Rahul Abhyankar

Four areas are important to focus on for new managers: 1. Understand the Team: Just as you feel anxious about your role as a new manager, realize that your new team also feels anxious about reporting to you. They will want to ensure that you have context about their role and their work at the company, as well as their overall experience. It is worthwhile to invest the time to get to know them. Learn about their individual goals and objectives. 2. Understand Impact: As you interact with your manager and skip-level manager, learn about strategy and impactful outcomes that have been defined for the business in terms of customer and market success. This will allow you to put some context around business goals and your team's individual goals. If these are not aligned, it is important to know this sooner than later. 3. Understand Execution: Learn how does your team, and the broader cross-functional team, make forward progress on the strategy and goals. What is the roadmap and units of work that constitute execution on the strategy? How is this defined? Which stakeholders need to be bought in? How do we know we are making progress? How is this progress reported to senior leadership? Look for past material on this. 4. Understand Optics: What do other leaders in the company/business unit perceive your team's role to be? A lot of times the role of product management is not very well understood by other leaders. Don't assume this. What do other leaders and teams expect from your team? Is that consistent with your understanding? These conversations will give you insight on where you need to invest time in ensuring alignment for your team overall.