📣 You don't need a big win in your first 90 days

👋 Hey Friends!

There's a specific flavour of panic that shows up around week two of a new product job, and if you've felt it you know the exact one I mean. It's the internal dialog that everyone in every meeting is figuring out whether you're actually any good at this, and that the fastest way to settle the question is to show them you know exactly how the job is supposed to be done.

So in my first 90 days, I set out to make the roadmap and backlog run perfectly.

Not better.

Perfectly.

I rolled in a whole new planning system, and then, because apparently one system wasn't enough to prove myself, a scoring model to go with it. I had frameworks for the frameworks. I was going to do this job entirely by the book.

By day 100 I had thrown most of it away.

Because here's what the book doesn't tell you.

A brand-new planning system is a solution to a problem the team hadn't agreed they had, handed down by the one person in the room they didn't trust yet, me.

I'd spent three months optimizing a process nobody asked me to touch, for a team whose actual way of working I'd barely bothered to learn. (And talking to customers? Not nearly enough. I have never once, not one single time, regretted talking to more customers.)

Watch how decisions really get made, who people trust, where the real bottleneck lives, for a few weeks before you introduce a single new process. If you're itching to roll out a system in month one, that itch is almost always your anxiety talking, not the team's problem. Sit with it. Learn first.

No agenda, no deck, just genuine curiosity about what's hard for them. If someone raises an eyebrow at you slowing down to talk, tell them every roadmap call you make afterward will be grounded instead of guessed, and then go make that true.

Find the smallest thing customers keep grumbling about, the one support is exhausted from answering, and fix that. Finishing something tiny in week three tells people more about you than promising something huge in Q3 ever will.

Find the engineer or designer or CS rep drowning in some recurring nonsense you can just remove. Clear one headache for one person and you've turned a stranger into someone who says your name warmly in rooms you'll never be in.

A short weekly note. Here's what I heard, here's what surprised me, here's what I'm going to do about it. If you're not sure something's worth sharing, that hesitation is usually the sign that it is.

Your first 90 days aren't the audition, you already got the part. What's actually happening in those weeks is slower and more human than proving you know every framework. The team is deciding, one small grounded move at a time, whether your judgment is the kind they can lean on. You don't earn that by doing everything by the book. You earn it by being a good teammate, staying close to the customer, and letting people watch you learn before you try to lead.

Start by learning. Start close to the customer.

So, honest question: what's the process you're itching to fix in your first 90 days, and what would happen if you learned how the team worked first instead?

P.S. Not everyone reading this is in a PM seat yet, and booking a call can feel like a big step when you're still finding your footing. So if you'd rather start smaller, come join the community of career changers and early PMs working through this exact stretch.

And when you want someone to look at your specific situation, my calendar is always open.