Ways of Working | Creating the environment that you want to work in

team work by Design Circle from Noun Project

Even after six job changes in 7 years, I am yet to nail down the optimal “first 90 days”. However, I recently tried this structure below that seemed to work for me. I’ve since shared it with a handful of new colleagues and friends who’ve started new jobs during The Great Resignation, and received positive feedback. If you try it and have suggestions, feel free to chime in.

Starting at a new job — particularly as a product manager — can be daunting, and most (if not all) workplaces are yet to discover frictionless onboarding (it’s a tough one to crack). There are natural questions that arise:

• Who are the stakeholders?
• Who are the actual stakeholders? Aka, the real decision-makers.
• How do I assimilate into the existing process/flow-of-work?
• What’s the strategy? What’s the product? What’s in-progress right now?
• How much autonomy do I have?

…among many, many others.

From my experience, these reasonable and basic questions are often met with ambiguity and confusion — a great opportunity to take matters into your own hands for the greater good.

It’s a great display of initiative, and also a means of hitting the refresh button for the team: addressing key culture and process pain points, building relationships early on, and most importantly: creating the environment that you want to work in.

There really is no one-size-fits-all approach, so instead of trying to implement stringent agile processes or other frameworks, I’ve tried to approach the development of “ways of working” with curiosity and open-mindedness.

Here’s the structure of discovery and implementation that I utilized, summarized in a five steps:

1. Introduce yourself in 1:1s with purpose and gather information. It’s not just about rattling off your name and past work experiences. Ask them about their time at the company — what’s working well? What’s not working well? Drop a hint that you’d like to use this opportunity to change processes for the better, and that you want to implement changes to address their pain points.

2. Share your learnings with the group. After building rapport, share what you’ve learned and propose a few changes that may address the bulk of the concerns. You’ve already established buy-in during the first step, so this should be well-received.

3. Facilitate a group brainstorm session. Before we discuss what we’re working on, let’s discuss how we will collaborate. I’ve often utilized a “Culture Canvas” from Mural (not a paid ad) to help establish our team culture, norms, and communication patterns.

• I also use this opportunity to reset meeting cadences. It boggles my mind how much legacy recurring meetings invade everyone’s calendar. I once had a manager who would do an analysis of headcount in a room and try to estimate the cost of everyone’s time in a meeting as a means of measuring value-add. It’s a bit extreme, but it does put things in perspective. Do all 25 of us need to discuss if we should change the color of a button for 45-minutes, only to conclude with indecision and further ambiguity?
• We also utilized the RACI Matrix (responsible-accountable-consulted-informed) to align on individual/role expectations.
• We answered questions such as: what are the norms of our team? How do we provide feedback to each other? What are “good behaviors” of an effective team? What are “challenging behaviors”? Some examples can be “no meetings more than 30min” or “cameras should be optional for group meetings”.

4. Realign on the “what”. Now that we’ve established the how, let’s realign on the what. What are we working on? What’s the priority? Be sure to implement all the process takeaways from the previous step to help kick-off the new precedence.

5. Recap and document. You’ve collected feedback, hosted brainstorm sessions, aligned on the “how” and “what”, and now you can cement it with a shared recap. It’ll take some effort to reinforce new patterns, but the juice will be worth the squeeze.

Below is an example of how I’ve shared and implemented the plan in the past:

Summary of the Agenda

Setting expectations on what we’re hoping to achieve.

While I’ve used the above process at the start of a new job, I’m sure you can use it as a mid-flight refresh as well. It’s easy to slip into complacency of existing processes and accept things as the norm without questioning it, so it’s a great way to reinvigorate the team.

It’s much easier said than done, but if done right, you’ll hopefully establish an environment that you and others will want to work in. You’ll have better working relationships, efficient meetings, clear roles/responsibilities, and a shared “ways of working”.