End of week 5 with manager meeting - joint with triad members
What’s your “draft” six month direction for your product or product area?
How did you reach this conclusion?
How is this supported by customer data / research?
How will this translate to business impact? (financials)
How does this align with your specific KPIs
How is this different from the plan the team had before you arrived (or is it?) Why?
Why will this plan turn out to be wrong?
End of Month 2 - Indirect measures of positive impact
360 feedback from triad and key cross-functional touchpoints - what’s the team’s assessment on the new PM’s performance
Decision & judgment
Confidence & Humility
Ownership
Self-awareness check - asking the PM up front, where do they think they are doing well and they think they need to improve - see how it matches up with the team’s assessment
What are new insights that this person has brought to the table?
Have they changed or improved how things are done to make their team or other teams more effective?
Tangible measures of impact
Ultimately you want to get to a place where the person has shipped a few things and you can measure them for impact. How long it takes to see that can vary widely from company to company. In a small SaaS start up a PM could potentially ship a few features (small is fine) within the first two months. In some larger companies, those selling to large enterprises, or companies with a hardware element in the product, release cycles can be much longer. Either way, you should be trying to figure out as the manager, how do I objectively measure whether the output of this person (and their team) is driving measurable impacts for the business, and is that the result of good quality decision making, or luck!
