The First 90 Days
Named one of 100 Leadership & Success Books to Read in a Lifetime by Amazon Editors, here is the world's most trusted guide for anyone taking on a new professional role. Transitions are critical times in your career. In fact, moving into a new role can be the biggest challenge a leader or manager will face. And while a transition offers a chance to start fresh and create positive impact in an organization, it also places you in a position of acute vulnerability. Missteps made during the crucial first three months in a new role can jeopardize or even derail your success. In this newly revised and updated edition of the international bestseller The First 90 Days, Michael Watkins offers proven strategies for conquering the challenges of transitions--no matter where you are in your career. Watkins, the world's preeminent expert on leadership transitions and adviser to business leaders around the world, also addresses today's increasingly demanding professional landscape, where managers face not only more-frequent transitions but also steeper expectations once they step into their new jobs. Watkins identifies the most-common pitfalls new leaders encounter and provides the tools and strategies needed to avoid them. You'll learn how to secure critical early wins, an important first step in establishing yourself in a new role. Each chapter also includes checklists, practical tools, and self-assessments to help you assimilate key lessons and apply them to your own situation.
Stats for nerds
20recommend
22mentions
21people
2012–2025years
91% recommend9% neutral
Mentions per year
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- Not experienced with big companies. So, take all advice with salt.
That said, as lots are saying here, it seems you’re being given a great chance to ‘move up’. With a new director coming in, I’d say at least part of your job is removing tail risk from being in this new ‘loser’ group, and the rest is turning the group around. Also, congratulations!
I’d recommend the book “The First 90 Days” which is about taking on a new job. For the lazy, the two parts I think are salient here are that you should clarify what expectations are, ASAP, for the job. Turn around? Sustain? Grow? I bet you know the answer, but your incoming new director won’t necessarily. And, either way, you need to align with them on these goals to structure how you’ll report and perform.
Second, the first rule of the new job is: stop doing the old job. This is harder than it sounds.
Add it up, and I’d suggest you sit down with a status report for the new director when they come in, and can meet. I’d suggest that status report be as scathing as you can make it within the realms of verifiability — this is your one chance to pin anything bad on your forerunners; don’t let it go by unutilized.
Say what you think you should be doing, and what you hope the outcomes will be, and give the director space to give feedback and redirect.
I think for very high performers a conversation like “well, you and I know that this might be a hopeless case; I’m willing to work on this, but we need an agreement in case I can’t turn it around” is super, super fair.
If you come at it with this confidence and a viewpoint of partnering with your new boss, you’ll probably learn more of what they expect, and you’ll set terms down in case the group is unsaveable/doomed to mediocrity.
Side note, there’s an anecdote I like: “What’s the difference between a good therapist and a great one? The great one doesn’t take hopeless cases.” In my experience this is true of very high performers in the work world as well — very high performers don’t work on hopeless projects. Almost nobody can save a hopeless case, no matter how heroic they may be. So, if you’re certain this is hopeless, slightly different behavior might better signal your worth to management.
- The best advice is probably to learn as much as you can from different sources but also keep a pragmatic point of view that helps to select the things that apply to your situation. Very often, new leaders follow a recipe without paying attention to the organization's problems. (check the book “The First 90 Days” by Watkins; it may give you ideas to organize your initial approach).
As someone who went from engineering to product design, I observe that CTOs without a product vision are challenging to work with. For example, at a previous company, a CTO tried to implement the hard rule that every UI component should be in the shared UI library. But, even when I was leading the design system, that rule didn’t match how a product design process works. It caused delivery slowdowns and a degradation of the UX. I can bring up other examples, and the typical pattern is a leader looking at only one aspect or two without balance. Try to go beyond engineering and learn more about business and product design, which will help you prioritize engineering decisions. Some product-related books: Inspired by Cagan and Well-Designed by Kolko. Beyond engineering and product, as a C-level executive or director, people and hiring will be your primary concern. There are many management books, and I don’t have any particular to recommend (all of them will provide tools, but none is perfect: The Advantage and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni, The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim). I also enjoy taking ideas from biographical stories like Creativity Inc. by Ed Camull or Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda. Finally, a book I found funny and cynical but depicts big corps very well is “Management Stripped Bare” by Jo Owen.
- Systems of Engineering Management (Larson) - Best practical advice for dealing with software engineering teams
Leading at the Speed of Growth (Catlin & Matthews) - Despite the title making me want to vomit, it has a bunch of practical advice about problems you'll encounter at various "stages" of a company, and how to identify what stage you're in.
The First 90 Days (Watkins) - Useful if you ever take on a leadership role where the current state of the organization could be described as a "shitshow".
Good Strategy / Bad Strategy (Rumelt) - Learn the difference between goals and strategy and plans.
- Unfortunately standard.
If you want to effect change you will need to understand what the board consider “business value” - things like return for investors (roi to private equity, share holders, etc.), executive salaries, topline/bottomline ratios, etc. etc.. it’s unlikely to be customer satisfaction, especially if they’ve hit status quo/plateaued Once you understand management’s incentives you can work out how to motivate them to change, focused on those incentives, working backwards from them and pairing them up to your own goals.
‘The First 90 Days’ is a great book that provides tools on how to do the information gathering effectively.
- I like "The first 90 days" by Michael Watkins. It lays out an onboarding strategy that makes sense, with concrete steps. I initially thought that it targets management only, but it'd work for anyone if you consider yourself a "team of one".
He talks about common traps when starting in a new role:
- “Sticking with what you know.” -- when all you got is a hammer..
- “Falling prey to the action imperative” -- in my case it's sometimes coding before I actually understand the problem
- “Setting !unrealistic expectations!. You don’t negotiate your mandate or establish clear, achievable objectives.”
- “Coming in with “the” answer. You come in with your mind made up, or you reach conclusions too quickly about “the” problems and “the” solutions. You alienate people who could help you understand what’s going on, and you squander opportunities to develop support for good solutions
He then moves on to identifying company culture, learning the internals, establishing relationships and securing early wins to show your worth
It's a useful model if you need a template for when you join a new company.
- 1. Read the book The First 90 Days. Do what it says.
2. Framework: have coffee / a beer / a video chat / whatever informal 1-on-1 conversation with as many people as you can, 5-10 a week, for 30-60 minutes.
Ask every single person: 1) What should we keep doing that we're already doing? 2) What should we stop doing that we're doing? 3) What should we start doing that we aren't doing? 4) What are the most important 3 things I can do to make your life easier as a product leader? In 3 months or 9 months, if I just did a few things to make your life easier given your personal role and goals and your teams' role and goals, what would that be?
Take notes and do some of those things.
That's it.
Good luck!
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