Source: UI8

A few months ago, I transitioned from UX in the consulting industry to a Product Design position. After working for almost 5 years with clients it was time to challenge myself as an in-house designer.

Of course, I was anxious and nervous before the first day.

• How am I going to become an expert on the product?
• Where should I start learning about the business and the industry?
• What is going to be my first project?

Reflecting back over what I managed to accomplish in the first three months, I decided to share my learnings and developed a 30–60–90 day guide (including a freebie at the end of the article) for any Product Designer joining a new team.

Being proactive can take you far in your career

The first 90 Days

A 30–60–90 is a plan co-created between new hires and managers for setting activities and goals to accomplish during the first 3 months.

How do you allocate your efforts can set you out for success and achieve what Michael Watkins calls break-even point: the point at which you have contributed as much value to your new organization as you have consumed from it.

Chances are the company you’re joining might already have an onboarding workflow, including some considerations for the 30–60–90 day plan. It should not be your sole responsibility to come up with a plan from scratch.

However, showing proactiveness on how do you allocate your efforts can set you out for success, and achieve what Michael Watkins calls break-even point: the point at which you have contributed as much value to your new organization as you have consumed from it.

Let’s learn how to speed up reaching the break-even point.

People, Product & Process

To better prioritize efforts, it is important to learn as much as possible about the people you will be partnering with, the experience and business model of the product, and how the company gets things done.

Depending on your seniority, job expectations, and type of product (consumer, enterprise, B2BC), the weight you give to any of these three areas might be different. As with any resource, pick what works for you and feel free to disregard anything you consider it’s not worth experimenting with.

Buckle up. We’re going places.

Day 1 to Day 30

Your first 30 days are for you to ask the right questions, being curious, receptive, and proactive.

Put 1:1s on your calendar

When working on a design challenge, you start by understanding the problem and its context through research.

Joining a new company is no different. It requires that you conduct stakeholder interviews with key team members and departments to learn the following:

• Working styles
• Internal departments and organization
• Tech stack, tooling and governance

I recommend the following list of stakeholders roles as a starting point to have 1:1s with:

• Your manager (no surprises here)
• Design peers
• Product Managers
• Tech Leads
• Product Marketing Managers
• CRM (Consumer products) or Costumer Success (Enterprise products)

Bonus points: Create a stakeholder map

If you want to take your onboarding to the next level, you can present your synthesized learnings to your manager through a stakeholder map, showcasing the relationships between departments, as well as the motivations and pain points every stakeholder manifested.

This will give you a systems-level overview of the organization, and allow you to start identifying areas of opportunity to solve.

Example of stakeholder mapping.

Manage expectations early

“What are your expectations from my role” and “How do you see me succeeding at this position” would be two common questions I would ask at the end of my interviews, to assess the implicit or explicit expectations peers had about my role.

This didn’t mean that I actually fulfilled every expectation I got, but I was able to get meaningful data points to understand the priorities they had, as well as their assumptions. At the end of the day I agreed on the expectations for my role with my manager, which were reflected on my goals, the next recommendation.

Absorb the institutional knowledge

Becoming familiar with the jargon and documentation inside the company will be important so you have a shared language with your team. To do so, go through any glossary the company might have, wiki spaces (Confluence, Notion), especially about topics such as how the company came to exist, org charts, and culture.

Set goals

After 2 or 3 weeks into the role, you can start working with your manager on your goals. Make sure to GET inspiration from your company’s Objectives and Key Results, as well as formatting your goals with the SMART framework. You can also divide them into:

• Learning goals: What do you want to learn about the company, product, users? e.g. learn about the top competitors and their value proposition
• Performance goals: What impact on the product you want to accomplish that can have business value? e.g. perform an a/b test that improves a core engagement metric
• Initiative goals: What do you want to accomplish in product design efforts? e.g. conduct a interface inventory to lay out the foundations of a design system
• Personal goals: What are you going to accomplish to create team cohesion and bonding?

Day 31 to Day 60

After 30 days, chances are you will feel more comfortable not only shadowing activities but also being an active participant.

Assess the current product experience

The best way to learn about a product as a designer is by observing users interacting with it through usability tests, or conducting a heuristic evaluation to identify usability issues.

This will not only allow you to become familiar with flows, journeys, and tasks, but also providing your team with recommendations.

The product might span several flows, so it is important that you work with your manager to define which part of the user experience is better to assess. You can prioritize the flow in terms of impact vs effort.

Become fluent in the company systems

Depending on the maturity of the product organization and the size of the design team, you might learn a full-fledged design system is already in place, a style guide, or just a sketch/figma file.

What it is important to grasp is how the design systems connect with product and engineering ones, which means you will also need to research about:

• What is the tech stack used in engineering?
• Does the team has Storybook or any other UI components documentation?
• What are the differences between design and engineering atoms and components?

This might take more than 1 month, and that is fine. As long as you develop a continuous learning of the intricacies of the system, you will be in a better position to make informed product design decisions and empathize with the constraints the engineering team can have.

Assess the product development process

As Jason Fried states, we should think of our companies as the product–the best thing that we make. This means companies can be fast or slow, and they might have bugs or not.

Assessing the way the company agrees how to develop products is a must for a product designer. At first, you will need to follow the practices the company has, and during that learning curve process you might be able to identify bugs or areas of opportunity.

Run design critiques

Critiquing is a core skill and activity in the product design process. Although providing thorough, constructive feedback requires a deep understanding of the product, it can be helpful to get your feet wet by critiquing as an outsider, as well as asking for feedback on the tasks you work on.

During your first month, it is more important to show vulnerability and openness to feedback in critique sessions than the actual outcome of the critique.

Become fluent in the industry

This is the most challenging one of a 30–60–90. Becoming a subject-matter expert in any industry might as well take a lifetime. However, identifying levers to learn faster within your own organization can help you speed up the learning curve. Some resources you can consult:

• Newsletters
• Marketing assets such as white papers, sales collaterals
• Slack channels about competition, industry, sales, marketing

Understand the business model

“Designers either need to participate in defining the business model or they will simply be its tool”

If you want to earn the respect of product and business stakeholders, you need to learn to speak business language: revenue streams, operational costs, industry verticals, markets, investments, to mention a few.

As you advance in your career in the organization, there will be many occasions where trade-offs will be necessary: business goals vs user goals. Understanding the business model will give you a lens to better assess these situations and reach a better decision with your team.

From Day 61 to Day 90

The first month was about listening, the second one about assessing. During your third month you can start challenging the status quo and taking ownership of initiatives.

Take the driver seat of designing a feature

After two months of being in the trenches with your peers, running critiques, and having immersed yourself on the intricacies of the industry, business, and product, you are more than ready to start taking ownership of the design of a product.

My recommendation is to partner with your design manager, product manager, and engineering lead on fully understand the roadmap, identifying the next experiences to work on, and review if there is any research previously made to start taking it as input for the design. Such inputs can be:

• Usability tests or generative interviews recordings
• Quantitative data such as analytics, metrics
• Recordings of sessions in Hotjar or FullStory

After this legwork, holding a kickoff meeting is a great way to start from the same place. I wrote a piece about kickoffs if you’re interested in preparing yourself for this meeting.

You might not necessarily be the design lead, but feel comfortable being a key player and paying attention to every detail, as designing products demand designers to have as fewer blindspots as possible, given the inherent complexity of software.

Own initiatives

It is never too early or too late to embrace a DesignOps mindset. With the foundations established to keep learning from the company, you will be in a good position to promote better operating processes to amplify the value of design, such as:

• Improving the research process
• Documenting plays for a product design playbook
• Contributing to the design system

Freebie

I designed a Notion Board for any product designer starting at a new company who wants to use it as a guide to better plan their 30–60–90. Just duplicate the page and use it to your advantage!

👉 Check the template here

Of course it is a Notion doc

Navigating through the complexity of joining a new company and becoming part of a new team is a tough challenge, and there is no one-size fits all approach to it. However, this guide can give you a solid baseline you can share with your manager and negotiate priorities, while showing proactiveness and willingness to reach the break-even point in a quick but realistic way.

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published on our platform. This story contributed to Bay Area Black Designers: a professional development community for Black people who are digital designers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area. By joining together in community, members share inspiration, connection, peer mentorship, professional development, resources, feedback, support, and resilience. Silence against systemic racism is not an option. Build the design community you believe in.