90-Day PATH to Business Impact - Complete these 6 key milestones
Drew Bridewell breaks down a 90-day plan for new hires into six 1-2 week milestones: map the business and customer feedback, clarify success metrics, build a project roadmap, set up communication and execution systems, invest in relationships, then execute and reflect. Weekly sprints and rituals keep momentum.
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What does it take to have business impact in your first 90 days at your new company? Or maybe you've been at your company for the first 90 days and you're still trying to figure out where you should focus, where you can have impact and where you can start building in that joy and integrate all that amazing energy that you have into your new team, your new company, your new. Your new lifestyle, really, when you switch over to a new role. So I want to talk to you about that today. And if you have any questions after this, please feel free to DM me, leave a comment or reach out. All right, so let's get. Let's get this show on the road. I can't wait to show this to you. Because business impact in their first 90 days. It starts today, so let's do this. So we're going to talk about one to two week sprints. There's about six total milestones that I want to work you through in one master reflection. Now you're probably like, oh, my gosh, Drew's already given me homework. It's a second. It's the second slide. But yes, I am. This is so important, and I'm going to help you just unlock this for yourself today. So let's do this. All right, Milestone number one. We're just going to jump right into this. So what happens when you first transition into a new role? Well, there are so many questions and so many things that you need to start figuring out. And. And that first thing that you need to start figuring out is you need to understand the business you're stepping into. This is done by mapping out the existing ecosystem. So when I say map out the existing ecosystem, I'm literally talking about drawing, like, literally, like 10 boxes and filling in. What does the company do in all those boxes? Or you could be taking screenshots of the product and all the things that they do from the logged out experience. The logged in experience. Just map out the ecosystem, see how it works, see how people collect money, see how they have to spend money. What teams do you have in your company? What products and services do you offer? Right. It's a lot of things, but you got to do that when you're first starting out in a new team. You got to really understand it. And this is going to help set you up for success later down the road. Okay, so that's the first thing. The second thing is you need to start reading customer feedback. And reading customer feedback is as easy as going into your customer success tool. You might use, like, help scout. You might Use like what is it? Intercom. You might use a lot of different things, right? Go ask what those things are or go into your app store and read the comments from your customers or even go and talk to your customers. Right? That's number two. Number three, you want to form a perspective about the business. So now that you've mapped and understood the ecosystem, what we want you to do is be able to like start forming a hypothesis and understand like, well, why do people use this tool? What value does this tool bring? What problems is it solving? And start forming your own perspective about the business. Yes, you're going to have the mission statement, you're going to have the values and the vision of the company that were probably there before you joined. But you got to have your own perspective coming in so that you can add your diverse perspective to the company, to the business. Okay, Number four, uncovering any problems or challenges with the business. So literally in the first 30 days of your team you're joining, you're understanding, you want to start writing down and documenting every single thing that you see and experience in your meetings and your rituals, your routines and the habits that your teams already have and start identifying what are the problems and challenges that we currently face. Now I know that you could go in and ask people in the company and you could ask them like, what are the biggest problems you're faced with right now? Right? The challenges that you're faced with. And even so, when you have that, you still want to be able to go back and document your own hypotheses and your own understandings of why things are problems and get to the bottom of them, right? You want to go to the root of the cost. Then the last thing for this milestone number one is you want to write down literally all your questions. So you got questions, you got probably a million different questions. You want to be asking questions every single week in your one on ones with your manager, your one on ones with your team, your. Your one on ones with your product team, your one on ones with your customer support team, whoever you support. You want to be answering and writing questions every single week so that you can bring up your maturity of what the company does and how it is understood. That is milestone number one. Let's go to milestone number two. If you have questions about milestone number one and you haven't done any of these things yet, now's the time. We're talking 90 days of success. So this could be a one to two week sprint to do this. Alright? One to two weeks. Don't take Forever to do it. You want to be able to boost your energy around what you know about your company and how you move forward. Okay, that's number one. Number two, we want to understand your roles and responsibilities. Your roles and responsibilities are important because this is how you get benchmark and measure success inside your role. It's how you get paid. If you're underperforming, then you're probably going to get on a pipe, which is a performance, a performance basically management plan that you have to get. You have to get into a development plan with your manager because you're not underperforming. So make sure you understand this up front so you can deliver an over deliver on those things. So you want to discuss the expectations and goals with your manager. You want to map out what success looks like in your role. You want to identify learning and growth opportunities in that role. Like what are the gaps current currently in the team and what things will you do to help fill those gaps? And then you just want to be in a reflection mode about like, okay, well how do I want to perform? And I really want to, I really want to encourage you. If you come in as like a junior designer, you come in as a junior PM or PM or whatever level you're at, you want to really understand what does it take two to three levels above where you're at and start working on building those skills. You always want to be building two to three skills above where you're currently at because that's what really, that's what's really going to move the needle. Like you're doing your current roles and responsibilities. That's a benchmark that you're going to be able to do with your eyes closed. You got to be able to go two to three levels above where you're at and figure out what those things are. That's going to really serve you. This is going to happen during week three and week four, right? Your manager comes in, he's giving you that grace to learn about the problem, product and experience. When you're first coming to the company, you're going through orientation and onboarding. Get an understanding. Now what we need to do is learn about how we can really have an impact with our role and the responsibilities inside that role. Milestone number three. All right, milestone number three. We're going to generate a project and development plan. So you got an understanding of what you got to do, you understand what your role is. Now what we need to really do is, is understand the projects, the big rocks, the big things that you're Going to help move forward with your PMs, your, you know, whoever is on your team. This is done by developing a roadmap. I want you to design a roadmap. And that roadmap could be 12 blocks or 16 blocks for the 16 weeks that you're going to do this. Or it could be for the 12 weeks that you know, because we're talking 90 days here. What can you do over that 90 day block? And this could be, you know, 12 blocks like I was saying, 12 weeks. And identify those 12 weekly milestones, those 12 learning objectives. Map out your plan and your goals, define your rituals, write the things that you're going to do as a team every single week, the routines, the things that you're going to do yourself in the morning to help set you up for success for those rituals and the habits that you need, like and I'd recommend the high performance habits. We're talking building clarity, we're talking building energy, we're talking about building influence and courage. We're talking about necessity, we're talking about really understanding that to be incredibly productive in your role, you got to have an understanding of what it is you need to do. Because if you don't know what you need to do and you don't know what drives impact, then you're just going to be in a stagnated flow. You got to really intense that, make that flow super focused, intentional. Now this is milestone number three. We're talking, this is going to be happening week five and six and that's going to be at the end right of your month one and kind of going into month two. All right, so this is no joke. Alright, here we go. Milestone number four. Define your communication and execution strategy. So now that you've had time to develop your plans, you've understood the company and the business, you understand your roles, you really want to develop a communication and execution strategy that's going to help accelerate you. So developing your Monday and Friday and their work strategy. What am I doing between this windows of time? How am I moving things forward? I want you to think about how you define your team norms and establish your boundaries, right? You're not working 7 to 9am, you are getting ready for the day and you're setting, maybe you're sitting getting your kids ready for school or whatever it is. You want to set boundaries there and then you also want to set boundaries of, you know, what times are you available and what times are you not available? Because we live in a virtual world now and everybody's working remote. You Got to really understand your team's boundaries of when they don't mind or mind you reaching out to them. You want to be open with this. We all have different schedules and responsibilities. We live in different time zones. So we need to honor our team. We need to honor those moments. Understanding your team norms and boundaries is going to be able to help you do that and achieve that. Alright, another one, understand your company tooling and process norms. What are the tools that we use inside the company? Why do we use those tools? What are the processes that integrate with those tools? So this is one of the big topics that I have around tools, people and tactics. Gotta really understand what tools the company uses. Is it like just 1 or 2 or 3? Using Slack or using email or using Confluence, Jira, you know, Atlassian tools? What do you use to make it happen? All right, we got to know those things. The last one here is initiate the reflect, learn, practice and apply the flywheel. So the flywheel is essentially the growth loop. And the growth loop is like you're starting to understand and reflect. Plan, plan, take action and practice every single week. So you have a really nice loop of success in what you are doing. So you can make quick adjustments and you can recalibrate and you can have a better redirection of putting your energy where it's going to have a lot of impact. And you want to be super intentional and aware of the fact that you are or not creating impact. You know, are you having success in what you're doing or are you continuing continually failing in what you're doing? You want to be able to calibrate that really quick. And by milestone four, we're talking, you know, month five or six, we want to be able to, or week five or six, we want to be able to do this because we're doing this in two weeks sprints. Each milestone is about one to two weeks of focus. All right? Pushing this through milestone five, find your allies, right? People in the company who you connect with, who you resonate with, who you can learn from, who you can teach, who you can coach, and you can have a very open and supportive dialogue and team structure of how you support them and how they support you. They can catch your blind spots, you can catch their blind spots. You know, finding these XFN partners, cross functional partners and peers that you align with and that you want to build camaraderie with, build rapport with. You know, these are also people that you can give regular feedback with and be able to help them along the way. You want to Invest in culture and relationship building activities. So now that you have understanding of your responsibilities, your role, what your norms are for your team, what your schedule is, now let's start thinking about how you can add in one or two elements a week that will allow you to help build your culture, build rapport, build, understand. Oh, well, I didn't know that Drew really likes running in the woods or I didn't know that Drew really likes education, design education. So he likes to teach this over when he's not doing growth day stuff. You know, you really want to figure out who your teammates are and what they like. Do they like rock climbing? Do they like hiking? You know, you can learn these things over a long period of time and then you can create those magical moments and experiences from the entire team and it'd be really great to have. Alright, the last one. Build in your schedule to add value to your team. So thinking about service, thinking about the service and contribution mindset when your team needs something or anticipating what your team needs and being able to schedule time to go in and support them, give them the feedback they need to move forward. You know, really think about what they need and that's just being it, empathetic to your team's needs and desires. Very important stuff. All right. And the last milestone, when we get into, when we get into the kind of the last, you know, week 10, 11, 12, we got to be able to do this right here. So this is about execution, your project work, you know, execute, execute, execute. Now showing consistent results over this time time period. You want to be in a place where you understand the rituals, routines to deliver and you can actually show consistent results. You can perform consistent check ins and iterations. So you know that, oh, I'm going to get feedback on Friday or Thursday. I know that I can have another review on Monday or Tuesday. So what are the things that you can set expectations and boundaries with your team so you can keep moving those things forward, delivering above and beyond experiences. Like yes, you can do the status quo and give your team what they ask for. They want a presentation or you could present that presentation, blow their socks off and really deliver incredible amount of value. So delivering above experiences is so key. Let me come back here. Sorry about that. And then, okay, so we delivered above and beyond experiences. Now what we need to do is think about how we plan and execute workshops. So now that you are under, you understand how the team works, what functions. Now you can start hosting planning sessions and executing workshops on how you can even push it even further. Now I know that confidence needs to build, encourage, needs to build about what you understand about the business so you can be impactful in these workshops. But hey, it's time to start leading. It's time to start showing that you can contribute. And doing workshops and jam sessions without, without your manager scheduling it for you is pretty incredibly important. Like, you got to push these things forward yourself. You got to develop, write these rituals, routines and habits along the process so that you're not literally waiting for somebody to tell you what to do. You got to be pushing these things forward yourself. The last thing that I want you to do is I want you to reflect, right? How did you do over these last 90 days? Did you do retrospectives? Did you look at your success metrics? Do you get peer feedback about how you're performing? And then you can go to the next plan and we have a lot more about this sort of stuff on the Next Level UX training platform. But you can look at this, you can do business impact in 90 days, completing all of these things and then having a really solid reflection. And you know what, every time you start a new role, every time you start a new position, you can do these things and then kind of recalibrate, reset, you know, you should know what these things are so that you can be advancing yourself and advancing your team, advancing your career. Alright, so if you want to learn more, take a picture of this, you can just open up your phone, this will open up the Next Level UX homepage and then you can look at all the other things we offer. Right? We have a Clarity Builder course. It's only 10 bucks. We have a full year of high performance coaching and on demand learning from me. So if you want to join me on a monthly basis and get in there and get training about the 12 categories of next Level UX and you can ask me questions and DM me at any time, then I would encourage you to just go ahead and sign up for the full year and then we can hang out and get to know each other again. We have the programs, we have the 90 days, we have the getting started and that's pretty much it, y'. All. I hope you enjoyed this training of getting you in to Business Impact in your first 90 days. I hope you enjoyed this little quick video and support. Have a beautiful rest of your day and I'll see you next time.
