[Note: New experimenting in 2021 is PM job referrals. CareerKarma, a YC backed online job training startup, is hiring a remote PM to improve activation and retention. See description. I am not paid for this referral, but if you’re interested, happy to connect you with their CTO Artur Meyster. Forward if you know someone who is searching.]
After spending hours interviewing PM candidates, you have an acceptance. 👏👏 Someone’s coming to help you get real product work done. But before you throw your new product manager into the deep, have you planned how you’ll welcome her? What information, connections, and tools does a new product manager need to succeed?
What is onboarding?
Onboarding is the process of orienting and training new employees. If you’ve worked for someone, you’ve gone through some type of onboarding process. Perhaps it was as rudimentary as “Welcome. We have a problem. Can you help…”
There are two types of onboarding: general and role specific. General onboarding covers processes such as enrolling in benefits or setting up payroll. HR typically owns this process and managers support by notifying HR when there are questions or issues. This article focuses on role specific onboarding for product managers.
Why onboarding matters for product managers?
Good onboarding does two things. First, it enables a new product manager to become productive faster. Remember when you had to figure out everything from scratch and accidentally reinvented the same feature that failed previously? I do.
Good onboarding processes provides information and context that helps prevent such types of wasteful energy.
Second, good onboarding increases positive perception, which improves long-term employee engagement and retention. First impressions matter. While new product managers are hired to help solve problems, no one enjoys having random issues dump on their lap week one. Even if a new product manager is good at triage, a good onboarding process further accelerates their impact. It creates a sandbox that guides new product managers in their learning, exploration, and delivery.
Creating an Onboarding Process for Product Managers
Getting to know the individual. Most onboarding processes start with telling or teaching the new product manager about the organization, processes, etc. However, I’ve learned it’s better to start the onboarding process by getting to know each other.
Have both the manager and new PM fill out the “Get to Know Each Other Template”
Then, setup 45 minutes to read, share, and discuss.
Questions in the document help break the ice and dive deeper into personal motivations and values. The discussions go both ways, forcing the manager and new hire to be a bit vulnerable. It’s important for the new product manager to see the manager’s perspective. Furthermore, this first meet and greet will help managers adjust the onboarding process to answer or cover any pressing questions.
Sharing information and providing training. This is the “formal” training, phased over two weeks.
Week 1:Industry & Domain, Company & People, Customer & Users, Product
Lectures by manager, 1 - 2 hrs / per day
New hire: assigned tasks, self-discovery, reading, chatting with others
Daily goal for new product manager: Write down three learnings and three open questions. Open questions can be answered during tomorrow’s lectures.
Weekly goal: Draft a 30 day plan
Week 2: Company & People, Customer & Users, Product, Business, Individual Performance
Discussions between manager/new hire: 0.5 - 1 hr / day
New hire: More conversations with people, playing with/using the product, talking to customers, exploring deeper questions)
Daily goal for new product manager: Write down top three open questions and one possible improvement idea (org., product, business)
Weekly goal: Finalize 30 day plan and get involved in the first project.
Let’s now review the different areas of orientation and how best to structure them.
a) Industry & Domain. A fresher for product managers with domain experience or learning for new product managers. Don’t create it from scratch if you don’t have to. Places you can find:
Consulting orgs write these (e.g., Celent, Accenture, Gartner, Forrester, KMPG, CBInsights)
Equity researchers write these covering comparable public companies (e.g., Morgan Stanley, State Street)
Public companies 10K or S1 for competitors
Industry associations (e.g., PIMA -> insurance)
VC blogs and writings (e.g., American Family Ventures -> Insurance)
If you don’t have this information readily available, don’t sweat it. Allocate 1 hour with your new product manager to do some Google search. See what you can dig up that’s free. You don’t need more than 2 - 3 documents. Assign these for reading to help bring the new product manager up to speed with a perspective of the industry.
b) Company & People. Two simultaneous approaches: Share & Chat.
First, sit your new product manager down and formally share your knowledge of who’s who (name, title), what people do (role, responsibility), what are the teams, and how people are organized. Reporting lines do matter, but it’s equally important to understand ownership of areas that aren’t obvious from reporting lines (soft powers of influence). Beyond sharing what people do and organization structure, give some personal background about the people your new product manager will be working with. This will help the new product manager start building relationships when she starts reaching out.
Second, assign 4-6 people for the new product manager to interview for 30 minutes in “Get to know and what’s top of mind” conversations. Don’t only pick senior leaders or people managers. Think about individuals who have knowledge of company history (i.e., can provide historical context for how decisions were made) or great executors (i.e., who knows the details of a particular area). c) c)
c) Customer/User. Most product managers aren’t also the target customer or user of the product they manage. So, every product manager has to learn about their product’s customer.
First, if you have a personas of your current users, share it. If you don’t, you can provide some marketing demographics/targeting data. Alternatively, if you have nothing, just talk about what you know and don’t know about your customers.
Second, assign the new product manager to join 3 - 4 customer service or sales calls with existing customers, not potential customers. Ask them to listen and ask questions. The combination of the two will help the new product manager start to understand the product’s customer(s).
d) Product. Best way to experience a product or service is to use it. Assign the new product manager to try, buy, order, and use the product/service/item. Tell them the customer’s pain point and ask them to experience solving it with our product.
Then, assign the new product manager to create a flow diagram of their user journey. The purpose isn’t to perfectly represent the experience. Instead, it’s to help document understanding and explore knowledge gaps. Perhaps the new product manager wants to understand how a particular part of the journey/feature works technically. Or maybe the person hasn’t tried to cancel and return the product so that journey’s missing. At this stage, guide the person to happy case examples, but make sure they document where they get stuck. Breaking down playing around with a product over two weeks increases learning through exploration.
e) Business. How does the company earn revenue? How does the company make profit? All product managers should have some idea of the basics so teach the basics. If you have profit and loss statements, walk a product manager through it even if the P&L isn’t perfectly accurate. For startups that aren’t revenue or profit focused, provide some information on how you will want to make revenue and profit, even if educated guesses. A good discussion might be informing when the company may focus on revenue or profit.
This is also where it’s important to inform the product manager about larger company goals, that are indirectly tied to product (e.g., raising money).
f) Individual Performance. I wrote about running effective 1:1, but before you get into the cadence, there are some personal questions to handle. As a manager:
What expectations do you have of the new product manager?
How will you measure performance?
What are your personal goals as the manager?
What is the company’s performance evaluation process?
When do we talk about career growth and compensation?
Asking such questions too early may feel awkward. But I’ve learned from my own mistakes that delaying these discussions only encourages a lot of assumptions by both the manager and new hire. It’s better to set the clear tone on day one.
Putting the product manager into action. It’s the middle of week 2, where the formal lecture style of onboarding is ending. Time to learn through action. This is where it’s appropriate to scope out a project for the PM. While it’s not always possible, try to aim for projects that are:
Shorter (weeks) > Long (months) duration
Higher % > Lower % of success
Quantifiable problem / Known Solution > Big, hairy, unknowns
Failure isn’t going to sink the ship
I know I haven’t always been able to follow my own advice at times. However, it’s better for everyone to start the first month with a win because the new product manager has to learn everything about industry, company/people, customer/user, business, and product.
Get to Know Each Other Template | Get to Know Each Other Example
Principles for Good Onboarding Process
Draft a welcome email & cc: some people in introductions. Spend 30 minutes and create a good welcome email. In it, introduce some other key people (cc’d) and tell the person what their first day(s) will be like. Add some links/attachments to helpful content they can start reading. In our remote working world, appoint a person (if you can’t be that person), who can act as day one buddy to answer any tactical questions.
Create a 10 item checklist for yourself as the manager. There were always small, impactful things I forgot to-do. Some examples for me were:
Invites new PM to some repeating calendar invites.
Sharing of links to PM only documentation repository.
Sending out doc for submitting expenses for approval.
Adding new PM to group email distributions or slack channels.
These are the boring stuff, less fun than all the other knowledge sharing but really practical and helps the new product manager get shit done. Create this checklist for yourself, not the new employee. But don’t let this grow larger than 10. As companies grow, you may be tempted to add other things based on suggestions and learnings from previous onboarding. To fight that tendency, if you have to add the 11th item, force yourself to remove something less important.
Seek feedback about the new product manager from people she’s spoken with. At the end of 30 days, ask the new product manager who are some of the people he’s gotten to know. Then, talk to them and get some reverse feedback. Alexis Fogel, Founder @ Stonly, ex-CPO @ Dashlane said, “I use this as a check-in with more senior product managers. I want to hear what kind of questions they asked to find out if there’s an area they should explore more. It's also a way to get feedback on the new PM, if the people she spoke with noticed anything the new PM should work on. I can quickly get constructive feedback to help the new product manager.”
Solicit the new product manager’s past experience with their manager and performance management. How a new product manager interacts with you (the manager) is highly influenced by how they interacted with their last boss. So, ask the new product manager about her most recent experience. Some of the following questions are good starters:
Describe your last manager’s management style? What actions did they take that you like or dislike? Can you give me some specific examples?
Tell me how your last manager handled performance evaluation? What worked and didn’t?
Tell me something that your last manager did really well, which helped you?
Tell me something that you wish your last manager did better?
New product managers maybe hesitant to share so set the context. You’re looking to learn because you’ll have your own management style, strengths, and weaknesses. Knowing what their past experiences can help you set the right expectations.
Shadow another PM for one day. If there’s another product manager already on your team, allocate one entire day where the new product manager literally shadows the other PM (or you) on everything (meetings, calls, emails).
Want to thank Alexis Fogel, Founder @ Stonly, ex-CPO @ Dashlane for helping with this article.
Additional Reading: