Minute Monday 16: 30/60/90 Day Learning Plan for Heads of Product / Growth

In this post I’m sharing the outcome-oriented 30/60/90-day plan I created before joining Snyk to lead PLG efforts.

Creating this myself ahead of starting in the role enabled me to learn the things I needed to and get to impact much sooner than I otherwise could.

Update: I’ve now worked with my friends at Reforge to break down the plan further with detailed commentary and video explainers.

The plan is featured in their new Artifacts gallery - please check it out!

While impact was the ultimate outcome, the emphasis in the plan is on learning and building trust.

30/60/90s are not new, but traditionally they are created collaboratively with your manager during your early onboarding period.

For product and growth roles in senior leadership or exec level, that’s too late.

You should already know or have extensively thought through what inputs and learnings are critical to your success.

You should have learnt through the hiring process the most pressing challenges important for you to solve, as well as the status quo.

Even for less senior product and growth roles, thinking through in advance what you'll need to learn to be able to get to impact faster is a hugely valuable exercise.

Of course, I refined this plan after starting, particularly adding more detail to the 30-60 and 60-90 periods as I learnt in role (the resolution of these sections in the initial plan is intentionally lower) and fleshing out details such as including real names once I learnt who folks were, but otherwise, this plan as shared here served me exceptionally well.

One of the biggest benefits that it brought me was focus.

In most new roles, you are bombarded with information from multiple directions simultaneously.

It can be overwhelming.

At Snyk, during a period of hypergrowth, it was orders of magnitude worse.

My 30/60/90 let me maintain a very high Signal to Noise ratio and intentionally put things to one side to pick up later.

Here's a link to the Google Doc - if you find it helpful, please feel free to copy and adapt it for your next role!

Shoutout to Andrew Capland, who got me started thinking about this and generously shared his approach during a conversation we had a couple of years back.

I also recommend reading 'The First 90 Days' by Michael Watkins.

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