Onboarding as a Product Manager at a Startup
How to create a context map for creating impactful roadmaps
What I will cover and a TLDR summary
This article is about how I approached onboarding in my new job as Head of Product at VirtualMetric, a startup with 20 employees. I will share my learnings, my method and a template (in Miro).
TL;DR: I was looking at how to accelerate my onboarding as I was collecting a lot of different input. My advice is to make sure you give yourself ample time to collect information, don’t be afraid to go wide and try to understand the wider context. I would also suggest to structure (or even better: visualize) your findings and invite others to contribute and collaborate. With me, it lead to concrete follow-ups that will help me create the right context to build an impactful roadmap.
Introduction: My Journey Begins at VirtualMetric
Starting a new job, especially when it is with a new company, can be exciting and daunting at the same time. Within larger organizations, onboarding programs are common and come in many different forms or shapes. I recently joined VirtualMetric, a company with 20 employees in 2 countries. With a small startup like this, onboarding falls on everyone’s own initiative, of course with the help of everyone. That said, it is insofar not different in what you, as a PM, need to get out of your first weeks to become effective quickly. Collecting all that information and finding a way to process it can be a challenge.
My intentions for writing this article are to share my experience, hoping it can be useful to someone in a similar position. I would also love to hear from others what helped them in their first weeks. Last but not least, I promised myself to keep trying out new things, and writing was one of them. This is my first blog, ever, so any feedback is more than welcome.
Setting Expectations: The Role of a PM in a Startup
Expectations are following us wherever we go, not only in our workspace, but also in our family, friends group or sports team. They can be the source of motivation but also of great frustration, especially the ones we have towards ourselves. But luckily, the latter are the ones most easy to control. So let’s start there.
In a nutshell, what we do as Product Managers is to align everyone behind a common approach and ensuring we can provide the right outcomes as fast as possible. That by itself is already a challenge, but with startups the challenge is amplified: You just found product-market-fit (PMF) and you are convinced that you are a) heading in the right direction and b) the concrete next steps are laid out in front of you. This naturally pushes PMs towards the “deliver outcomes fast” part of the job.
What this might result in is the expectation towards yourself to start delivering fast, even within the first weeks (or days). Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing bad with wanting to ship something as soon as possible. But it if that happens at the expense of getting the big picture clear, an important opportunity is missed.
I remembered a good advice from one of the Reforge courses I took, “Product Leadership” with content from Ravi Mehta. One sections speaks about the first 90 days on a new job: (Link)
“When entering a new role, it may not be immediately obvious which problems are hard or valuable, and product leaders who have not taken the time to foster their understanding of the business are more likely to pick the wrong ones.”
One important aspect, coming back to managing expectations, is to clearly communicate your agenda to other stakeholders. Luckily, when speaking to our CEO Jimmy about my onboarding plans, he was 100% supportive.
The Starting Point: Establishing a Foundation
“Begin at the beginning”
Following the advice from Lewis Carolls’s King’s in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, I was trying to find a good starting point. Easier said than done, given the many, different options. Should I explore the company’s vision or mission? Look at the current product strategy?
The reality is, that all those elements are not arranged neatly nor linearly. They are messy, interconnected, and arranged more like a web. It is hard to look at all the pieces in isolation, you will miss the effect a bi-directional relationship has and oversimplification removes too much of context. A good example is looking at your Ideal Customer Profile and the Personas. Just because you have a company that fits your target market, doesn’t mean you will find the right buyer. Adding the Go-to-market strategy to the picture, you are immediately faced with a lot more complexity: What should Marketing focus on? Do we need a growth strategy that incorporates more user driven aspects? What does the handover between Sales and Product look like?
For solving this puzzle, maybe the full quote might give us more insight on how to approach it.
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
Maybe the end is a good starting point, a destination, our Rome, so to speak. And like all roads are leading to Rome, everything that leads to a good product is a roadmap.
There are many blogs, articles, videos and even books about roadmaps, so I am not going to add to it (at least not this time). To help answer the question “What is next?” better, I had adapted and applied another concept I learned about from Casey Winters that he incorporated in the “Product Strategy” program on Reforge.
Now that I had an “end” in mind, it felt a bit easier. By that time I had collected quite some ideas, gathered input and feedback from my new colleagues and reviewed quite some existing documents. What I needed is a way to organize my thoughts.
Bringing It All Together: Collaboration and Insights
During my introductory conversations with my new colleagues I realized that, while I was getting many insights, I also felt I wasn’t the only one looking for a better understanding about how everything we do “connects”. Folks from different departments had a good grasp on what was going on from their perspective, but how all this aligned towards Product was a different question.
The beauty and the curse of Product Management is that you are neatly sat in the middle. Everyone wants something from you, and you need everyone else to succeed. (If stakeholder management is not for you, than Product Management isn’t either ;) )
This presented a good opportunity to define the other end of it all. In other words, while I knew I needed to understand everything that will help me build a good roadmap, I need to find what it all traces back to. The one element that spans across all parts of the organization, and everyone in it, so to speak.
Being a big fan of Simon Sinek, I was immediately drawn to his concept of the “Why”. I found my starting point and had both “ends” of my map laid out. The connections were forming in my head, but how to share this with others? How can I invite the rest of my team to collaborate and contribute?
Visualizing the Journey: The Role of Miro
I am, by far, not an artist, but over the last years I found myself becoming a passionate user of Miro and have used it whenever something was clear in my head but the words couldn’t quite convey it.
Whenever I learned something new, I went back to the board. I added or changed the content I found, and started drawing connections. The current version looks like this:
Here is a quick overview of the elements that made it on the board:
- Our Why, vision, values and mission
- Northstar Metric and Product Goals
- Personas and Ideal Customer Profile
- Product Vision and Product Direction
- Product Strategy, Growth Strategy, Feature Strategy, PMF Expansion Strategy and Scale Strategy
- Relevant Gartner Reports
- Product Sequencing Matrix
If you want to give it a try, or take a closer look, then you can check out the template I have created. You can find the link in the Additional Resources section, if you find this helpful or have any feedback, please do let me know.
Next Steps: Diving Deeper as a Team
Now that we have created the map, it became apparent that some of the elements need refining. But even in this state, it proved to be useful already. For example, I could already leverage some of the insights to draft a first version of the product vision.
The other effect it had was to show the rest of the team how they can influence, or be influenced by Product. Further, it showed that the overarching elements, the Why, vision and mission for example, were something that the entire team can co-create.
As a team, we agreed to “Start with Why” and our marketing manager Patricia and I got together to create a workshop for us to find our why. She went even further and created a roadmap for further areas that we, as a team, can start looking into.
Conclusion: Lessons Learned
If you are starting a new job as a PM (or any other Product related role), onboarding can be tough. You are in the epicenter of it all, and the more context you have, the better you can impact the right outcomes.
My key takeaways from my first weeks are:
- Manage your and your team’s expectation towards what your focus is in the first weeks. Yes, you can create that urgently awaited roadmap, but whether it is as impactful as it should be is questionable.
- Don’t be afraid to go wide, apply a beginner’s mindset and ask away. Coming back to foundational topics or principles after a few months will be way tougher than digging in during the first weeks.
- Set boundaries by relating the context back to your work. Casting the net wide is helpful but at some point the additional value diminishes. There is no hard formula, trust your intuition.
- Write it down, or even better, visualize. Pictures speak more than 1000 words.
- And most importantly, share back, validate and refine. I used Miro, which combines nicely both the visualization and the collaboration aspects.
