Reduce the Ramp — Tips for your first 30 days as a Product Manager

I was about to join a startup as a Product Manager. I was really looking forward to joining a small team and trying to take over the world. As with any new environment it always takes time to adjust. In a startup, however, there is a lot of pressure to start adding value on day one as resources are naturally very constrained. It was important to me to figure out how to aggressively reduce the ramp.

To prepare, I began researching online and asking my friends what I should do. I heard about having a 30/60/90 day plan and how important it is to stick to it. The more I read, the more I started to realize that a lot of the advice out there is limiting. Much of it focuses on a list of tasks that you should check off. But life as a product manager is rarely just a task list. Sometimes startups need you to help them get the house in order. Some startups want PMs to be the product designers and marketers, while others want you to be the data scientist. Most likely, the startup will want you to do all of the above.

Don’t focus on what to do, focus on goals and defining three objectives that you think will move the needle

While you can (and should) talk to all your teammates beforehand, that alone doesn’t prepare you for life in the startup pit. You also need a plan for how to react to things you can’t prepare for ahead of time.

Here’s where I found inspiration from an unusual source: Donald Rumsfeld. He is credited with saying:

“There are known knowns … there are known unknowns … but there are also unknown unknowns.”

Disregarding its original context, this is a great framework for learning how to adjust to your first few days as a PM at a fast growing startup.

Known Knowns

This can be a task list. You should know why they’ve selected you to join the team. Focus on what’s important on day 1. There are plenty of resources and other blog posts that describe what you should do in your first 90 days. Here are some check lists and suggestions from other product managers. However, don’t just stop here, your onboarding shouldn’t be limited to a task list of what to learn — it’s the ability to figure out how things work, what is broken, and how you can step in to provide value.

Known Unknowns

From meeting and talking to various members of the team, you have a hunch as to what is and is not working. Use this new time to meet with people and get their point of view on what is working or not. This is where you flex your soft skills to try to identify those percolating issues that may not have surfaced during the interview process. At the end of the day, people are looking to do things faster, cheaper or better. Figure out what the team needs, as this can be an opportunity for you to provide additional value.

Unknown Unknowns

There are things you’ll find you don’t know that you needed to know. Often events can blindside you like a Mack truck, thundering along and leaving you speechless. Step away and try to figure out how to deal with the issue. While getting to know your colleagues and chatting with them may uncover them, more often than not these items are unknown unknowns because there wasn’t a good way to figure them out.

Unknown Unknowns can be the bane of your existence or the boon of your success. Recovering your footing quickly shows individual agility in your actions. With fast-moving startup projects, start by breaking down what kinds of decisions the “new known” will require. In The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker gives a framework for classifying decision-making:

1. Truly generic: Is this a decision that you’ve made before, and that you’re going to have to make again? A generic decision is like figuring out what to get for lunch every day — you know it will come up again and again.
2. Generic, but unique to you: This occurs often when there is asymmetric information. While it’s unique to you, it’s a common occurrence.
3. Truly unique: A decision that is truly unique to the circumstance.
4. Currently unique: Does this decision represent a new “breed” of decisions?

When blindsided by an unknown unknown, everything seems urgent. Great product managers can use Drucker’s framework to think through, break down, and categorize the decisions required by new critical information.

Once you understand more about them, document the unknown unknowns to see if there are any common threads. While there shouldn’t be a ton of them (hopefully), the idea is to determine if there are trends and misalignments in expectations across various stakeholders (engineering, design, CEO, customer service, sales).

I created a simple google form for myself to document whenever I run into something where I was blindsided or the outcome was drastically different than I had expected.

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Starting a new job is never easy. Doing it as the first PM hire at a startup doesn’t make it any easier. With pressure to meet expectations and the desire to beat expectations, it’s not an easy route to navigate. However, by focusing on these goals:

1. Tackling known known
2. Digging for potential known unknowns
3. Stepping back and categorizing unknown unknowns that flare up

You may just be able to provide the value that you were hired to do.