What to do in your first 90 days to have a great year 1 review?

Your first 90 days are crucial to the impact you can create in your first year. Just like for a baby the first 5 years are the most crucial for development and impact the rest of their life.

Often people tell you when you join a large company to take your time, get to know people and don’t have big expectations of yourself to contribute much. Or atleast that’s what I was told.

While this advice isn’t false, it also isn’t the full picture. While it’s true you don’t need (and shouldn’t try) to contribute immediately, what you do in the first 90 days has a massive impact on the potential depth of your contribution in your first year. Here I’ll share how to use the first 90 days to establish yourself as an authority and leader in your field and set yourself up for long term success.

Your mission in the first 90 days is to understand new opportunities for your product and/or companies growth and find a path to execute on it.

To do this you need to get to know:

1. Your colleagues
2. Your users or customers
3. Your team’s peripheral capabilities

Your colleagues

Having great relationships with your colleagues pays off in dividends long term. Not only do they make the day to day of a job more fun, their support is also likely needed to push any new project forward. Hence, understanding their world view becomes important. Ask your manager for a list of people you should talk to that’ll help you in your role. Start with people closest to what you work on and slowly work your way out. Leaving leadership till last so by the time you get to them you can ask them more prudent questions. Here are some questions I asked my colleagues.

• Tell me about yourself
• What’s your background? What’s been your journey?
• What do you do at the moment?
• What do you think I should focus on in my role? What has already been done or tried in this problem space in the past?
• What could I do in my role to make your job easier?

I also shared my own story and background. I included something unique about me to make myself memorable and build a strong first impression. I gave everyone I met my favorite New Zealand treat (Caramel Slices) since I’m a kiwi and those treats are delicious. Depending on how large your company is, this pays dividends, and I still get asked about them more than a year later!

Your users and customers

It’s impossible to come up with new ideas without getting to know your users and customers. Whenever possible you should go meet them in their own environment during you first 90 days. Observation will almost always give you 70% of the information. The remaining 30% you can ask by open ended or directed questions of your users and customers. The goal here is to generate extremely strong empathy with them and if you work in enterprise, to also establish a relationship you can call upon for the remaining tenure of your job. In my first 90 days I was lucky to go on two customer immersion trips that helped me very quickly build my empathy.

Here are the questions I asked myself when observing and later confirmed with questions:

1. What’s the core problem they are trying to solve?
2. What’s their how of doing this?
3. Where are the biggest challenges and inefficiencies?
4. What are they doing to work around these?
5. How could we help them solve it in a differentiated way (i.e. they could not do on their own or get from another source)?

Peripheral team’s capabilities

This is the biggest opportunity for any new comer. Often in large companies, established ways of solving customer problems have been explored. Hence, it’s best to find alternative paths. Talk to peripheral teams within your new company that your team isn’t used to communicating with. Not only will they provide new ways of solving the customer problems you observed above, you’ll also become the conduit to help leverage their capabilities. Here are some questions I asked them directly or tried to discern implicitly:

1. What problem are you trying to solve?
2. How are you trying to solve it?
3. What are the general principles of this technique or solution and how can they be applied to solve other problems?
4. What benefit would you get in helping our team?

Other tips

• Read a lot on company documentation and emails. Understand what’s come before you and how your organization and team think about various problem areas and approaches.
• Befriend colleagues who have succeeded in the first year. Learn how they did it. Every company is different and they’ll be able to give you more specific guidance.
• Establish your goals with your manager and let them know you are looking to learn fast with reference to the above three areas and if they can share tips on ways you can do this.

At the end of the day, it’s up to you how fast you learn and grow within your new company. Do not let the law of averages define you. Go at a pace that’s exciting for you. And if speed is your jam, go fast and furious!