The Myth of the First 90 Days
Making an Immediate Impact as a New Engineering Manager
The “first 90 days” strategy, popularized by Michael D. Watkins in his book The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, has long been considered the gold standard for new leaders transitioning into their roles. The book’s premise is straightforward: the first three months in a new job are crucial for establishing yourself, learning about the organization, and setting the groundwork for future success. Watkins emphasizes the importance of creating a 30–60–90-day plan to structure your transition, ensuring you understand your role, build relationships, and achieve early wins.
However, for engineering managers stepping into high-tech companies, the luxury of a gradual 90-day transition is a myth. In today’s fast-paced tech environment, waiting even 60 days to start making an impact is often considered too long! As a new engineering manager, you must hit the ground running (I’ve created this comprehensive checklist to help you get up to speed and start making an impact fast).
Learn Fast and Act Faster
When stepping into a new role, speed is crucial. Understanding your team’s dynamics, the company’s goals, and current project statuses allows you to make meaningful changes sooner. Initiate swift listening tours to gauge your team’s and the organization’s pulse. Engage with team members, peers, managers, and key stakeholders to gather insights. Instead of waiting for over a month to complete all the listening tours, complete them no longer than 2–3 weeks! Prioritize them so that you meet the most important and relevant people during your first two weeks!
This rapid but comprehensive understanding helps you identify pressing issues needing immediate attention.
Once you’ve gathered insights, communicate your findings and proposed actions to your superiors. This ensures that your understanding aligns with the broader organizational goals and secures the necessary support for your initiatives. By validating your insights and planned actions, you demonstrate your proactive approach and build a foundation of trust and collaboration with your superiors.
I recommend finishing every day by writing down “what have I learned today.” Add your thoughts and open questions you can validate and get answers for during your listening tours and meetings with your managers.
Build Momentum with Quick Wins
Quick wins compound and are essential for establishing credibility and building momentum. Look for opportunities to make immediate improvements, such as streamlining processes, enhancing tools, improving developer experience, or resolving minor productivity-hindering issues.
Engineering managers are expected to be hands-on. Don’t wait too long before installing the local development environment and working with the product. This hands-on approach allows you to identify quick wins, demonstrate your technical competence, and help you gain your team’s trust and respect.
Here are some common “quick wins” examples:
Writing a summary and action items for meetings
You will be surprised how many companies have a poor meeting culture. Simple actions like sharing the meeting agenda, taking notes, and sharing the meeting summary along with clear action items will establish your credibility and show that you value efficiency and clarity in communication. Follow up on the action items and create the necessary accountability. By doing this, you ensure everyone is on the same page, which minimizes misunderstandings and keeps the team aligned.
Automating manual work
Identify repetitive tasks and automate them using scripts or other automation tools. This not only saves time but also reduces the risk of human error. You don’t need to add a whole bunch of atomic tests to the product but identify the areas the team is used to doing manually, and it can be relatively easy to automate. For example:
- Leverage Slack workflows to add automatic reminders (recurring reminders to add items to the retro) and automatic processes like adding a new team member to all relevant Slack channels.
- Write scripts to easily extract and manipulate data for reports instead of manually creating pivot tables in Excel.
- Add no-code tools like Streamlit or NocoDB for exposing production data to non-engineers (Product Manager, Marketing).
- Create Google groups and easily add relevant members to team events.
Automating routine work demonstrates your commitment to improving the team’s efficiency and productivity. These small changes also establish you as someone willing to challenge the norm and can make things happen.
Adding tests to your PRs
Lead by example and raise the bar for quality by adding tests to your pull requests (PRs). We all know the benefits of writing unit tests. However, this practice might be neglected in many existing teams for different reasons. As the new leader, raise the bar by showing that it is possible to add tests even to the hardest places. You don’t need 100% coverage, but even 1 unit test is better than none. Help your new team remember the importance and benefits of this practice.
Gaining Production Visibility
Logs are very common and most likely exist in any team. However, more advanced observability tools like OpenTelemetry, Grafana, and Sentry might not exist. These tools don’t require extensive coding and are relatively easy to integrate. By adding such tools, you create instant visibility into production environments, gain invaluable insights, and help quickly identify and resolve issues.
Focusing on these quick wins can build momentum and establish leadership early on. These actions demonstrate your ability to deliver immediate value, enhance team productivity, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
Creating a Team Newsletter
Develop a regular monthly newsletter to highlight what the team is working on, celebrate victories, and share updates. This not only makes your team proud but also raises awareness within the broader organization. It helps in building a positive team culture and demonstrates your commitment to transparency and recognition.
Prioritize and Address Urgent Issues
Identify and prioritize urgent issues impacting your team and the company’s performance. Focusing on these areas first can deliver quick wins that build momentum and demonstrate effective leadership capability. Not everything needs to be fixed at once, so it’s crucial to distinguish between what needs immediate attention and what can be addressed later. You see, urgent issues can’t wait 60 days for you to “learn” or “finish your onboarding.” Focus your learning on these issues and their background. Understand what holds them back from being fixed. Identify the relevant people and gather them to several focused sessions on aligning on the issue, understanding its impact, identifying the root cause, and immediate action items. Most likely, you won’t have a significant part in the actual work, but you will be the one who facilitates the solution and manages the situation to resolve it.
Maintain Open Communication
Transparent communication is a general guiding principle and is even more important when you start your new role. Gain trust by explaining your actions, their reasons, and the expected benefits. Brainstorm with your team and ask for feedback before you make changes. This transparency fosters trust and collaboration, making implementing changes and achieving desired outcomes easier. Keep track of your actions and their impacts. Regular updates and visible results help you stay organized and demonstrate your progress to others, reinforcing your commitment to the team’s success.
By maintaining transparency, you cultivate an environment where feedback is encouraged and valued, contributing to continuous improvement and innovation.
Respect Your Predecessors
Avoid criticizing the efforts of those who came before you. Instead, focus on building upon their work and raising the bar. This approach shows respect and promotes a positive work culture, making gaining support for your initiatives easier. Instead, focus on the future. Use your strengths to talk about vision and technical roadmap. You don’t need 90 days to encourage the team and start talking about automation, CI/CD, production stability, higher development standards, and more effective meetings. You can do it much sooner.
Conclusion: The Myth of the Traditional 90 Days
In high-tech environments, the luxury of a gradual 90-day transition is a myth. While the “first 90 days” concept provides historical context, be prepared to adapt and accelerate your approach. Embrace urgency, listen actively, communicate clearly, and act decisively to make an immediate impact in your new role. By adapting quickly and demonstrating your ability to deliver results, you set the stage for long-term success and establish yourself as a capable leader from day one.
If you want additional tips for creating impact in your new role, I invite you to read my next post — A Manager’s Checklist for Long-Term Success.
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