Onboarding your First Product Manager

Assuming you’ve completed a dozen or so interviews, or transitioned an internal candidate into the role, what does the new Product Manager do in those first few weeks on the job? When onboarding your first Product Manager in a media organization, the most important activity in the first few weeks is to begin relationship building activities. It is good to arrange meet and greet sessions with the teams and stakeholders with whom the Product Manager will need to work with in order to execute on the full set of product lifecycle activities.

An initial casual round of “drive-by” meetings should be followed by a “roadshow” presentation with each department within the company to explain the role of product management and the value it adds to their teams and the broader organization.

In parallel to these early stakeholder engagement efforts, the Product Manager must assess the ‘execution power’ of the product development team. Execution power refers to the capacity and competence of internal resources in developing new products and features. This involves identifying the size and experience of development and creative teams and any third-party vendor relationships that are in place. The new Product Manager should also collaborate with the development team to define and agree on the tools and methodologies for developing and releasing software.