Product Marketing 30/60/90 Day Plan

The first 2 PMM's are going to wear many hats and serve many masters. There's unfortunately no way around that given the breadth of the function. The biggest tension is striking the balance between supporting product, supporting sales, and establishing an operational cadence for go-to-market (GTM) within the organization. I believe that a pod of 3-4 PMMs is really when the team can start hitting its stride by working across insights, GTM, and sales enablement. Until then, there are always going to be many competing priorities and the need to do more with less. My best advice for how to advocate for more resources: 1) Address the pain points of your functional leaders in sales and product. "If I had one more person, this is what I'd be able to do for you and your team..." Having 2 functions go to a C-level advocating for a full-time hire is a lot easier than 1! 2) Address the pain points of the business. "Churn is a real problem at the company and here are the initiatives that product marketing can do to support that..." Speak in terms of overall business KPI's vs. tactics or functional responsibilities 

The first PMM must provide a ton of value for the company. Generally speaking, it's value measured by impact on revenue. They also need to get along with other stakeholders (sales, product, CS, marketing). Lastly, they need to have execuitve sponsorship. That's the trifecta all PMMs should strive for.

To scale any team you want to do it thoughtfully, and have a clear plan in place before you go on a hiring binge.  * Have the right foundation in place before you bring on more PMMs. For instance, have the basic tools or processes in place because once you scale your team, it's much harder to define those. For instance, a GTM process, a basic messaging framework, etc. * You also want to make sure that the role of PMM in your org is clearly defined and communicated throughout. It's important to first establish what the roles and responsibilities of this team should be /will be so that when you hire new people, there is no ambiguity in what they are responsible for. * Create your ideal org chart, regardless of the headcount you do have, and then prioritize the roles that are the most critical and focus on hiring those first. This will vary for each org and depend on the current priorities of your organization, but it's important to have an idea of how you want to structure the team, and how they will work with each other as well.

Hire contractors to fill in gaps as they pop up and if they are rockstars and you find yourself with open head count, convert them to full time. Know what your weaknesses are and hire PMMs who balance those. Hire PMMs with different superpowers – you want a well rounded team. PMM teams are in constant reorg pending what our marketing, product or sales teams are doing, given we support them all. You will want PMMs with different skill sets to be able to dive in quickly when needed. Spend time developing your PMM’s into full stack ones who can then hire and train junior ones. If you know you will be hiring several headcount and scaling quickly, hire your senior roles first so that they can help hire your junior roles. It is harder to hire your junior role first, then put a senior person between you both. Also, if you have junior and senior JD’s (job descriptions) out at the same time, everyone is going to want to apply to the senior role.

One effective way to scale a PMM team is to understand what the business needs and align PMMs to support those needs or goals. But, what a business needs can range from gaps in employee skill sets to stalling revenue growth.  For example, * Is your business investing in entering a new vertical? Maybe they need PMM support in understanding the market dynamics and consumer behaviors in that industry or space  * Is your Product team building new feature bundles or entirely new product suites? They might need customer research to support product development, pricing, or go-to-market support when the product is ready to launch.  * Is there a product or feature that is struggling to get adoption? Is your sales team aware of their target customer? Are they enabled with product and feature knowledge that helps them communicate the value?  You can start with looking for the gaps in the organization that PMMs are uniquely positioned to fill and fill them. Or, look for goals that aren't being met and try to deliver on them. Or, find a growth opporunity that the business may want to double down on and support that growth Anytime you can add value to an organziation, your team will likely scale. 

I believe that adding more people to your team needs to follow the needs of the business. This means making sure you can break down the goals or OKRs that you, as a PMM leader, is responsible for and outlining the key initiatives that will help you achieve them. Part of this exercise is to also identify what you can and what you cannot do with the current team. For example, you may list out things such as "create competitor battle cards, conduct win/loss analysis, write 3 new whitepapers, implement a new campaign strategy". Great, you have all of these key initiatives that you have connected with key business goals. Now, who on your team will do that? If you only have one person reporting to you, there's only so much you two can do. The next step then is to explicitly call out what you will NOT be able to do. A good idea is to put your plan on a page with items that are your high priority and items that fall "below the line", i.e. not enough resources to execute. As you share this with your boss and the rest of the executive team at your company, one of two things will happen. You will either be told OK, we understand there are things you won't be able to do and we don't have the budget to get you more help; or you will then be told OK, we see that you need more people to help execute!  So getting back to the question about scaling the team, I believe that if you are able to make a case for more resources and you get the budget to hire one, two, three, or more people for your team you gotta think about them in terms of what key priorities they will have so that you can look for the right skills to hire. Make sure that as your team scales your contribution to the business grows proportionally and you will be able to scale the right way.

Make sure every early hire you go for has a clear "mission" - what are you going to get from that person. What problem are you going to target them at. Once you start to get past hiring to solve specific problems - refer to my other answer about how you think about coverage of market / product intersections, that's where you start to get scale.

This depends a lot on the companies business goals. In the beginning you'll be on the hook to support the GTM with assets so focus on content creation. It's pointless trying to be too strategic in the early stages. Look to the exec team for priorities and focus on the most important use cases and value drivers your GTM needs help with.  As the team grows think about the best way to support your messaging and positioning. Is if easier to focus on the personas for your product (good when there are multiple buyers) or to focus on value pillars (good when the solution is more complex). That gives a blueprint for how to start to organize your team. 

It's tough to answer broadly as different business will have different needs but if I were to pick one area that PMM can uniquely add value its: A compelling understanding of the customer. There are so many teams that have knowledge & insight into the customer but PMM is in a unique position to synthesize customer insight across several areas including product, sales, success, support, market & competition and more. It takes a ton of work and time to develop this level of customer knowledge but if you are able to build it, you will be among a small group of people that can credibly represent your target customer. No matter what topic is being discussed or who is in the meeting room, when someone says "I've spent time with 8 customers, 3 analysts and our sales team this month and this is consistently what I'm hearing", there is very little that can challenge that. So, know your customer well. Know why they hire your product, know what problem it solves for them, know how big of a problem it is, know what benefit it provides, know why they don't churn, know how they buy. Know it all. Know your customer and you'll be able to add lots of value.

Understand the needs each leader has as they will be different from your CEO to your CFO, CRO, CMO (personas), etc...and mental map what value you can bring through your playbooks, framework and content (customery journey). You are bascially running your own integrated marketing campaign and you are the product. Launch yourself with the right data and strategy that you would want for a successful product launch.  Build relationships and find your champion in each of their orgs. I talk more about managing different stakeholders here.    When you present your ideas, make sure you aren't going in cold and that it isn't your first time presenting it. You should have practiced it at least 3 times, already presented it to your champions for feedback, iterated on it and label it draft. By the time you get to your leaders they should've already heard about it from someone else. I talk more about consenus building here.   When you see one of your leaders and are chatting with them in the office, on zoom or elsewhere -- use this opportunity to present your ideas as questions and get feedback and their thoughts. This will help shape your ideas and keep you aligned with them. Don't let those micro interactions go to waste, they are very valuable! Be prepared with a list of questions you want to ask them and chat away. 

In order to add value, you need to first consider the priorities of the business and the leadership team. You could be doing some pretty great work, but if it doesn't advance the business's priorities it will likely get wasted. Once you're doing work which aligns to the business goals, its a good idea to set goals on a quarterly basis.  At the end of each quarter or project, put together a summary of the improvements you made, and review it with business leadership. If you have a team be sure you're setting your team up for these opportunities too. Often times these presentations become very long and wordy. Avoid this. A simple deck with key results and objectives should get the job done. Once you're ready to go to your next job and want to highlight everything you accomplished, you will have all these decks to look back on as a reminder.

Stakeholder management is an important skill of all PMMs. If you're actively driving an important program or initiative, there are a few tactics you can try out. 1. Organize, structure, and lead regular "cadence meetings" - For cross-functional initiatives, people often don't want to volunteer to be the program manager. If you're willing to put in the work and set up the calendar invites, manage the agenda, run the meetings effectively, and foster healthy participation and collaboration - you'll dramatically increase your influence. These are opportunities to speak up and share ideas. Not an easy thing to do. 2. Reporting - Every important project will require some level of reporting. If you provide transparency at the right level and offer consistent reports on a regular cadence, you can surface issues early and gain visibility. Again, reporting is not often seen as a fun thing to do. 3. 1:1s - You may get shot down but it doesn't hurt to set up a monthly or quarterly 1:1 with senior leaders to get feedback and mentorship. It's not a daily tactic but if you rotate through key senior stakeholders you'll build rapport over time. 4. Customer feedback - There's feature feedback that will come through the software but that doesn't capture customer feedback at the sales level. Sales teams often struggle to collate and prioritize feedback on why they lost a deal. As PMMs, you can help make this a regular report back to the leadership team with ACV numbers attached. Hugely influential. The other effective thing you can do is deeply understand your persona, solution, product, market, industry - whatever. Become a subject matter expert (SME). Be the person people come to for insights and expertise. There's no quick fix for this. You have to be willing to put in the time to study the market, talk to experts, talk to customers, and get close to the sales team.

* Having been through several of these at a few different companies, the advice I would offer is that for joint-sessions focus on the biggest impact announcements (e.g., new product demos, fireside chat with a major customer w/ Q&A, new company vision/mission, etc.), and make sure to put the time, effort, and energy into producing the content for these sessions--these assets can all be reused, and it’s an easy way to get the team excited. Have these sessions be less about Q&A and more of a one-way street in terms of content going out to the audience is typically better for everyone in the room. * The individual team sessions should be used to focus on what’s relevant to those teams so that you can get focused Q&A that will be valuable to everyone in that room. Share wins/losses/learnings from big deals/top reps, train on new processes or collateral (e.g., pitch decks), go over new comp plans or territories (these probably need their own day to cover…).

Yes, at VMware this is called Sales Kickoff. It usually consists of sales, technical pre-sales, professsional services and customer success gathering for a few days to discuss the company's strategic priorities, solution areas, product positioning, roadmaps and relationship building. It is split out by the functions above to dive deep into each phase of the customer lifecycle. 

FKO, SKO, RKO, AKO to ZKO, put whatever letter in front – they are all company kickoffs. Sales teams are now being called Revenue teams –- I've also seen marketing departments rolling up into a larger Revenue org. Take the stakeholders going (personas) and map their typical and ideal work flow (customer journey). What information, resources and content do they need to be successful at their job? Your answer is your RKO Schedule. Not sure? Talk to them and interview the most successful ones in each department. How do you replicate them? Take the data and plan out your sessions around what they do and their needs that ensure they are successful at their jobs. Do they need to know the product roadmap, message, positioning, personas, competitors, marketing campaigns, how to manage prospects/customers, do a first call, do a demo, work with services or partners, create a quote, negotiate with prospects, draft a legal contract, ensure compliance…etc? If yes, then there should be a session for it. If some personas overlap on their needs, those are your joint sessions. If there are unique needs, those are separate sessions.

We recently held a GKO (GTM Kick Off) with Sales/CS; Marketing attended the ones that were most relevant for them. Here’s a rough schedule: Day 1: CRO kick off, Marketing 2022 Roadmap, Customer story 1, Product 2022 Roadmap, Sales Methodology / Rev Ops, 1st Call Deck training, Customer story 2 Day 2: Pop quiz, Customer story 3, Product demo training, Competitive workshop, Discovery questions session, Storytelling workshop, X-func. panel discussion (topic could be how you use your own product) Day 3: QBR / breakouts for each group. Breakouts could be by function (Sales, CS), by segment (SMB, MM, Ent), industry, etc. In the past, we’ve invited a few customers to join our SKO and the Sales team loved it!! There’s nothing like hearing directly from our customers on they use your products/solutions.

30 days: Balance being an absolute sponge and learning by doing. Be a sponge by reading every doc you can get your hands on (enablement materials, case studies, team quarterly/annual plans, research studies, etc.), talking to as many prospects and customers as possible, and scheduling 1:1s with both stakeholders and company leadership. Learn by doing by getting involved in low-risk, low-hanging fruit activities where a PMM touch is needed but perhaps don’t require a ton of context. 60 days: Hopefully you’ve gained enough context by 30 days to start to get an idea of what the big challenges and opportunities are at the company. My goal is to have identified a couple of “base hits” that I can deliver by days 60-90 that can demonstrate tangible results against things that a key stakeholder cares about like the CMO, a Sales VP, or a product manager/leader who is a respected influencer within the product org. Identifying and delivering these base hits gives you an early platform within the organization of visible results and relationships that can open doors and give you the room you need to set an ambitious vision and plan for the function. 90 days: Delivering a POV on both the role you want to carve out for the PMM function (see my answer on surprises about moving to a smaller organization) and the initiatives you hope to tackle in the coming quarter. If you’ve done the homework of gaining context as a sponge, delivering one or two meaningful base hits, and winning the trust and endorsement of a couple influential stakeholders, you’re much more likely to get buy-in on your plan/POV and the latitude to actually start getting to work on building the PMM function as opposed to just executing on stuff people throw your way.

I'll "yes and" Gregg's answer and say that this will really vary by company size and complexity. I was at a startup where my 30-day goals included creating buyer personas and enabling the sales team to talk to the decision-makers. So it was more like a 10-20-30 day goals as described below.   At SAP, the organization is so sprawling and complex that the my goals were actually 60-120-180. I've been with the company for almost a year and I'm still getting introduced to some of the far-flung enablement teams spread across the globe.   The key is to set some measurable goals against appropriate milestones.

Now this is a fun challenge. Assuming you did your homework during the interview process, you should have a good idea of what you're getting into. That doesn't mean you won't find some skeletons lurking behind close doors. Rather you should understand how the team views product marketing, what kind of executive support you can expect, and their expectations of you.  With that mind, here are a few key things I would want to accomplish after 90 days. * Everyone knows what product marketing does and what we're responsible for. That means internal evangelism and roadshows. You will need to educate internal teams on product marketing and get everyone on the same page. Don't assume they have the same definition. You define and evangelism it with executive support. * Get product marketing added to the cross-functional agenda specifically product and sales teams. It's crucial that you're seen as a leader within these teams. * Find and knock out any quick wins. This will make you look like good and earn respect among other teams. People want to work with A-players and people that can count on to get shit done.  * At the end of 90 days, you should be prepared to present a long-term strategy of how why we're gonna win. Depending on the company, long-term could be a year, 6 months, or a quarter. Whatever that timeframe is I would want to see a presentation outlining our go-to-market strategy. Lastly, be sure to check out a new Sharebird podcast launching in late January 2021 called Thrills & Chills where I interview first product marketers and those who have established product marketing in company. 

One of the best pieces of advice I got before joining Hopin, was to take the necessary time I needed to be a "sponge" and let things soak in, before going straight into "solve-mode". Of course, that's easier said than done :)  When joining any startup as the first product marketer, you'll be getting requests from every angle from week 1(and sometimes before you even start!) - and that's especially true with PMM, because it is such a cross-functional role. This is what I've found to be helpful:  30 days: understand both the tangible and intangible working cultures of the company. How are decision made? Who are your main stakeholders? What is top of mind for each of them, and where is there overlap? Also use this time to develop your own "Product Marketing Charter" to do a bit of a roadshow and help others understand your mission and responsibilities (remember, PMM is still a fairly new concept for many!)  60 days: identify some quick win projects to start building your brand and help the company start to understand the value of PMM (develop sales one-pagers, put in a better release process, start tiering your feature releases, etc...) Also take this time to identify the tools and resources you need in order to do your job successfully.  90 days: by the 90 day mark at most startups, you're on OG! Embrace that feeling and remember that more likely than not, no one at the company knows more about product marketing than you do. Present your big ideas and long-term plans to your stakeholders, and see what resonates to help you prioritize where to execute first. This is also a great time to ask for any additional resources or headcount you need in order to do your job successfully. 

Product Marketing’s superpower is being the “Voice of the Product to Customers and the Voice of Customers to Product.” When establishing PMM as a new function, the best place to start is listening. First 30 days: Listen and truly get to know your Customers and the Product.  On the Customer side, what this looks like practically is spending as much time in the early days reviewing Help/Support tickets, reading through research reports, sitting in on focus groups/interviews -- anything you can to get close to the Customer. Even if you’re a Customer yourself, you’ve got to fully understand the range of customers your product attracts and why. Who are the power users? Who are the churned users? What experiences are the most delightful? The most painful?  Engage with Product to understand what’s most top-of-mind for your team. How is the product best used today? Are there unexpected ways customers have learned to use your product? What aspects of the customer experience are the most challenging to solve?  First 60-90 days: Build the shared plan (see previous question) that addresses the company’s short-term, most pressing, PMM needs while building a PMM team that will drive longer term success for the business.

30 days: Prioritize understanding your customers, your product, and your company:  * Shadow customer calls (or listen to recordings if they exist). * Get to know your cross-functional partners - schedule time with people from product, sales, marketing, engineering, design, etc. This will help you understand areas of opportunity as you establish relationships internally.  * Learn about your product - get access to a sandbox account, read the documentation, read case studies, etc. * Educate your company on what product marketing is and how other teams can work with you.  * Ask a lot of questions!  60 days: Plan and validate * Based on what you've learned, start creating a plan for what you and your team should prioritize over the next quarter and year. * Share your plan and priorities broadly to get feedback and adjust your plan based on that feedback. * Develop a hiring plan and start recruiting.  * Continue meeting with customers, teammates, etc.  * By the end of 60 days, try to get a quick win out: revamp the pitch deck, launch a new product/feature, etc.  90 days: Execute and refine  * Focus on hiring and recruiting - the PMM market is really competitive and recruiting takes time.  * Continue meeting with customers, teammates, etc. Product marketing is one of the most cross-functional roles - your cross-functional relationships are really important.  * Continue to share your plan, progress, and accomplishments. 

PMM wears so many hats it's important to recognize what is needed at any stage of a company. When first coming into an organization as the first PMM I think the most important thing to do is establish what does and doesn't exist - and where the biggest holes that can be plugged are. This can be accomplished by interviewing the top stakeholders at your company: Sales, Product, Support to understand what is working and where the pain points are. From that, you can build a list and prioritize it accordingly. Using something like an Eisenhower Matrix exercise can be a great way to knock out things that have to happen - maybe you also pick a few "easy wins" to support the team right away. That being said, I think when starting at a company as an initial PMM you have to square away certain areas before beginning others - the #1 thing you have to do first is to talk to users, active, churned, big, small - this will inform a lot of your next steps - I think next comes positioning, which entails competitive analyses as well, then some level of sales enablement, which is a part of a larger GTM initiative.

Oy! First, good luck! I have done the "first" before. I don't think you have the luxury of 30/60/90. I think it's more like 30 days to identify the problem and tackle easy wins. Sixty days build out a basic launch framework, then a GTM strategy, align both with leadership. Then 90 days to test and what you build and revise based on market feedback. My advice is to prioritize like crazy. 

Please see my phases of success for a PMM in your first 100 days here . A KEY THING to know at the onset is, does everyone know what a PMM does and what value they bring? Ask all leaders and cross functional partners. Product Marketers are the marketing strategists, the brains of marketing, the connective glue between cross-functional partners, the ones who support a company's internal teams, the market, and target customers to achieve competitive advantage, increase users, adoption, find a path towards monetization and build customer lifetime value, we are a strategic function that aligns stakeholders to drive business growth, product usage and customer lifetime value -- you pick your definition. If they do not know this, then you become the product and you need to product market yourself ASAP. You need to have a strategy, narrative and deck to gain a position in the mind of all your co-workers (personas) so they know what value you bring and the power of having a PMM on board to collaborate with them. Then, identify your quick wins and crush them. This is the scenario I've seen too many times when the above doesn't play out right...the startup is struggling with hitting their numbers and layoffs begin. PMM's can be first or last on the chopping block. I've seen PMM's be the first to get laid off. OR I've also seen, PMMs be the first executives will call upon to be the strategists to help steer the ship back: I.e. redefine our persona and target customers, relook at our TAM/SAM, roll out a new position and message to win market share, identify where in the customer journey we are falling short, figure out a new pricing strategy to stop the bleed on churn, help enable the field better to understand complex problems and identify sales signals better etc...

The first 90 days are crucial to any job, but especially for new product marketing leaders. This is the time to establish your credibility, build relationships, and layout team roles that will set your function up for success for the months to come. Here’s how I break down my priorities by month: First 30 days – Assess the current state and product roadmap Look at my response below regarding the 3 prior deliverables that I review when joining a new company. But, in general, here the goal is to understand what the immediate internal pain points are. Start with looking at what audience research exists, reviewing existing customer messaging and landing pages, and understanding the acquisition funnel. You should also use this time to become intimately familiar with the product roadmap. From here, you should be able to identify some quick wins as well as some areas for strategic, step-change impact. Lastly, use your newness to inquire about current roles and responsibilities of product marketing and stakeholders’ thoughts on how that could evolve. This provides important intel for influencing RACIs down the line and identifying which people or functions may be aligned with your vision. 30-60 Days – Begin Establishing Processes and Adding Value From your first 30 days, you should already have a sense of where some acute pain points from an external positioning and internal operations perspective. This period is now focused on showing value by getting in some quick wins. This could entail a quick messaging refresh, establishing a GTM tiering framework for different product releases, and/or some sales enablement collateral. This will be critical for gaining credibility and winning partnerships with other teams. 60-90 Days By this time, you should be ready to roll out your team charter and RACI. Results come first from the quick wins, but you don’t want to wait too long to get your working model and flows aligned. This is the time to start to communicate your larger vision for product marketing. This step should likely come in 30-60 days if you are at a larger organization. But at a startup focusing on delivery in less controversial areas wholly owned by PMM first will set the right tone. Additionally, here’s where I would kick off a larger strategic initiative or big bet for your team, such as a revamp of the customer segmentation or a new market entry strategy.

- Retros on strategic projects, especially those with cross-functional teams so you can identify previous learnings and opps for improvement, and quickly get up to speed on legacy experiences  - Centralization of customer feedback; can you do some quick analysis and theming of it to start to form an objective opinion on customer experiences based on data  - Pricing history; what has happened in the world of monetization before you to understand if there's revenue opportunities on the table as early wins 

1. Positioning 2. Messaging 3. Personas / Competitors Always focus on the top 2 first, as this will impact how everyone talks and writes about your company – which ultimately brings in users and wallet share. Good templates for positioning and messaging are here. And these are different, PMMs control positioning through our messaing. Positioning creates an image of our product in the mind of customers. Messaging uses words that help customer understand our value, brand promise and desire for our product.  Then dive deep into your personas and competitors -- use this data to iterate on your positioning and messaging. Sometimes if you are a first mover, you may not have many competitors yet, then look at Personas 3rd. Or, if you are in a crowded space, knowing the competitors become more important, that’s why I put these both as #3. Depends on what you are walking into. Also, you need a base level understanding of these both in order to do your initial positioning and messaging.  Beyond these top 3, knowing your ICP, TAM, SAM is important too and impacts all of the above. Each step here creates more iteration of your top 2.

As I mentioned in the question regarding your first 90 days, the first 30 days are all about establishing a baseline and assessing the current product marketing status. The first 3 things that I look for when onboarding are: 1) Audience strategy and research. Here I want to understand what’s known about the customer and their jobs-to-be-done. Specifically, personas and segmentation as well as any research related to acquisition and why customers purchase the product. This may also include any prior win/loss interviews and doing your own quick interviews with sales. 2) Current messaging. Look at as much of the customer-facing messaging as possible. This includes highly trafficked landing pages, sales collateral, recent campaigns, and messaging hierarchy templates. 3) Funnel and Lifecycle Performance Data. Here I am looking to understand what the major drop-off points are and the shape of the customer lifecycle. This helps identify areas for potential quick wins and gives you an early perspective on the typical sales or conversion cycle.

Definitely product management, to understand the blurry demarcation company to company between those 2 positions such as customer exposure, pricing/competitive analysis and salesforce training. Sales management and CRO, sales ops, marketing functional owners (digital, automation, ops) and customer support even to name a few. PMM can be purely tactical or it can be very strategic, depends on company culture relative to PM and the individuals in the seats. 

Research and get smart on your positioning, message, personas, competitors, customer journey, ICP (ideal customer profile), market sizing with TAM (total addressable market), SAM (serviceable available market), SOM (serviceable obtainable market). Know your customers, the pain point you are solving and have an opinion backed by the data you’ve researched. My PMM 100 day plan here has a comprehensive list of areas you should be researching. Get alliance with the Product and Marketing org first. You are a Product Marketer – in your title you are equal parts both, regardless of which group you officially map into. Other orgs to eventually build alliances with are Leadership, Sales, Services, Ops, Biz Dev, Eng, Finance, HR and Legal. You are such a cross-functional person, you ideally need a stakeholder in every department to ensure your cross-functional efforts and projects are smooth.

I like to start with the purpose of creating a 30/60/90 plan. I view the plan as a set goals to help me strategize my first three months in a new job. I use it to help maximize my work output and stay focused. That said, I have rarely completed any 30/60/90 plan perfectly.  Working in startups means lots of change and course correcting. It also means you're going to learn new information and have to adapt to it. Therefore, I advise PMMs to create a lose outline rather than a follow a template line-by-line.  Here's what I'm currently doing in my new role at AWS (reminder it's a big company). 1. 30 days 1. Meet as many people as possible. I met over 40 people in my first days. Some meetings where very fruitful others where one time meetings. But this allowed me to introduce myself, what I'm going to be working on, undestand their role, and how we will work together moving forward.  2. Complete HR & IT stuff (payroll, setup computer, etc) 3. Get access to tools that I'll use everyday  4. Set up 1:1 meetings with my manager and monthly skip-levels with appropiate stakeholders 5. Understand team goals and how I contribute to them 6. Ask lots of questions with fresh eyes 2. 60 days 1. Start to internalize how the teams operate and cooperate 2. Understand how the business generates revenue and the levers that can be pulled to influence it 3. Understand the different team's goals (how are teams measured and how is success defined) 4. Complete necessary internal trainings 5. Formulate and document gaps in current process 6. Ask to be added to standing meetings to get additional context 7. Keep meeting more team members 3. 90 days 1. Start working on a cross-functional project and/or take the lead a new one 2. Complete outstanding onboarding tasks 3. Keep meeting more team members