Questions to Answer in My New Job

Written By David Short

I’ll be starting a new role as a Product Manager at a large company on Monday, and I jotted down some questions I want to cover over the first 30 days. These have been generalized slightly, and hopefully most would be helpful even if you aren’t a PM.

  1. What’s the vision for our team?

  • Where are we, and how do we get there?

  • Are there particular KPIs to focus on?

  • Who determines those KPIs, and how often are they adjusted?

2. What are the principles of the company?

  • Are there a set of core values / enumerated tenants that everyone knows?

  • Are there any that jump out innately as different from other places I’ve worked?

3. How does the company measure and recognize success?

  • Celebrate big wins?

  • Handle failure?

  • Is there a lot of transparency in how things are going?

4. What kinds of documents do people use to sell and build product?

  • Product Brief / Project Summary

  • User Flows

  • User Stories

  • Wireframes

  • High fidelity mockups

  • What software do they use for these documents: PowerPoint, Word, Google Docs, Google Sites

  • Quarterly / annual roadmaps

5. How does information flow through the organization?

  • Jira

  • Slack

  • Confluence / internal wikis

  • Meeting notes

  • Monthly project / sprint team e-mails

  • Documents vs. meetings

  • Databases vs. dashboards

6. What are the typical kinds of meetings?

  • Standup

  • One-on-ones

  • Estimation

  • Sprint Planning

  • Demos

  • Retros

  • Post Mortems

  • Pre Mortems

  • Biweekly status updates

  • Targeted one-offs to resolve blockers

  • Cross-functional meetings for status updates with frequent collaborators

7. What is the role of product?

  • Who are our key stakeholders?

  • Who are our customers?

  • How do we typically conduct research?

  • Are there other teams that we share infrastructure with? Collaborate with on development?

8. How do resources get allocated?

  • Who approves requests for engineers, designers, product?

  • How are budgets approved?

  • Who needs to approve a project / roadmap / investment?

9. What’s the technical architecture here?

  • How does code get deployed?

  • Microservices vs. monolith

  • Cloud vs. on-prem

10. Is there anything else I should know?

  • Training opportunities

  • Perks

  • Charitable focuses / matching

  • Travel expectations

  • Events / getting to know the team

  • How do I hit the ground running?

David Short
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