Wow. It’s been 30 days already? Next thing I know it’ll be 60 then 90 then a year!

As a PM, I have a lot of leeway in how my schedule looks like and how I ramp up. But with all that ownership comes a lot of doubt: “Is what I’m doing with my time what I really should be doing?”, “What do I not know that I don’t know about my product?”, “Can I trust my intuition enough to make this big product decision?”

Lots of existential crises (like I don’t have enough of that already!). I wanted to take this 30-day mark to take a step back and think about the progress I’ve made in the past month & a half, against a pretty robust benchmark of how I think I should be performing per category.

I made this checklist to track my progress. I’ll track it up until my 120th day, per 30 days, so I have a good baseline of how I’m tracking towards “success”!

Superpower

• Be the expert in your product area such that people directly go to you for questions.
• Be expert and confident enough to be able to teach someone about the ins and outs of your product focus.
• Be at the level in which you can identify and form an opinion about a larger challenge or product area you think the company should pursue.

Process

• Get invited to all necessary groups, email threads, meetings, standups and Slack channels
• Setup weekly 1:1s with manager and other key peer PMs
• Theme & schedule your days so you can focus (i.e. separate for customer visits, market research, spec writing, bug watching, etc.) Have time to block out entire blocks dedicated to no-meetings – pure solitary work.

Team & Stakeholders

• Setup 1:1s with all key stakeholders (data, design, UER, engineering, strategy, PMM). Ask “How can we help each other?”
• Know which immediate stakeholders to ask to get things done and which types of questions to ask specific stakeholders
• Get demos / perspectives of the product from key stakeholders (i.e. QA, sales engineers, etc.)

Users/Customers

• Know the personas of users and customers from previous user research
• Meet and talk to actual users of your immediate product
• Setup regular cadence and/or systems to constantly receive 1st person user feedback
  • VoC/Sales calls
  • Support tickets
  • User research sessions

User Experience

• Dog food and go through the entire workflow. Document this experience.
• Setup regular cadence and system to dog food the workflow and experience. If possible, setup a demo environment.
• Break down, critique and analyze each part of the current user workflow. Document it.

Market & Competitor Landscape

• Absorb press and collect relevant information about market and competitors
• Understand how your product stacks against the rest of the market. Draw it.
• Go through the product experience of competitors. Document it.

Data & Metrics

• Map out how northstar metrics are operationalized. Memorize these metrics.
• Setup your own personalized product metrics dashboard
• Deep dive into your experimentation platform and know how to set one up.

Org & Other Product Areas/Teams

• Draw out the organizational hierarchy & memorize key people’s names
• Understand the other products & teams that your product works under and touches.
• Take to heart the larger priorities and OKRs of the org.

Personal

• Sign up for all the benefits! Get recommendations from people.
• Get comfortable with your daily and weekly routines.
• Figure out your superpower and capitalize on that in your everyday.

Growth & Mentorship

• Have a list of strong possible mentors & people who I should reach out to
• Identify 3 key sponsors/mentors (besides my manager) within the company & establish a regular cadence with them
• Operationalize meeting with a new person in the org (or going deep with someone I’ve met in the past) every week

Tools & Tips

• Create product spec template
• Organize Google drive and relevant resources/links dashboard
• Have all necessary software, demo environments, accounts setup on your device

Let’s see how the next 30 days turn out.