The first 30 days of a startup’s first product hire

Product is a function whose dynamic, contributions, and expectations vary wildly from company to company. If you’re joining a larger company with an already established product team, your interview process and first couple of days with your new team (who probably already has experience working with a PM) should give you a clear sense of these expectations.

But if you’re the first product hire at a startup, you have the privilege and responsibility of figuring out the best version of your role for your company and then helping everyone else understand that too.

Done well, it sets you up to do immense value-add product work, mesh well with your teammates and the rest of leadership, and ship features that solve real customer problems.

Understand who’s making the product decisions now and why they decided to hire you.

Generally this individual is usually one of the founders whose wearing multiple hats (and often is running out of bandwidth for product.) Make sure you understand how they were playing the product role before you, what was working and what wasn’t, and how they want to be involved going forward.

Meet the team. Like, everyone.

Assuming you’re joining a company with <30 people, there’s no excuse to not meet 1:1 everyone in the company. Given that product is singlehandedly the most cross-functional team, assume you’ll be working with everyone. During these conversations, you should get a pulse on the following things for each individual: 1) what motivates them professionally and what their team/individual goals are 2) their experience with working with the product function and what is working/what isn’t 3) their understanding of the product strategy and their view of product threats/opportunities in the next year

Jump in to help where you can (generally, this is helping with execution.)

Chances are, the team is already in the middle of working on a feature when you arrive. Starting from your first day, you should start attending standups and any pre-exisiting meetings on the current feature at hand. You probably won’t feel prepared to contribute meaningfully to product strategy and ideation in your first week, but you definitely can help on other tasks like QA, speccing, etc. This is the beginning of the process of building trust with the engineering and design team.

Immerse yourself in understanding the customer.

Sit on any sales call you can. Browse through submitted support tickets. Reach out to existing customers to hear their feedback about the product. Join communities of your target customer. Read through any user research that has been done and launch your own this month to speak directly with the people you’re building for.

Understand the business.

Review the board deck and ensure that you understand the business priorities for the upcoming couple of quarters. More concretely, by the end of your first month, you should have a robust understanding of the state of the key marketing and sales metrics (generally in funnel form.) This will help you figure out what types of “business outcomes” you want to ship with your product strategy.

Get to know the product inside out.

By the end of the month, you should know every aspect of the existing product. Play around with it, dogfooding when possible. Read all the support documentation that exists. There’s an opportunity here to create and refine product documentation while you’re learning the product.

Start ideating on a problem area with your design partner.

Chances are, the existing product leader (generally the CEO) and the team have a sense of what’s already coming next. Roll your sleeves up and start working with your design partner to dig into the problem and solution space.

Establish recurring communication patterns with your team and the company.

There’s nothing worse than a product person who joins and then awkwardly sits quietly in the corner. It is one of your jobs to be the connective tissue amongst many teams. Figure out what is the best venue for you to share what you’re working on regularly with your closer teammates (engineering and design) as well as with the broader company. For the former, I’ve found weekly emails or a product-announce Slack channels are an easy way to keep folks in the loop. For the latter, by the end of your first month, you should present at a venue like All Hands about your observations from all the conversations (with teammates and customers) you’ve had. One of the most valuable parts of having a new teammate join is getting their fresh perspective on the company, space, and product.