Five tips for your first 30 days as a TPM
Starting a new job is both exciting and nerve wrecking. Looking back at my career, I did not have a specific strategy for onboarding when I started new jobs. I just went with the flow. I recently went through onboarding in a new company and it was a different experience primarily due to the company culture. While there were a lot of learnings, being intentional about how you want to onboard is key. Here are five tips that can help in the first 30 days of starting in a new company as a TPM.
1. Meet your manager
Needless to say, this should be of topmost priority. Try to meet your manager in the first couple of days, understand their expectations and how your onboarding success would be measured, details of the projects you would be working on, key contacts to meet etc. Understand if you are expected to contribute to the project right away.
2. Find an onboarding TPM buddy and/or a mentor
Ask your manager if they can assign someone on the team to be your onboarding buddy. This is someone you can reach out to if you have any basic questions, someone that can help you figure out the ropes in the first few days in the new company. Also, ask your manager to assign someone to be a mentor for the first 3 months. Difference between a mentor and an onboarding buddy is that a mentor is someone that has experience in the company and can give you advice on running your projects. An onboarding buddy does not necessarily need to have the experience in the company but someone that has joined before you and would be able to answer any basic questions like which video conferencing tool to use, which communication platform to use etc. Mentor and onboarding buddy can be one and the same. If you cannot find a mentor, at least find a buddy TPM.
3. Learn about the company culture
For some companies, being a culture fit is super important. Understand the importance your company places on their culture and learn as much as you can about their culture. Learn how prioritization decisions are made, how escalations are done, how teams communicate (messaging vs. email vs. wiki etc.), how performance evaluations are done etc. Do not rush to implement your ideas without understanding how things are done, and why they are done a certain way.
4. Meet as many people as possible
TPMs have to typically work with cross functional teams. Meet with as many project team members as possible in the first few weeks. In my first two weeks, I set a goal to meet 2 new team members a day and then reduced it to 1 person a day for the subsequent two weeks.
Set up 30 minutes with each one of your project team members. One advice is keep your first meetings non work related and focus on getting to know the team members personally. While this is great advice, being an introvert, I am not too comfortable talking about non work-related things. Someone at my new company suggested the following format and I stuck to this format which worked out well:
- Brief intros about you and your team member’s background.
- Aspects of the project the team member is working on. Ask a lot of questions.
- Current challenges that they are facing.
- Advice for your successful onboarding based on their experience.
- Three contacts that you should talk to. This will help you with building your network outside of your immediate project team members. Focus on meeting your immediate team members first and then go outside this circle once you talked to everyone on your project team.
5. Map out end to end technical workflows
Based on your conversations map out end to end technical workflows for your projects/programs. If it is allowed, try to record the first few technical sessions you might have with the project technical lead/s. This way you can go back to the re-watch the recording and understand the nuances you might have missed the first time around. This will help you with creating the technical workflows. By forcing yourself to map the workflows, you can understand the systems better.
There you have it. Good luck with your onboarding to a new company.
