PM03: Onboarding to a New Product

6-weeks spiral plan for an internal PM transition

Exciting news this month! I’ve taken over another internal Amazon product. In the current economic climate, we will see more and more internal transitions, and reshaping, expanding the scope of PMs.

As I move into this new role, I wanted to share with you my 6-week plan for becoming an autonomous and successful PM for the new Product.

A Product is a complex and messy ecosystem of technology, people, and business. So how to use the on-boarding time and resources effectively?

How not to get lost in opinions, biases, but to create a holistic and balanced understanding of the product, necessary to become autonomous and successful PM?

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My focus is on reducing uncertainty by incrementally absorbing all the resources available to me.

The resources include existing artifacts such as:

• vision and strategy documents

• business and product requirement document

• training and documentation

• demos

• post- and pre-mortems

• status updates

• roadmaps

• design documents

I will also work closely with key people such as:

• Previous PM

• The engineering lead and development team

• Stakeholders

• Customers

• Potentially new leadership

My plan combines perception, reflection, play, and creation. It’s a spiral plan, meaning that every week I am going deeper in understanding of different aspects of the Product. This approach is based on spiral curriculum theory, which emphasizes the importance of revisiting previously taught ideas and building upon them.

I want to highlight the necessity to begin writing early and often. Good place to start is your version of the Product vision. It will feel like it turns out naive and dirty, but as you continually learn, you’ll refine it and get feedback from the stakeholders. In addition to your version of the vision, get into the “boy-scout” mode by improving the existing critical documents, or creating them if they don’t exist.

The duration of 6 weeks for this plan is a flexible guideline, not based on any scientific evidence. The appropriate length may vary based on the complexity and size of the Product being taken over. I recommend to adjust the duration as needed to ensure a thorough understanding of the Product.

Week 1

🗣 Meet

📚 Read/Watch

• Strategic documents (Product vision, strategy and goals).

• High-level trainings, introductory documentation.

🕹️ Play

• Spend at least 2 hr exploring the Product. Get an overall sense of the user journey.

📝 Write

• Summarize your learnings of the week

Week 2

🗣 Meet

📚 Read/Watch

• Product discovery documents (opportunity-solution tree, roadmap)

• Stakeholder documents

🕹️ Play

• Spend at least 4 hr exploring the Product.

• Go deeper in the workflows, try to replicate the journey that you learned from the user interviews.

📝 Write

• User interview and stakeholder 1:1 notes.

• Write 1 page with your current understanding of the vision and goals of the Product.

Week 3

🗣 Meet

📚 Read/Watch

• Tactical documents (Recent and current business requirements).

• Product Technical Design

• Postmortems

🕹️ Play

• Spend at least 4 hr exploring the Product.

• Test the new features or bug fixes that are code complete.

📝 Write

• Notes on tech design.

• Notes from the user interview.

• Update opportunity-solution tree with your ideas.

• Refine the vision doc.

Week 4

🗣 Meet

📚 Read/Watch

• Metrics dashboards and definitions

🕹️ Play

• Spend at least 4 hr exploring the Product.

• Replicate recent customer issues in the Product.

📝 Write

• Notes on the metrics

• Notes from the user interview

• A most common user journey that you heard from the users, and how it can be measured with existing metrics.

• Refine the vision doc.

Week 5

🗣 Meet

📚 Read/Watch

• Market, User and Competitor research analysis

• Tactical documents (Business requirements) — yes, again

🕹️ Play

• Spend at least 4 hr exploring the Product.

📝 Write

• Refine the vision doc.

• Fill the gaps in the existing business requirements

Week 6

🗣 Meet

📚 Read/Watch

• Roadmap (now it might make more sense)

• Latest user feedback.

🕹️ Play

• Spend at least 4 hr exploring the Product.

📝 Write

• Combine your version of the Product vision, and opportunity-solution tree to validate the roadmap.

• Propose an alternative roadmap, if you see a better path forward.

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It can be easy to get too deep into one aspect of the product, or to get lost in the breadth of materials without a clear focus. In my plan I tried to ensure consistent and intentional learning tapping into variety of sources and backed up by reflection and writing.

If you have other tips, please drop a comment.

Let’s go!🚀