Are you looking to start your new role as a Product Manager? Check out these tips from Stephen Cognetta, a Former PM at Google, and Founder of Exponent
Congratulations! You landed your dream product management job, and are about to embark on an incredible career journey. You worked extremely hard, pouring through our course and getting help from our coaches. Now what?
Well first, we hope you’ve taken the time to celebrate with friends and family.
Now, it’s your first week and you want to put your best foot forward. Here’s Exponent’s definitive guide to acing your first week as a product manager.
Meet Your Team
Spend some time getting to know your team. This includes both your cross-functional product management team as well as your engineering and design team. Start off by walking around the office and introducing yourself (or have your manager help you do so). Then, ask your manager who some of your key team members are and schedule 1:1 coffee chats or walks with them.
For the first week, don’t focus too much on goal setting and task management. Instead, just get to know the lovely human beings you’ll be working with! This is also a great opportunity to ask any “dumb questions” you might have about how the team works, or who else you should connect with!
Keep in mind: the folks you meet will be different from company to company – rely on your manager’s guidance on who to meet, as some team members may be more or less relevant than you thought!
Meet Your Product
While you hopefully have used the company’s product before joining the company, ask the engineers on your team to help you get set up with the very latest internal beta version of the product. Play around with the internal version of the app. When looking through your product, write down:
- Features you love – make a list of what you think makes this product so awesome? What are some of the upcoming product developments that are really going to improve this product?
- Features you don’t love – why did the team make the decision to launch these features? Why did certain areas of the product not get as much product thought as others?
- Bugs – what’s broken? One of the best gifts you can give the team is a prioritized list of bugs in their beta version to help them prioritize.
- Feature ideas – as a product manager, you should invariably have some neat product ideas pop into your brain as you sift through the product. Write these down! It’s okay if they’re not high priority features, this list serves more as an internal brainstorm document as you learn more about the team. Your team will love a fresh perspective of a product from new folks.
- Questions – do you have trouble understanding how the product works in a certain use case? Write down a list of questions to ask folks as you meet the team.
Meet the Process
For better or worse, all companies operate with some sort of process. Get a sense of the major tools used by your company, specifically looking for:
- How ideas get communicated
- How decisions get made, and by whom
- How feedback is delivered
- What tools are relevant for which types of messages
Take a look through your company’s org chart – this will also help you understand how the company is structured, and which stakeholders are relevant for your product team. Every time you meet someone, get a sense for how they fit into the overall company’s organization.
Meet Your Users
Understanding users is the lifeblood of product management. In the first week, get in front of the users and build up that user empathy muscle. There are three major ways to do this.
Analytics. Chat with analysts or data scientists on your team about the best way to pore through user data. Try out running some simple database queries to answer questions you have about the product flow. A common one to start with is to brief yourself on the product’s user acquisition funnel.
User Research Teams. Some companies have dedicated user experience researchers who are responsible for running beta tests with potential users. Check out some of the documents and presentations this team has created. Think about other questions that might be useful to answer about your company’s users.
Customer Success. Your company likely has some avenue to speak directly to customers regarding customer service requests. Spend some time sitting in on customer service calls or messages. Understand how the customer success team handles these requests, and start thinking about the commonalities in customer service requests.
Consider Goals
Lastly, think critically about how you’d like to grow as a product manager. Do you want to develop your product sense? Do you want to become a better manager? Think about the skills and goals you have for yourself in your career growth, and communicate them to your manager early-on, so that your manager can find projects that are best suited to your interests.
Consider using the 10-30-50 product management development framework by Shreyas Doshi, Stripe’s Lead PM.
Above all, coming in as a curious, open-minded, and thoughtful team member will get you further than anything else. The first week is a great time to absorb information, get to know your team, your product, and your users.
Good luck with your product management career!
This post was written by Stephen Cognetta