With all the money invested in tech these days, companies are hiring like crazy, and everyone seems to be switching jobs. Only among my consulting customers, two companies recently hired a new VP of Product. I decided to write this article to help you, product leaders, with your new position. Even if you’re not starting a new position now, you probably won’t retire from your current company, so at some point, the tips in this article would surely be relevant for you – save it for then!

By the way, while the tips here address specific challenges that product leaders face, many of them would apply to any kind of leadership position, and even to non-leadership positions, so feel free to forward it to friends who are currently on the move.

Take the Time to Learn

Although this tip may seem trivial, it is often forgotten, since we tend to jump right into work – and in product leadership positions there is so much of it! Add to that that the company probably took so long to find you – the perfect leader for them, that they are already in desperate need of you jumping right in and getting things done. Under such conditions, it’s easy to get sucked into doing, at the expense of learning. But if you don’t do it initially, it might never happen.

Learning by doing is important (and is the only way to become a great product leader) but it should come a little later, not at the beginning. Some things can’t be learned this way, especially things like the history and background of the product or company. Understanding how we got here, what assumptions we made, what we learned along the way, and why we made certain decisions is extremely valuable and would the depth of knowledge that you would really need to do a great job later on. As you do so, make sure that everything makes sense to you by summarizing the story the way you see it and asking people if you got it right. In many cases, this technique alone helps the people in the company learn something new even though they were there all along, so you would already bring value in your first days.

Meet Irrelevant People

Part of learning is meeting new people, but I want to encourage you to meet people that you wouldn’t normally get to talk to. Obviously, your onboarding plan would include meeting with all the people you would be working with on a regular basis. It’s great and important, but it will happen anyway whether you enforce it as part of your onboarding or not. When joining a company, you have a unique opportunity to meet employees you won’t necessarily work with on a regular basis. These meetings are super important to complete your broader perspective of the company as mentioned above.

Whether you are meeting the people you would be working with or others that you won’t necessarily have a working relationship with, these introduction conversations have the same goal: before you get to how you will collaborate and learn the specific work processes you would need to use, take the time to learn their perspectives and getting their feedback on the one that you have developed so far. This can be achieved by opening the conversation and asking questions such as:

• What do you think is the #1 challenge in the product right now? 
• What worked best so far?
• What should I know about the company?
• What should I know about the product?
• What should I know about you and your domain?
• What is it that you need from me or the product in order to succeed in your role?

These questions are deliberately open and somewhat vague since each person has a unique perspective, which is precisely what you want to hear. Make sure you also talk to those who might not have good answers for you upfront, since you never know when something important might come up. So while you don’t have to use all the answers, use all the questions. It will help you not only with learning valuable information but also with building trust. People love being asked for their opinions on things that they don’t necessarily own, and you’ll establish yourself as their partner in their own success with the last question in the list above. 

In gathering as many viewpoints as you can, you will broaden your own perspective which is important to be able to lead the product in the right direction. It will also help you develop intuition, which has a bad name in a data-driven world but is actually a super important tool for you to use.

Write Down Your Raw Thoughts

Everyone knows that you only get one chance to make a good first impression – but that also means that you only have one chance to get a first impression. This is true for people, but also for anything else you encounter, like processes, strategy, and even the product itself. 

At this early stage in your job, you still don’t filter your thoughts since you probably don’t know enough to think otherwise. Your initial feelings and reactions to what you learn are priceless. This is an excellent opportunity since you will likely lose this fresh perspective over time, as you become more immersed in the product and company, and fall in love with everyone’s point of view.

You might tell yourself that you won’t fall into this trap, but trust me – you will, even if you try very hard not to and are super aware. It’s for a reason that companies invest a lot in bringing in fresh thinking (and by the way I do so as well for my own company) – it is nearly impossible to do it right from the inside. 

But you do have the opportunity to do it for some time when you are only beginning at a new company. Make sure you use it!

The way to do it is to write whatever comes to mind, regardless of whether it is a good idea or not. You are writing to your future self, so don’t worry about what others would think about it. You should point out to yourself areas that you would like to take a closer look into in the future, or questions that you think are important to answer. Your list can include things such as:

• A gut feeling that something will not work in the long term
• A feeling that the dots are not well connected somewhere
• Ideas about how to take something to the next level
• Any that you would like to remember to get to think about in the future, big or small

Be sure to capture these insights that can only be gained when you see everything for the first time. You probably won’t use all of your ideas, but if you don’t write them – you will definitely not use any of them. 

Define Tangible Goals

This method which I developed years ago proved itself again as I was onboarding my new COO recently. As part of building her onboarding plan, I was surprised by the amount of operational knowledge and processes that I already had. Doing it myself for such a long time, I felt it was almost trivial, but having to teach someone else made me realize that it was anything but. Despite knowing my operation in and out, I never took the time to document it properly (or at all, to be honest). I didn’t want my new COO to get lost by simply throwing everything at her, so I created a list of what she needed to accomplish – not just learn. By defining specific results that I wanted her to achieve, I helped her focus and made sure she took over the most important things first.

For example, I assigned to her the responsibility to manage on her own all the operations related to the upcoming CPO Bootcamp, which also created a clear timeframe naturally. Another example is that I have many automatic processes running in an automation tool, but learning all of them could take months. I did want her, however, to get to know the tool and find her way there, so I requested her to fix only three bugs during the first month, which gave us a tangible outcome and allowed her to learn what I wanted her to learn along the way. Other things, which may also be important, will have to wait. 

In both examples, I “threw” her into the deep end, but I made sure she could swim. Managing the CPO Bootcamp and fixing the automation bugs taught her certain aspects of the job while providing me with extreme value because she already got the job itself done. 

You have so much to learn and do in your new job, and even though everything you need to learn is essential – it’s easy to get lost. Many people are looking for a textbook 30-60-90-day onboarding plan (which outlines how to get to know the company, the team, and what you need to learn), but the problem is that they tend to focus mainly on what you will be doing – instead of which results you need to achieve. It happens because the results which are important are specific to each company and its current situation, and cannot be part of any textbook answer or plan. 

Discuss with your manager what are the first goals you have to achieve – ones that will bring value to the company and also let you start doing the work yourself. These goals can include, for example, organizing the roadmap, making sure specific processes work well or building a team. These results must be essential for the company, not just the ones that naturally come up in your learning plan. This will help you learn the job faster, give your managers (and yourself) real value, and lead you to success.

Get To Work

I’m sure you’ve noticed that the first three tips focus on learning, but the last one emphasizes getting work done – which may be a little contradicting. If you look more closely though, you will see that even for the goals themselves I recommend keeping a broader perspective and not diving right into the chaotic day-to-day hustle. 

Approach your onboarding process with advanced thinking and a clear understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish – just as you would do with anything else related to product leadership. Eventually, it’s about finding a good balance between taking the time to learn and advancing specific and important goals – a classic short-term / long-term conflict that I’m sure you already know how to handle 😉

Good luck in your new position!