Use TAPES for Your First 90 Days as a Product Manager

Throughout my career, I have worked at small, medium, and large size companies. If I count internships, it will be 12 different companies, meaning I have experienced the “first 90 days” twelve times. As I have gone through this process again and again, I’m starting to hear good words from my manager such as “I can’t believe you’ve been with us for only two months, it felt much longer” or “I’m surprised how knowledgeable you are with the product already”.

This led me to start pondering about my past experiences and identifying the actions and elements that facilitated my onboarding process.

I’d like to share my learnings through a framework dubbed “T.A.P.E.S”. Hopefully, this framework can help you ease into your first job or PM role faster and easier.

T.A.P.E.S stands for Technical, Alliance, Processes, Engagement, and Success Drivers.

You can either use a spreadsheet or just a table to build the framework. On the left-hand side, we have the five areas. On the right-hand side, we outline the actions to be completed by 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days. Let us dive into each area a little bit deeper next.

Technical

Technical here refers to your understanding of the product, your ability to communicate with developers, and your skill to write technical specs.

By day 30,

• You should have a good understanding of the end-to-end user experience of your product(s).
• You should have reviewed the past specs and current specs of your product(s).
• Based on the specs, understand the core technical concepts introduced in the document.

By day 60,

• While reviewing the specs and playing with the product(s), you should keep a note of all the things you find confusing, disliked, and liked. This will serve as an opportunity list when voicing your opinions about the product(s).
• You should understand the technical and business challenges for the product(s) and ask why certain things are done the way they are. This should help narrow down the opportunity list.
• As you gain a deeper understanding of the product(s), pick up the related technical skills needed to understand all the lingos used.

By day 90,

• You should be able to write specs for the product(s).

Alliance

Alliance focuses on building relationships with people you’ll be working with. This includes your direct team, partner teams, and project stakeholders.

By day 30,

• You should have a high-level understanding of the teams you will be interacting with.
• Have 1-on-1 meetings with all members of your team. This may include developers, designers, data scientists, and other product managers.
• Setup a weekly 1-on-1 with your manager to go over your project status, issues encountered, and career goals.

By day 60,

• Have 1-on-1 with people on your partnering teams. Start with at least one member from each team.
• For large companies, it’s paramount to understand team boundaries. For each team, learn which part of the product they are responsible for, and what is considered outside of the scope for them.
• For products that you will be managing, list out the stakeholders. Fit them into a Power-Interest Grid to facilitate stakeholder management.

By day 90,

• To build better relationships with other teams, try to understand their team processes and the work they do.

Processes

Processes encompass the flow of work within your team and other teams.

By day 30,

• You should have learned the end-to-end planning cycle of a new feature.
• You should have a brief idea of the rollout plan adopted by the team.
• You should have spent some time playing with the tools used for project management.

By day 60,

• You should understand the drivers used to prioritize features and tasks.
• You should know how the team is collecting customer feedback and the channels used.
• Continue to explore the capability of the project management tools.

By day 90,

• You should actively engage in product planning discussions.
• Be able to effectively use tools to drive end-to-end product implementations.

Engagement

Engagement focuses on your level of input to the team and your participation within the company.

By day 30,

• You should shadow meetings, take as much note as possible.
• Actively ask questions for anything you do not understand.
• While shadowing, take notes on how other product managers are driving the conversation, learn what it means to be a product manager at your company.

By day 60,

• You should be ready to take over some of the meetings.
• Use the “new guy” card, continue to ask questions for things that are not clear to you.
• Take a look at the backlog, see if there is any overlap with your opportunity list and ask why they are in the backlog if any.

By day 90,

• You should actively engage in product planning discussions.
• Start to drive the end-to-end product implementations.
• Explore interest/culture groups within the company. If none exists, consider starting a club yourself!

Success Drivers

Success drivers can be for the company or for yourself. For the company, it indicates factors and metrics that dictate the success of a product or of a company. For yourself, it can things that you want to achieve to hit a personal goal.

By day 30,

• You should have a good understanding of the company’s goal (primary OKRs) and the team’s goal (secondary OKRs).
• You should have learned about the success metrics for your product(s).
• You should have a good understanding of the customers and users of your product(s), what are their demographics, behaviors, interests, and pain points.

By day 60,

• Draft personal short-term and long-term goals that can help you grow professionally while at the same time contribute to the company’s overall success.

By day 90,

• Continuously refine your goals and take action.

There you have it, this is the T.A.P.E.S framework. To thank those of you who read all the way to the end, here is a link to the template. Feel free to use it at your own disposal. I’d love to hear how it works for you and any suggestions for improvement. Cheers.