How To Approach Your First 30 Days in a New Role
There’s always some uncertainty around what you can and should do during your first month in a new role. You probably want to have an instant impact on your team but you lack the context or the relationships you can leverage to do so. The good news is, you’re not alone. After successfully completing 1 month in my product team at accuRx, here’s a cheatsheet (the one I wish I’d had) on how you can set yourself up for success in your new role.
Set up plenty of 1:1's
Spend the first couple of weeks setting up several 1:1 meetings with your core team members (aim for 30 mins) and anyone else you feel like talking to. Strong relationship building and people skills will help you thrive at any company.
Have a rough idea (3–5 questions) of what you’d like to learn about the person, their work, the team, or anything else. It will help you get the most out of their time and you’ll learn more about them! Here are some questions you could ask them during your 1:1’s 😀
- What brought you to accuRx?
- What made you want to become a PM/designer?
- Could you please tell me a bit more about your role?
Become Spongebob — read a lot, shadow people and teams, ask tonnes of questions
Read anything and everything you can get your hands on regarding the company, your role, what other teams are working on, and everything in between.
Ask PLENTY of questions! (why, how, what, who, when). What worked best for me was jotting them down on my laptop/notebook as and when they came up, grouping them by the potential people who could answer them for me, and booking out a 15min slot in their diary to get them all answered.
Start using the product your team is working on and recreate scenarios that users are likely to encounter to help you get a feel for the various use-cases and value the product is adding to a user’s experience.
Attend plenty of user-research calls within your team and across the company. This is the fastest and most effective way to learn more about your users and the problems they currently face.
Get outside your comfort zone
Organise a team social. It’s a great way to break the ice, have fun, be silly, get to know your team outside of work, and show that you’re keen to get stuck in!
Volunteer to run your team’s core product meetings/ceremonies (e.g. stand-ups, retros) and think of simple ways to make them more fun and engaging. I kicked off my first stand-up with a dad joke, which lightened the mood, helped me get everyone’s attention and helped start the day with a smile on everyone’s face. Here’s a fairly substantive list of meeting icebreakers.
Grab the opportunity to present at your company-wide weekly town hall meeting (sometimes called an all-hands at other companies). It’s a great opportunity to introduce yourself to the company and tell everyone about what you/your team have been working on whilst creating some hype around it! This probably sounds like the hardest one but it’s definitely worth getting your first one out of the way as soon as you can.
Get your hands dirty! You may feel slightly out of your depth during your first month; I know I did. To counter this, keep an eye out for quick opportunities to contribute to your team’s success and provide them value, fast. During my second week at accuRx, I volunteered to freshen up our team’s product roadmap, so that it was clearer and more accessible to everyone at the company. The experience genuinely brought me a lot closer to my team and instantly made me feel like I was making a difference.
Some parting thoughts — don’t overthink it, just get started and have plenty of fun while you’re at it 😀
