The first product manager of a startup plays a crucial role as one of the foundational members. S/he not only needs to quickly lay the product strategy, create short and long term roadmaps, and build development processes, but also potentially extend responsibilities wherever help is needed, including user research, marketing or even as a QA engineer.
Here are initial 30/60/90 day goals to achieve this as the first product manager:
30 days: Be open minded to listen, observe and learn
- Understand the company and its business model in depth, including history, challenges, overarching strategy and short/long term goals
- Learn the products and features to get familiar with them
- Understand company culture and dynamics
- Get to know your team and key stakeholders, including engineering, design, product marketing, operations and sales
- Learn about any existing processes and gain context on them
60 days: Identify opportunities and form a strategic plan
- Identify the problem spaces of user pain points, business challenges, technical and operational needs
- Layout the user journey to identify product opportunities
- Prioritize the opportunities, define an MVP and build a roadmap
- Identify success metrics
- Got leadership and stakeholders’ buy in
90 days: Start execution and iterate
- Form and develop a plan to work on the detailed solutions
- Test out the solutions and iterate
- Build and iterate on the progress to have an efficient eng development cycle
- Potentially build a product management team