Making an Impact in Your New Organization

It’s your 3rd week at your new Product Management position, and you start typing out a Slack message to your buddy who you were hired with: “How does anything get done like this?? We have to fix this!”

This is a common mindset when coming into a new position at an organization that isn’t a highly polished machine, and even still it will exist. You know that no process can be perfect, but you also know based off of your past experiences what things do and don’t work. Coming from the perspective of someone with a fresh look at operations, you are brimming with ideas on how to improve processes, on how to improve efficiency, suggestions on how to adhere more closely to Agile principles, on how certain Product specific processes like communicating your roadmap could be done better, and so on. You feel like you can make your mark early and swiftly with immediate improvements, and then when you excitedly communicate them to your manager, you hit a wall. After a few weeks of trying to get through to people, frustration begins to set in, and you start to lose the motivation you had to be an agent of change.

Whether you are joining a new company or a new program, being the catalyst for change is a difficult job, and these are lessons that I have learned which I carry with me. There is a time to be in listening mode, and a time to be in planning & execution mode. If you are still fresh to the organization (0-3 months), be in listening mode. Absorb as much as you possibly can, learn as much as you possibly can. Your ideas that you have initially formulated will morph over this listening period, and that’s perfectly normal. Your initial instincts combined with your newly acquired wisdom will produce the impact that you are looking to have.

Meet People and Make Friends Quickly

I cannot stress this enough. I know that in the post-COVID world meeting people is much harder, but slapping a 10 minute 1-on-1 on people’s calendars with a friendly intro message will do the trick. If they decline it, don’t take it personally, as people are busy and a meet and greet is probably low on their list of priorities. You can even tell them it’s okay to decline in the intro message, that way they won’t feel rude if they actually do have to decline. Often when you offer that courtesy, they respond in kind by rescheduling rather than declining.

Make good use of the meet and greets. Disarm people by sharing first, and then being inquisitive. People love to talk, especially folks who’ve been in their roles for a year or more. Understand their views on the organization, relate where you can, but allow them to speak. Don’t let that be the last time you talk to them either! Slack or Teams are amazing tools, use them to build those relationships with the people around you. Speak to anyone and everyone; this relationship building is vital because when you are ready to put that change into action, you are now very visible and have reputation to use as a platform. Not having built relationships and pointing out issues is an easy way to alienate yourself from those around you. If you’re already at this point, it’s not too late! Just cool off, regroup, change your tune to a more positive one, and keep meeting people.

The other big advantage of meeting people and listening to them (actively!!) is that you will round out your understanding on your preconceptions of what the problems actually are. Which leads us to the next point…

Actually Understand the Problems

I promise you, you are probably not the first person to realize there is a problem. When you speak with your peers and actually gain experience working in the environment, you will gain a deeper level of understanding in what the problems actually are, but more specifically, which of the problems are the important problems. Identifying a problem as an outsider is easy, but if solving it only marginally improves the program, is it even worth doing? Understand where the bottlenecks and breakdowns in communication actually are. What are actually hinderances to you and your team? What is stopping you from delivering value to your customers and contributing to your bottom-line?

There is one trap you will most likely fall into while in this phase, and that is as you naturally become more accustomed to the process, you will stop looking at it as critically as when you first arrived. You will realize why things operate the way they do, whether it was a band-aid process masking something deeper, or that there was an organizational shift that happened prior to your arrival; there are 100’s of reasons why. You will need to understand those reasons and work within their confines, but you also need to remain critical of them.

Plan with your Organization’s Leaders

I have been blessed with very reasonable leaders and peers in my career thus far. Nobody likes inefficiencies, especially those who are in charge of ideating and executing. Naturally, there is no better person to plan with than the leaders in your organization. They will understand what needs to be done from a different perspective, such as which other leaders should be involved, what avenues you should take, and which “stakeholders” should be involved in these discussions. I’ve found that treating these plans as pitch decks is effective. You not only need to identify the opportunity, you need to sell your solution.

The other thing to keep in mind during this phase is that your solution may not always be right. In fact, after discussions with leaders and staff, it’s most likely going to be wrong in more than one place. Regardless of the state of the solution, the beautiful thing here is that you have brought folks together to help solve a problem that is ultimately going to help your organization function properly.

This Process is Constant

One thing you will come to know is that as an agent of change, you will be respected by those around you. Not because of the fact that you are solving problems, in fact that will probably cause some people to be very annoyed by you. What they will respect though, is that you care. Rather than being a timecard puncher (which there is no problem being), you are working extra hours to ensure the proper function of the machine that is your organization. This is who you are. Therefore, this process is one that will never end for you. As long as you don’t fall into the trap of normalizing the chaos around you, you will always be looking to improve the system around you. This will also influence your environment, and people will be volunteering to partake in this refinement process. This can end up rippling out and becoming a cultural mindset (more likely in a smaller org), or it can be a one and done situation (more likely in a bigger org). Regardless, you are making your organization that much better to be a part of.

The key is patience.