It’s exciting to start work on a new product! When I start a new effort — whether it’s for a greenfield product that I get to influence from the beginning or if it’s a product that I am taking over mid-stream — the beginning feels so full of hope to me. It’s like the first day of school; anything is possible! While different product managers have different favorite times in a product’s lifecycle, my favorite is always my start with the team.

You’ll no doubt do your best to get up to speed quickly so you can map out your plan or approach. To accomplish that, I suggest doing these four steps, which can happen in parallel:

Understand the problem your product is meant to solve
Get up to speed on available documentation
Bond with the Team
Establish a healthy relationship with your stakeholders

For the remainder of this article, I’ll share some pointers that will set you in the right direction for each of these steps. My hope is that you’ll use this as a starting outline and that you’ll add to or subtract from it to meet your specific needs.

Understand the problem your product is meant to solve

When you come on board at the beginning of a brand-new product, part of your work will almost certainly include guiding the team through the discovery process. This means you will learn about the product as part of that discovery.

Here’s a starter list of questions to ask. If you’re lucky, some of these answers may already be known and documented.

Have we tried to request funding or is there a charter available to view?
What problem are we aiming to solve with this product? Is there an initial problem statement?
Who is the target customer for the product?
Has any preliminary research been done that every team member should read?

To arrive at the answers, consider the following approaches:

Conduct discovery activities, which may include problem definition workshops and user interviews. These activities will allow you to learn about your problem space and determine how the product can solve these problems.
Ask to talk to existing subject matter experts who are likely to give you valuable information.
If the product is in a problem space, industry, or technology that you are unfamiliar with, check if there are industry and customer research studies that can add to your overall understanding. You should also consider adding some independent research and learning.
If you are coming into a product that is already in flight, use the product yourself. Whether this means downloading the app, making a purchase, or going into a store for a visit, find a way to use the product so that you can truly understand it.

Get up to speed on available documentation

When it comes to documentation, my philosophy is: the more available the better.

If it exists, I’d like to review it. Aside from the charter, the backlog, and the roadmap, I would also review any work that pertains to the problem definition and the hypotheses for solving these problems.

In addition to the more obvious product documentation, I ask to look at some things that might not immediately be obvious as valuable or useful:

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) can help me understand how the user interacts with the product and what constraints they have.
Knowledge items (KIs) are useful to assess prior questions about the product.
Service tickets are a fantastic way to review past problems, anticipate future issues, and understand how those prior problems have been solved.

Bond with the Team

There’s no substitute for bonding with the team that you’ll be working with, whether they’re a newly-formed team or one that has been in existence for a while. A great part of conducting these fact-finding conversations is that you can build relationships while you are learning.

I like to spend a small amount of time with each team member, asking them several open-ended questions about the product.

Consider these questions as a starter set:

What is the most valuable feature this team has implemented (and why is it so valuable)?
What are you working on right now?
What future feature are you most excited about (and why)?
Can you explain this product’s problem space to me?
What is your favorite thing about this team?
What is one thing you’d like to see this team do differently?

You should absolutely change the questions to meet your specific learning goals. The key with this team-interview approach is to go into the meetings prepared, leave plenty of time for small-talk, and ask open-ended questions.

Using this team-interview approach achieves two goals. First, you gain valuable information on the product at the team level. Secondly, you get to know your team members and how they feel about the product. You’ll get a feel for team morale and energy, which is important for you to understand as the product manager.

Establish a healthy relationship with your stakeholders

Aside from bonding with the team, you’ll also need to talk to your stakeholders. In fact, you may have stakeholder ideation sessions as part of the discovery stage, especially if you’re working on a brand-new product.

Consider inviting stakeholders out for coffee if you’re co-located. Use these interview sessions to build relationships with stakeholders by getting to know them as individuals as well as understanding what they’d like to see from your product.

As you speak to each stakeholder, ask yourself: does it look like the team and the stakeholders are in alignment? If not, you will need to figure out where the disconnect is and work to get the two groups into better alignment. The team needs to understand what the stakeholders are asking for and expecting, and the stakeholders similarly need to understand the work the team is going after and why they are choosing that work first.

This outreach will give you a network of stakeholders that you can call upon for research or validation later in the life cycle. Also, you can use this research to create baseline documentation for the product, and then add to it as you make enhancements or change the product moving forward.

Wrap-up

Becoming the new product manager for a product can be intimidating. There is always so much to learn, and you have a new team to build relationships with. Although it can be challenging, it’s also exciting. You are starting a new journey, full of opportunities to learn and add value.

Make the time to learn as much as you can about the problem your product is solving. If the product is already in flight, learn as much as you can about what has already been done. Read whatever you can get your hands on and ask as many questions as you can think of! Build relationships with your new team and your stakeholders while you learn about the product.

Once you have the foundational knowledge of the problem and the product, you’ll be able to quickly add value to the team and help them deliver value!

Use these resources to learn more

This article was originally published in the March 25, 2019 edition of Ask Women in Product. The original, complete article can be found here.

Women in Product

What structure or process do you use to understand a new product?