Product Manager Onboarding: Your First 30/60/90 Days

How to drive maximum impact step-by-step. Notion template with a proven PM onboarding framework. What you should do in your first 30, 60, and 90 days.

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Today, I’m sharing a Product Management onboarding framework I’ve refined over the years and tested across different organizations. It’s designed to help you:

• Maximize your impact as a Product Manager when joining a new company.

• Evaluate the Product Manager onboarding plan in your organization.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. Your First 30 Days as a Product Manager: Relationships and Learning

2. 🔒 Your Days 31-60 as a Product Manager: Deeper Understanding and Quick Wins

3. Your Days 61-90 as a Product Manager: Driving Impact

4. [Notion Template]: Product Manager Onboarding: First 30, 60, 90 Days

You may need to adjust the timeline and details to fit your organization. One of your first tasks is to confirm your onboarding plan with your direct supervisor and set up recurring 1:1 meetings.

P.S. Thank you,

Maarten Dalmijn

and

Siddharth Arora

for reviewing this one!

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1. Your First 30 Days as a Product Manager: Relationships and Learning

The first 30 days of your Product Manager onboarding are about building relationships, establishing rapport, and learning as much as possible about your product, customers, ways of working, and the strategic context.

The generalized framework that has always worked best for me:

Each item in the Notion collection contains a list of subtasks, for example:

Let’s dive into the details.

1.1 Focus Area: Build Relationships and Establish Rapport

Have 1:1 meetings with the team:

• Your team (Engineers, Designers, QA, PMM)

• Other PMs (ask them to present their areas)

Have 1:1 meetings with key stakeholders:

• Marketing, Sales, Success, Support, Finances, Legal, Head of Product

• Map their power, interest, and communication preferences to engage them properly (see the 2x2 Stakeholders Map Template)

Sync with your direct supervisor:

• Confirm your onboarding plan and performance metrics with your supervisor

• Set recurring 1:1 to discuss your progress, challenges, initiatives, and feedback

Your attitude: Proactively ask others for feedback and guidance

1.2 Focus Area: Learn the Ways of Working

Learn discovery and delivery practices:

• Product discovery

• Scrum events

• Quality assurance

• Production bugs

• Releases, environments

Request and confirm access to the tools:

• Product analytics (e.g., Amplitude, Clarity)

• Design/collaboration tools (e.g., Figma, Miro, Notion, Jira, Confluence, Slack, Slack channels, and other specific "workspaces" and "wikis")

• Customer feedback channels and account management (e.g., Intercom, CRM)

1.3 Focus Area: Learn Your Product

Learn from the basic materials:

• Review onboarding wikis/videos

• Review internal and public documentation

• If possible, shadow a customer onboarding call

Use your product daily:

• Understand core use cases and user flows; one technique is to help with testing

• Identify at least 3 key insights or potential quick wins, share them with the team

1.4 Focus Area: Understand Your Business

Understand the strategic context:

• Company vision

• Market segments and their Jobs to be Done (aka "personas")

• Value propositions for key segments: JTBD, pain points, features and capabilities, benefits, differentiators

• Key business and customer metrics (e.g., revenue, churn, CSAT, North Star, etc.)

• Identify your team objectives and how they align with product strategy

For highly regulated industries:

• For some industries (finance, healthcare), understanding relevant regulations (GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA) and how they might affect the product is critical

1.5 Focus Area: Understand Your Customers

Review the existing product artifacts:

• Product Backlog

• Product Requirement Documents (PRDs)

• Recent release notes

• Feature requests

• Product roadmap

• Interview transcripts

• Support chats and calls

• Opportunity Solution Tree for your team

Join early discovery sessions:

• Collaborate with Designers and Engineers to learn about the current opportunities, ideas, and assumptions

Talk to the users:

• Conduct at least 4-8 exploratory customer interviews or visits

• Consider shadowing interviews organized by other PMs

• Document key user needs and pain points

• In B2B, reach out to other decision-makers (buyers)

Track basic users’ activity:

• Start using product analytics

• Review events, session recordings, surveys (e.g., CES or CSAT) to spot basic patterns

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2. Your Days 31-60 as a Product Manager: Deeper Understanding and Quick Wins

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