Onboarding Notes for A New Product Manager Job

If hiring is the most important thing for a company to do, then onboarding is the most important thing to do after the most important thing.

Once, I had a bad onboarding experience. I did something without knowing that certain tasks needed layers of approval. It’s something that can be avoided if the company, managers, and the new employee themselves have a certain checklist to help them to survive the first few days of their life at the office.

This is a living article for product managers to help them going through their onboarding process and get the best out of it. I started writing this because I’m moving to a new job and have been thinking about what I should do when I start. It’s also based on my small experience in onboarding product managers for the last few years and several discussions with fellow PMs.

Kindly comment so this article can have better validation from different point of views.

And here’s a spreadsheet document that you can use as a template. The usage of the sheet will be explained along with the writing.

source: KR Jogja

Understand the Goal

The point of this part is to make sure we’re performing well on our job. We should be judged by how we strive to attain our goals. A good organization will state it clearly through systems like OKRs. But a lot of times, the system is a bit blurry and it will depend on the subjective view of the stakeholders. That’s why understanding goals, the true goals and the mirage ones, should be the earliest thing to do.

Decide your first 3 months’ goal, plan achievable milestones for each of the months, and make it more detailed for the first month. Do it based on OKRs and people’s expectations.

Talk with all of your adjacent peers and uppers to gather their expectations. Ask them what are things that they’re expecting from you (objectives), the outputs (action plan), and the timeline for that. Refer to this sheet on the second tab for reference. Also, read SMART goal setting to understand the fundamental ideas of this step.

If you’re feeling awesome and looking to be much more strategic, also do this checklist:

OKRs

• Past OKRs and its achievement
• Current OKRs and its current status
• OKRs dependency with other teams and cascading model
• OKRs decision-maker and thought process

Expectation

• What and when of the direct report’s expectation
• What and when of the peers' expectations (PM, UXR, Data, Eng, UXD)

Vision

• The company’s vision
• Specific product’s vision
• Estimated current position to the vision

Strategy and Planning

• Study the current quarter strategy and the previous quarter
• Study the existing project on the pipeline
• Study the product strategy framework

Understand the Data

Can never reach the goal without understanding our current position. Understanding the usual data and how it correlates to each other is mandatory for the first few days.

First thing first, get access to the main BI dashboard. Things like Metabase or Looker. Learn to navigate the dashboard. If somehow the BI team in your company is kind, get a one-on-one session with them to build rapport and run through the dashboard.

Next, also understand the event structure for the app and the tools being used to track them (tools like CleverTap, Amplitude). Usually, the event structure will be documented in a certain sheet and you can just use it whenever you need to read specific data.

Lastly but important, understand the data request process from the BI/analyst team. Learn how to write a request brief and the cadence process.

Oh ya, gather data understanding from the weekly or monthly report works too. It’s commonly happening: the business team is not relying on the BI dashboard and rather use a certain sheet for data visualization. That’s why knowing which report document to monitor here is important.

Surely if you’re feeling strategic, cross this checklist too:

Business Data

• Revenue-related data to understand the magnitude
• Business growth to understand the momentum
• Read quant research report, especially which related to OKRs

User Data

• Traction growth to understand the product stage
• Retention-related and engagement-related data to understand user’s stickiness
• Monetization-related data to understand the value model
• Acquisition-related data to understand growth model

Understand the User

Who are we without our users? We can find unique perspectives that cannot be shown by the data by diving deeply into the world of our users. It’s what is generally expected of product managers too. To discover new insight that has never been seen before. Start with the big picture and dig into the smaller nuggets.

Generally, PMs are expected to just deliver a project. Someone throw some ideas, they need to measure the impact and effort, and make sure it’s being executed. Even if somehow the PM is unsure about the impact, it will be hard for them to criticize the idea because they don’t have user literacy. They don’t know about the user better than the stakeholder or anyone above them.

We as PM must be aspiring to become more strategic. In many cases, being strategic can simply mean you understand the user better than people in the room. Then you can fight the thought process of the idea then shape it according to your insight.

Start drawing some simple value proposition canvas: pain, gain, value. Then call your users to understand how they’re coming to your platform, what’s their Aha moment, their complaints, and so on so forth. Your research team might have something similar, but the experience of talking with users is irreplaceable.

Oh ya, simple competitor research works too. Use Kano Model to map comparable value/features so you can understand how you are compared to competitors. See which features that suppose to give real value to users and which are that only act as delighters. Find the simple example on the third tab of the previous sheet.

General User

• The segments and personas
• How they contribute to engagement and revenue

Specific User

• The segment and personas of your specific product scope/domain
• How they contribute to engagement and revenue
• Study the user’s journey and empathy map

Research

• Read generative/foundational research report
• Talk to users
• Read customer services report and talk with the customer service team
• Do competitor’s research and use Kano Model to map the features

Understand the Process

To thrive well, we need to play with the existing playbook. We may or may not change the playbook, but the most important thing is to be able to operate well the already operating machine.

Arrange an intensive one-on-one with one of your peer PMs to scrutinize the product development cycle. Understand what seemingly small details such as the engineer communication preference (meeting, async, DM, etc.), which data analyst is the most responsive, so on and so forth.

Get a one on one with the engineers and the designers too. Build rapport and do a simple retro with them. You’re gonna know what’s nice about the current process and what needs to be improved.

Business Alignment Process

• Strategic document and cascading model
• Strategic and tactical rituals
• Decision-making process and alignment

Product Development Process

• Collaborating with researchers
• Collaborating with data team for analysis
• What when how with engineers
• What when how with designers
• PRD template
• GTM template
• Internal product development team cadence ritual

Understand the Politics, Relationship, and Culture

Not necessarily how to gain power. But how to reduce noise, align well, and working with more focus. Managing stakeholders is one of the main jobs for several PM positions. So knowing the politics is important.

Also, we will always need someone’s help in doing our job. Whether it’s in development, deployment, and in crafting strategy, everything is related to the other’s concerns.

Don’t hesitate to arrange one on one even with your distant peers such as PM from a different group. You would want to be friends with as many people as possible. It’s important to make yourself feel welcomed and understand few tricks to survive. With the pandemic around and fewer offline face-to-face moments, it can be quite cold. Everyone seems so busy working and less bonding. So build your own bond.

Get to know about the culture too. Understand simple things like what kind of discussion that they prefer. Is it DM? Or maybe a thread discussion? Or skip them all, let’s jump into a meeting! I wasted few weeks of my time trying to do async discussion both in channel and DM. Turned out the only way to get other's attention was to get them into a meeting. It may not be cool, but it needs to happen anyway.

• Who to talk to, when, and how (org structure, RACI, playbook)
• Read business org structure
• Past projects review and retro
• Company’s incentives model for each role
• Team’s social rituals
• One on one with high-level stakeholder (if necessary) to understand their expectation
• One on one mid-level stakeholder to understand their expectation
• One on one with the UX leader
• One on one with the engineering leader
• One on one with the data leader