Blazing Fast Onboarding for Product Managers

Most companies suck at onboarding—even those who don’t struggle to successfully onboard their Product Managers. The role has a wide surface area, and most folks in an organization don’t fully understand it. This wastes time, money, and talent. Is it preventable?

I’m Mirela Mus, Founder of Product People, a Product Management Consultancy on a mission to help companies discover and deliver great products faster. Our 40 full-time Product Managers help as Interims onboard in new companies every 3 to 9 months. That’s ~100 onboardings per year in Series A+ to publicly listed companies.

Below are our learnings on how to onboard fast as a new PM and show you’re adding value in two weeks. And for Product Leaders, how to not freak out your new product hires in the first weeks and how you can set them up for success.

Here are the slides and a recording of one of my talks if you prefer a different format.

What is Onboarding?

As a basic textbook definition, onboarding is how new employees acquire the knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective. An insightful way to look at this is using an illustration from Michael Watkins’ “The first 90 Days” (a recommended read!):

Michael Watkins’ “The first 90 Days.”

This graph shows that the time it takes for a newcomer to get to the break-even point in terms of value contribution (value created — value consumed) is about 6 months. Now, 6 months seems too slow and costly if we think of PMs, so we’d like to explore the quickest ways to create net value and best practices.

What’s also important to remember is that Product Manager onboarding is hard and expensive. This is not only due to the vague definition of the role and various expectations depending on the company but also because:

• Product Management has a huge surface area (e.g., business, tech, operations, etc.).
• PMs “invest” everyone else’s time.
• PMs make or break the information flow in their team and product.
• Some PMs need extensive domain knowledge to make the right bets. (e.g., fintech, medical/health tech, etc.)
• PMs must deeply understand the company’s and product’s strategic context.

Onboarding ends when the PM starts to create value, so you might be asking yourself: How do I measure the value a Product Manager creates?

There are three things we look to measure value :

1. The outcomes they help drive. These translate into the business metrics, the user experience, NPS that are (positively) affected, and the overall stakeholders and team happiness.
2. The processes they use or set up along the way. For example, the methods, frameworks, and templates put in place and the cultural approach and rituals brought into the team.
3. The speed with which they impact the above.

Consider also the context of the onboarding, as it helps to understand the approach and impact a PM can have when joining a new crew.

• If the product organization is well run, outcomes in the early weeks and months are often the result of prior good strategies and decisions. In this case, it’s better to go with the flow and adapt to what’s working, and the value created might not be a reliable measure of successful onboarding. But you can still measure day-to-day PM parameters like how much hand-holding the new PM needs to do to keep the current initiatives afloat and how much rework others need after the new PM.
• If it’s a chaotic and messy environment, the new PM can achieve faster outcomes once they’ve understood the core issues and quick wins. And bonus points await if there’s a leadership void that the PM fills just by stepping in.

Deliver Value Before You Join: The Ideal Scenario

A PM can quickly understand the problem and make a game-changing proposal in a perfect world. This short clip from the movie “The Founder” embodies this eureka moment that turns a business around by looking at the numbers and the business model.

Unfortunately, not all of us are a Harry Sonneborn that can always deliver on the ideal scenario — I know I’m not. But I found some shortcuts that help the Product People team deliver value in 2 weeks as a realistic scenario.

Deliver Value Two Weeks or Less: The Realistic Scenario

“They dealt in the intrinsically untoward, where rules were forged as you went along and were never the same twice anyway, where just by the nature of things, nothing could be known, or predicted, or even judged with any real certainty. It all sounded very sophisticated and abstract and challenging to work with, but in the end, it came down to PEOPLE and PROBLEMS.” - Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons (Culture Series)

Our metaphor for this is that a PM’s job comes down to managing People and Problems. Here is how to do it.

People:

1. Map them, understand who’s who. Detect your stakeholders and the people you immediately want to approach. Understand the team dynamics and be sure to identify the troublemakers and (political) opponents. In these cases, you might want to manage them preemptively or be ready to diffuse their actions.

Map People during the onboarding process

1. Be visible and communicative, access basic communication tools like email, Slack, or similar, and take the initiative to do personal intros with stakeholders/peers. Shoot a general intro wide and large: “I’ve just joined to help Champion on Main Quest. Please send anything on Topic my way. I may not be useful in the first days, but I’ll do my best.” (More about what the Main Quest is below.)
2. Bonus point: Add as many people from your company to your professional networks (i.e., LinkedIn/Xing) to familiarize them with your background and credentials and understand their backgrounds.
3. Get into the communication flow. Involve people, ask for feedback, and respond fast. When you don’t have “the answer,” point them in the right direction.
4. Be the 💩☂️ “umbrella” for your team when issues escalate (if it impacts your Main Quest), even if it wasn’t you who created it. Review processes and suggest some if they’re missing.
5. Announce relevant updates wide and often while praising the team. If team members are interested in sharing updates, encourage them to take the stage.

Problems
(used as an umbrella term for opportunities, issues, etc.) The Problems that are important to identify for a PM:

1. The Main Quest and Side Quests
2. Product Context
3. Company Context

Main Quest. This is what you’ve been brought in here for, “the main problem you’re solving”. Make sure you agree with your Champion about how they measure your success and what that is. Moreover, check if their boss/peers see it the same way. Misalignment happens, but you should be aware and surface them to your Champion and key Stakeholders as soon as possible.

Side Quests. Smaller projects or process improvements fall under a PM’s responsibility but are not deal-breakers if you don’t achieve them. Pursue these only when the main quest is secured and accomplished, if/when it helps stakeholders/peers to consider you successful, or if it defuses troublemakers. You can also go for them if it furthers the company’s mission and long-term goals.

Next, I advise you to look into the Product Context to help drive better decisions. To understand the Product Context, ask yourself:

1. What’s the most important Job To Be Done that this company exists to solve?
2. What evidence do we have that we’ve clearly understood the customer’s Job(s)?
3. What are the experiences of purchase and use that the customers currently have?
4. When customers choose something else, why do they do it?
5. Who is not consuming the company’s products today? How do their Jobs differ from current customers?
6. In which circumstances are customers trying to get their Jobs done? What are the functional, emotional, and social dimensions of their progress?

And finally, look into the Company Context:

Pay attention to the Process:

• What’s set in stone, and what’s negotiable? (e.g. methodology cultists vs laissez-faire)
• How do your champion/stakeholders/peers share info and updates?
• How do you get things done?
• Where’s the useful info stored? Who can give you immediate access?

And don’t underestimate the power of Culture:

• What’s the “vibe” like? How do people act when their boss is not around or involved?
• What are the no-go areas? What are the horrors of the past, aka the company’s history?

Understanding the Product and Company Contexts helps you be realistic and drive rational decisions. In the end, not all your clients want life-changing outcomes. Sometimes, the product just needs to pass the butter.

Manage People and Problems and Deliver Value Fast

Gaining a good understanding of the key People and core Problems is something you can gain within the first week if you focus on what’s most important and de-prioritize everything unnecessary. These will make you a master of fast onboarding and allow you to start creating impact from your second week on.

Don’t worry about missing out on some fun or non-core topics — if you onboard quickly, you will soon sort out the most important tasks and streamline your core responsibilities, freeing up your time to start side quests and join that board game club. 😊