📅 Days 1–30: Build Trust
In your first month your focus is simple: learn, listen, and connect.
Team: Hold one-on-one meetings with each member. Ask about frustrations, goals, and how they work with others. Take notes but do not rush to fix everything.
Technology: Review the codebase. Read through the last three months of incident reports to understand recurring issues.
Business: Meet with product managers, designers, and support leads. Ask them how success is measured and what challenges they face.
Trust is built when people feel heard. Avoid making big changes in this stage unless something is clearly urgent.
📅 Days 31–60: Set Direction
Once you have a strong understanding of the team, technology, and business environment you can set a clear course.
Foundation: Document the key architecture decisions that shape the system. Identify the top three technical debt items and agree on a plan to address them.
Team: Create a simple growth plan for each person. It can be as short as one skill to improve and one next step.
Process: Define the team’s Definition of Done. Keep it short and include essentials like tests, documentation, and monitoring.
Direction is not about adding dozens of rules. It is about aligning everyone on what “good” looks like.
📅 Days 61–90: Drive Results
With trust built and direction set, focus on making a visible impact.
Delivery: Identify the biggest delivery bottleneck. Fix it, and clearly communicate the before-and-after improvement.
Growth: Assign one project for someone to lead end-to-end. Support them but do not take it back once delegated.
Communication: Provide weekly updates to your manager. Resolve any cross-team dependencies proactively.
Trim: Remove at least one meeting that does not provide value.
By the end of this stage the team should feel supported and empowered, not just managed.
✅ Success at 90 Days
If you have followed this plan successfully:
The team trusts you and problems surface early without surprises.
At least one painful process or workflow is clearly improved.
Work moves at a steady pace with clear ownership. Stakeholders know what to expect.
💡 Beyond the Checklist
The first 90 days are like the boot sequence of a system. You are running diagnostics, checking subsystems, and ensuring everything is operational. The list is your map, but the real challenge is navigating the territory.
This role is not about heroics. It is about finding the leverage points where small, well-placed changes yield long-lasting benefits. Trust, clarity, and better flow are not items to tick off. They are outcomes that emerge when you understand the human and technical systems deeply enough to influence them in the right places.