You’ve landed a new role – congratulations! For senior folks, you know the first things you’ll want to do is absorb and assess as much as possible while determining your strategy and this includes the ever omnipresent 30-60-90. For those who haven’t built one themselves before, where do you start?
First of all it depends on your role, the culture of your company, and your manager. The 30-60-90 is often seen as a must-do or must-have with new hire, but I often times having a time limit on your work, such as days, doesn’t demonstrate progress. Rather, what may demonstrate progress would be key projects or outcomes and then adding an estimated timeline to those.
For example, you may want someone to do a full assessment of the team, documentation, and report back on their findings. This could take anywhere from 15 days (low complexity) to 45 days (high complexity).
In general, there are 3 stages that I use in my first 90 days: learn, build, and execute. Again, it’s key to note that these don’t have to be 30 days exactly, but having a timeline is helpful for expectation setting.
Learn.
The best advice I can give to someone joining a new company is to lean into listening. Even if you are the foremost expert in something, that doesn’t mean that the business doesn’t know what they are doing, or haven’t thought about what you have thought about. The worst attitude you can ever come with is the “savior” complex – when you join as if you are saving everyone from a tragic outcome.
So, take the time to listen, ask questions, and gain deep understanding as to why things are they way they are. And, early on, don’t interject yourself into anything you weren’t hired to do. Get your first wins under your belt by building your relationships and getting the full scope of what needs to be done. After you feel like you’ve gotten a good picture (more information = better), then it may be time to offer your opinion.
Build.
The next stage is building. After learning and determining what needs to be done (and hopefully gaining some approvals), it’s time to start building. This means strategy, this can mean plans, this can be project management trackers.
This is foundational work, so don’t skimp on it. You will want to have a solid game plan before beginning to execute, otherwise, how does this stuff tie together? Does it go toward a goal? Otherwise, you will end up doing a bunch of ad hoc projects that may not add up to the bigger picture.
Execute.
This isn’t really a stage that can be neatly tied up into 90 days, but insert some projects with time constraints that you want to do to get to the end goal. If you’re in demand gen, this could be something as simple as “optimize the website to increase conversion by X%” or “develop X content to drive X leads” etc.
These shouldn’t be long projects, you want to make sure that since this is your “30-60-90” that your initial executed goals are small enough to demonstrate value early on. Once you get those wins, you can move on to bigger projects!
Header Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash