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Things to do in the first 30 days of your new Product Management Job
I was really pleased to find this list of key things to do in your first 30 days on a new job from blog writer Gopal Shenoy I actually think they are good things for those of us in the same old job to do.
I especially like tip number one:
Company’s vision and Business Strategy: Your focus should be to first gain a solid understanding of the company’s vision and business strategy and take stock of what exists within the company. Specifically, find answers to the following questions by interviewing internal resources:
- Company’s vision and business strategy
- What are the current hypotheses?
- What are the data points (customers, research sources, analysts, partners etc.) that have been used to arrive at the vision and business strategy?
If your job is anything like the product owners I work with, they spend 80% or more driving on current production issues or getting ready for the next sprint. They have very little time for really looking at the big picture.
We just kicked of a "Review" of one of our company's business groups to do exactly the above; we're digging in to each data point we cite and verifying if it is still valid, if the number we quote is right and what else can the numbers tell us. It's a great exercise for shaking up the thought process. Best of all, we're uncovering opportunities!
Tags: job, management, new, product, strategy, tips
Views: 65
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Mara Krieps on -
Totally agree that this is a top priority early on, and should be a recurring item even for veteran PMs to re-check, as every product plan, dashboard and quarterly review needs to overtly align with the strategy. In many organizations some sleuthing in addition to the interviews may be helpful to uncover the (current) strategy. Coincidentally, yesterday I just wrote a blog post with some related tips. Comments welcome here!
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Permalink Reply by Val on -
I have added a brand new product owner to our team of product owners. He is coming from a different part of our organization and has been interacting with our customers and our internal users of our products. It's a eye-opener to remember how much we take the basics for granted. I realized at last night's Product Camp (which our new Product Owner attended) how my own passion for product management has been rekindled. In working with the rookie, I've had to go back to basics: clear stories, clearly understood goals and the ability to communicate how we will measure. It's great.
One opportunity that we're taking is reevaluating everything and we have found simple changes that are yielding real results just because we looked! We put dev, BI, business and product owners in a room for 90 minutes. We reviewed every partner we have for a particular product and found some things had not been changed for years -- we were missing opportunities. Our assumptions were wrong in a number of places and while they hadn't damaged the business, it had kept us from growing faster and providing better service. Long live the partner review!!!
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