From first day to first win: How to nail your first 90 days

A field-tested framework for building trust, showing impact, moving the needle, and laying the groundwork for long-term success as a Product Leader.

In this post, Jori Bell and I share a framework we’ve used to help ourselves and others land a new role. Jori is a NYC based Product Coach and writer of the Substack, Product Therapy.

You aced the interviews, landed your dream offer, and now you're stepping into a new role as a Product Manager or Product Leader. Or maybe you’ve landed that promotion. Bigger team = more responsibility.

You’re excited—and maybe a little overwhelmed. You know it’s a normal feeling but you want to do it differently this time. You wonder how you ground yourself in a plan that keeps imposter syndrome at bay and sets you up for success?

The first few months in a new product leadership role are uniquely challenging. And whether you’re a leader or an individual contributor, it’s rarely your tactical product skills that will define your early impact. It’s more likely your ability to earn trust and build momentum will shape your credibility and set the tone for what’s ahead.

While it may take 6-12 months to feel truly at home at a company, your first 90 days are commonly identified as that onboarding magic number. Why?

It’s when your eyes are freshest, your energy is highest and you still carry the credibility of an outsider—while getting to play the “new” card. The urgency to prove your value will never be higher.

When you use that 90 day window well, it creates a virtuous cycle: early wins build trust… trust leads to more autonomy and support… helping you achieve bigger wins… reinforcing your reputation… leading to more trust.

Sounds easy, right?

Is 90 days enough?

Product people aren't like other makers on their team. Engineers merge code and designers craft UX—deliverables that have a tangible and immediate impact.

Product management is a long game. PMs are ultimately evaluated on business metrics—user impact, engagement growth, or revenue performance—but there's a critical disconnect: the work that drives these outcomes takes time to bake.

This creates a unique challenge: the activities that will eventually move metrics are often relationship-building, strategic thinking, and process improvements—work that might take months or quarters to materialize with customers.

So what do you do when you're being evaluated tangibly on something so…intangible?

You shift your definition of impact. You focus on the things you can influence early, like building trust, aligning the team, improving processes, and setting goals. And, you find the early, quick wins that build credibility while your longer-term strategies take root.

Big impact happens in the People, Business and Process work—the foundation that enables those measurable outcomes to eventually emerge.

A 90-day framework for new Product Leaders

So, what does it look like to focus on People, Business and Process in the first 90 days?

Let's go through a ramp up checklist.

Note: This approach works anytime you're stepping into a new domain, team, or challenge so try it on for size even if you’re not onboarding.

Pillar #1: The People

Product work is people work. More than roadmaps and releases—it’s negotiation, influence, and often politics. Your success as a Product Leader depends on cross-functional alignment, collaborative execution, and a shared understanding of goals.

Relationships are your leverage. Culture is crucial. Understanding both is your first real win.

In the end, it’s your connections that will make or break your impact. In the first 90 days, your top priority is to build trust and gather context.

To do that, prioritize these people-centered tasks:

• Get to know your team

• Establish alliances with key stakeholders

• Build a personal board of directors

Get to know your team

You can't lead a team you don't know. Approach your new team with authentic curiosity, maintaining neutrality as you absorb their history and context. You'll have plenty of time to evaluate them later. Now is the time to listen and learn.

As a new leader, you’ll often come into a volatile situation. Individuals will have a range of responses – from enthusiastic to resistant. They will be particularly sensitive to leaders who come in with baggage – preconceived ideas of the right way and the wrong way to do things. It’s important to navigate this terrain with both confidence and sensitivity.

These candid, open conversations will help you accurately assess the team's current state and build the relationships you’ll need.

Consider asking team members:

• What’s working well? What do we need to preserve as we seek to grow?

• What’s not working? Where should we focus on developing?

Consider asking yourself:

• What’s the team’s trajectory? Are they set up to succeed?

• Where are the strengths and gaps across skills, experience, and confidence?

• What is the team not telling me but showing me?

Uncover the informal power dynamics, decision loops, and trusted voices within the team. Aside from 1:1 conversations, this can be done by attending meetings and reading cues.

And most importantly, make yourself available and visible to your new team.

Establish alliances with key stakeholders

Product is cross-functional by definition. In your first few weeks, map out the ecosystem of stakeholders who influence your work. Just like with your team conversations, approach these interactions with curiosity and an open mind.

As a new leader, you have a unique opportunity to position yourself as more than just a product team advocate. You can serve as a bridge-builder focused on helping the entire company work better together. This neutral stance is powerful for identifying and repairing strained relationships between departments that might be limiting your team's effectiveness.

Begin by connecting with key partners outside your immediate team: marketing, sales, customer support, research, data, and finance. Later, expand to others like legal, trust & safety, and operations—these groups often have valuable product insights that may have been overlooked.

Consider asking stakeholders:

• What are your biggest goals this year? What’s getting in your way?

• What does the product team do well today? What do we need to improve?

• How do you work with the product org - what’s working well and what could be improved?

• Who else should I be talking to as a key stakeholder?

Consider asking yourself:

• What incentives do this stakeholder and their team have?

• Are this person’s goals similar to my team’s goals?

After these initial conversations, establish regular check-ins. As you gain a deeper understanding of the organization, you'll discover new questions that need exploring with these key partners.

Build a personal board of directors

When you start a new job, you’re often at the end of a long road of networking conversations. So it might seem counterintuitive to keep your foot on the networking pedal in your first 90 days. But, keeping your networking intention strong is one of the best things you can do.

How do you do it? A personal board of directors will give you the grounding and perspective you need as you get started in a new role. What’s a personal board of directors?

Ha Nguyen explains the Personal Board of Directors concept well and champions building your personal board:

“A personal board of directors has people you trust, a diversity of perspectives and brutal honesty and accountability” — Ha Nguyen

No matter how senior you are, you’ll need support. In fact, many leaders find they need more support as they get more senior and have fewer peers to rely on. Early on, start curating your personal “board of directors”—a mix of trusted leaders inside the org, mentors outside it, and coaches or peers who can help you see around corners.

Consider meeting with these folks on a regular basis to round out your perspective early.

Pillar #2: The Business

You can't make good product decisions without understanding the business context. Early on, your “outsider” perspective is actually your superpower. Jori experienced this first hand:

During my first week at a new job, a leader said, “I want you to think about how everything is working—how things operate around here. What’s working? What’s not? What could we be doing better?” At first, I was caught off guard. I was new to the industry so his request was surprising, but empowering.

Ultimately, he taught me the power of early impressions and fresh perspective as part of the onboarding process. The way I saw things in those first weeks was actually strategic input for him. It helped shape how he thought about the team, our systems, and the business overall. And it was something I carried with me to future roles and in leading future teams.

Understand the Product Strategy Stack

As a new product leader, one of your greatest assets is your fresh perspective. You’re not yet embedded in the way things have “always” been done, which means you’re more likely to notice where things don’t quite add up—whether that’s in strategy, execution, or communication.

Start by mapping your Product Strategy Stack:

In the first 90 days:

1. Get to know each layer of the Product Strategy Stack

2. Identify underlying assumptions that connect the layers

3. Assess the layers of the stack that you and your team own

As you examine each layer, consider looking for holes in the stack. Aside from assessing consistency with what you’re seeing and hearing, it’s on you as a leader to spot if teams feel empowered to build for their customers.

An important question to ask yourself: Do teams feel confident in how they’re contributing to the bigger picture?

Here are some of the most common gaps we’ve seen:

• A product team “taking orders” from the sales team or leadership

• A vision-less roadmap full of features that don’t tie back to a clear product strategy

• A lack of a cohesive customer strategy – vague customer profile or trying to be all things to all people

• Top line metrics that don’t clearly tie back to products or clear decision making

• Goal metrics that are trailing indicators, not levers the product team can pull

• Too much focus on revenue, too little focus on how customer value is created

Leverage your outsider’s eye, competitively

Now is also the time to challenge underlying business assumptions and look at competitors with fresh eyes. Asking basic questions and pushing team members to defend decisions made in the past is all fair game in the first 90 days.

As the “new person,” you have a limited-time window to ask powerful questions. Use it. Your perspective is clean, and you’re not yet weighed down by institutional knowledge or internal politics. When you receive muddy or unclear responses, chances are there are some gaps in strategy. You can use the Product Strategy Stack to debug those gaps.

Pillar #3: The Process

How an organization handles operations reveals what they value. The first 90 days is the optimal time to observe what's happening – to understand if it's working or not.

Now is not the time to change things or copy and paste your former processes onto your new team. Now is the time to take notes and collect data.

Dig into the product life cycle

Understanding how the product development process works today is a critical first step to improving and optimizing it.

Work on a single feature yourself or shadow a Product Manager through a feature journey. This hands-on approach will let you experience ideation, spec writing, design, and delivery firsthand.

Assess how team’s learn about customers and generate insights

Talking to customers and learning from experiments is a critical part of improving product decisions. You must understand how the team makes sense of these insights and incorporates them into product initiatives. Ask questions like, “What user research methods are used?”, “How often do teams talk to customers?”, “How does the team learn from its experiments or product launches?" and "What mechanisms does the team use to incorporate learnings into future product initiatives?"

Make it a priority in your first 90 days to personally observe customer interactions—whether through research sessions, support calls, or user interviews. If these opportunities are scarce, you've identified both a red flag and your first opportunity for impact. Deepening customer understanding is perhaps the highest-ROI investment a product team can make.

Map out collaboration

Identify how the product team collaborates, with whom, and how often. Ask about daily, weekly, or monthly communication cadences within and across teams to understand the rhythm of collaboration.

Learn how goals are set

Get a clear understanding of the process for setting goals and the specific metrics used. If you encounter a metric that is central to the company but you don't understand it, prioritize getting clarity on it.

Get feedback on what's working

Conduct a retrospective with your team to learn what's going well or poorly about the process. This will help broaden your understanding of the product development process beyond what you uncovered in your own assessment.

After understanding the current process, then you can decide where to rely on the system that is already in place and where improvements are needed. Prioritize fixes based on the ease to implement and the value it brings.

Get those early wins

As you gain the lay of the land – as you understand the People, Business, and Processes at play – you’ll build a perspective that is rare & fleeting. You’ll have the benefit of fresh eyes, but also an increasingly deep understanding of how the team works.

This is the perfect perspective from which to identify opportunities for early wins – the meaningful progress you can make today as you establish the foundation for tomorrow.

These early wins are critical – because they establish you as an effective, action-oriented leader who is able to move the needle. Every leader gets placed into a new role because of your potential—early wins transform the promise others saw in you into visible proof of value.

Earlier, we talked about the virtuous cycle you can create in your first 90 days. Early wins build trust which earns you the support & resources to deliver even bigger wins which earn even more trust.

So, early wins are critical to getting that flywheel turning. Often, leaders get tripped up by focusing on big wins rather than early wins. They wait too long to get the flywheel turning – and credibility erodes with each day that passes without visible progress. If your team and stakeholders can speak to your early value, you know you’re on the right track.

What does a good early win look like? It starts with reframing how you think about progress. Don’t get bogged down shipping product features. Instead, look for other ways to create impact.

Here are some ideas. Not all of these will apply to your role or your product, but they highlight the type of thinking necessary to achieve early wins.

You'll notice many of these ideas are hands-on, but that's okay—even for Product Leaders with a large team. Now’s the time to dive into the details. Getting granular, whether directly or through your team, sharpens your insight and sets you up for lasting success.

Customer experience improvements

• Run an A/B test on high-traffic pages to quickly validate messaging or design changes

• Analyze the top 5 customer support tickets and implement one quick fix that reduces volume

• Create a "quick wins" backlog highlighting small UX improvements with outsized impact

• Implement targeted onboarding improvements for a specific user segment with low activation

• Identify and fix the most common drop-off point in your conversion funnel

Revenue & retention optimization

• Use the CRM system to test a new campaign or refreshed copy on an existing segment

• Optimize your dunning strategy to reduce involuntary payment churn

• Use targeted email or push campaigns to re-engage recently churned users

• Use the merchandising system to highlight an in-demand or high-margin product

• Implement tactical pricing adjustments that don't require major development work

Process & productivity enhancements

• Map and remove a significant bottleneck in the team's development process

• Create a streamlined prioritization framework to reduce decision-making friction

• Improve meeting effectiveness by implementing a "decision-tracker" template

• Audit and consolidate your team's tools to eliminate redundancies

• Create templates for common deliverables (PRDs, specs, experiment briefs)

Team & stakeholder alignment

• Define and articulate a clear product vision that inspires the team

• Run a collaborative design sprint to solve a meaningful customer problem

• Rebuild a broken stakeholder relationship

• Implement a regular "voice of customer" review with key stakeholders

• Create a "skill-sharing" program where team members teach others their expertise

Technical & strategic focus

• Sunset a feature that's consuming resources without delivering value

• Conduct a technical debt audit and prioritize the highest ROI improvements

• Define success metrics for existing features that lack clear performance indicators

• Identify and delegate ownership of a neglected but promising product area to an emerging leader

Focus on early wins that tap into your strengths. If you’re great at facilitation, run a killer planning session. If you’re strong in research, synthesize insights that unlock new directions. If you see a zombie project dragging everyone down—end it. Even something as simple as improving meeting hygiene or fixing a small internal tool can show people you’re paying attention and making things better.

Remember that impact often comes from unexpected places. A thoughtfully redesigned meeting structure can reclaim hundreds of team hours annually. A simple fix to an internal tool might unlock productivity across departments. These seemingly small improvements demonstrate your attentiveness and commitment to making things better immediately, not just eventually.

For leaders taking on greater scope, sometimes your most valuable early contribution won't be what you add, but what you subtract. Having the discernment and confidence to descope an overly ambitious initiative can instantly reduce team stress, improve focus, and demonstrate your judgment – sending a powerful signal about your leadership approach from day one.

Keep calm and the momentum up

Above all else, don't forget to be patient.

Momentum doesn't always look like rapid movement. Sometimes, it's about creating space for deeper understanding to develop.

Because no matter how amazing your first 90 days are, sometimes it's just time that's needed for real roots to grow. The relationships you build, the insights you gather, and the changes you initiate all need room to flourish.

And it's quiet discipline—not rushing to "fix" everything—that ensures your quick actions are guided by long-term thinking. Trust the foundation you're building; the most meaningful impact often reveals itself after those first 90 days have passed, when your early wins evolve into lasting transformation.