30–60–90 Day Plan: A Proven Guide For Transitioning Into A New Job (With Examples)

8 min readJun 7, 2022

To be in the first few months of a job is to be in a vulnerable position.

Being in a new environment means you lack in-depth knowledge of the issues you’ll face. And If you don’t create momentum in the first 90 days, then the rest of your time in that position will be an uphill battle.

So, to succeed in such a role, you must be effective in getting up to speed quickly. Every moment you gain is an opportunity to impact the organization. A 30–60–90 day plan helps you do just that.

What is a 30–60–90 day plan?

A 30–60–90 day plan is a document that sets you up for success in your new job by outlining a course of action for your first 90 days.

The Benefits of Planning For Job Transitions

Depending on your role, a 30,60,90 day plan can help ease your transition in the following ways.

It helps you negotiate timelines for diagnosis and action planning: You avoid getting sucked immediately into firefighting. You make time to understand the problem and then solve the problem.
A plan helps you determine what you want to learn about your new role, especially in your first 30 days. It helps you know what you want to learn and from whom you want to learn it. You use it to preempt sources of information and to clearly understand the company’s current situation, e.g, financial statements, product roadmaps, existing research, etc.
A 90-day plan is a great way to align with your manager’s expectations: It’s a handy reference for thinking through the implications of those expectations as it helps you best communicate what you believe you are there to do.
It helps you preempt potential pitfalls of the job and develop tactics to anticipate and prevent them.
It helps you create new alliances quickly, since, in hindsight, you’ll be engaging different stakeholders as you implement your plan, and you’ll get insights into the company culture.
It creates a roadmap for essential focus areas depending on the business situation.
It helps you determine the relationships you have to rely on to do your job well.
Secures your early wins: It’s a great way to ensure personal credibility at the onset and build some organizational momentum. You learn to aim for early wins in areas essential to your boss.
It helps clarify your mandate.

Themes To Consider While Writing A 30–60–90 Day Plan

Some areas of your plan will be common to all companies, such as building relationships with colleagues. Other areas will be specific to the company. But there has to be a balance between diagnosing the company’s situation and getting things done.

Here are themes to consider in planning your transition:

Accelerate your learning

There are different approaches to learning about the inner workings of your organization.

There’s the technical aspect that mostly includes knowledge about products, technologies, and systems.

Then there are the soft issues, centered around culture. Such learning involves meeting colleagues to try to understand the cultural foundation of your new organization. From this, you learn how decisions are made, how power and influence work, and identify the most influential individuals and alliances. These are the people you’ll want to support you.

Match your strategy to the current situation.

Try to understand what exactly you’re there to do for the business. Managers should be keen on this, as the way they approach their transition highly depends on the type of business situation they have inherited.

Are you getting a new business off the ground?

Is it a turnaround where you’re working to revitalize a failing unit?

Are you there to sustain the success of something that has been performing well?

Is the company in a steady-state situation, in high growth, or in a crisis, and how does this impact your priorities?

Gaining alignment

You gain alignment when you can strategically use the resources available to match the company’s expectations.

Establish direction

Your plan should also aim to provide clarity about:

What needs to be done: The goals, priorities, and associated measures of progress.
How should it be accomplished: Strategies to use in achieving those goals.
Why should people get excited about it: A vision of what success will look like that will inspire people to exert effort.

For newly created positions, you’ll find that you need to work to define what your role is. So you need to put some substance into how you’re going to create value in the context of that role.

How To Write A 30-60-90 Day Plan.

Own your education (Day 1–30)

Early on, it’s about credibility. It’s about connections and positive impressions, as you learn about the inner workings of the company.

In the first 30 days, your plan should be geared towards starting a cycle that will propel you into some early wins.

Learn about the company. Take care to understand all aspects of the business, not only the technical/product side of it but also the people and the culture. Be sure to ask any questions you have about existing systems.

Introduce yourself to team members, and learn their work styles, and preferred modes of communication. Let them get to know you too. Then, become a consistent participant in meetings, drawing contributions from your research, experience, and what you have learned about the company.

As you start to gain a better understanding of the people and the business situation, start making initiatives in collaboration with your manager and team members.

Find your rhythm (Days 31 -60)

At this point, it’s assumed that you’re well oriented with the company. It’s now time to focus on how you can contribute to the company. Leverage what you’ve learned so far to have a clear, measurable impact. Your priority should be to perform your role at full capacity, with a decreased need for guidance.

Use this time to set goals that will help you deliver more value for your company. Work to implement some of the ideas and concepts you crafted in your first thirty days.

You could focus on:

Improving processes — identify what your team is doing well, and capitalize on it. Also, look for processes that need updates. You could also suggest ways to improve productivity and promote collaboration, but try to make suggestions that create more leverage in the way you work.
Solve problems — For managers and mid-level hires, try to look for immediate issues you could solve for the company. Develop strategies that can help the team deliver more value, or make better use of existing resources.

Assessing yourself (Days 61–90)

By the end of your ninety days, it’s expected that you’ll have an outcome to share with the company. It’s not that different from your second month, only that you’re really focused on the results. It would be best if you had a measurable win.

This is also the time new leaders should set specific goals, and set new performance milestones for team members to strive to hit. For example, you might instruct the team to work faster, having added new resources for the team, or start measuring the results of implementing a new method of work.

If the company is hiring new employees, you could use your expertise so far to help bring in hires that could increase the company’s performance.

It’s also the appropriate time to review your work with your manager — To help you understand your strengths and areas for improvement.

In every role, there are expectations that never change. Such as continuously working to maintain great relationships with the people you work with, and finding areas for improvement. So, you ideally, never ‘wrap things up’, but you build up on the momentum gained so far to secure more wins.

Examples

30–60–90 day plan for product managers

Your first 30 days as a Product Manager.

Begin using your product as much as possible, drawing references from available documents, i.e., Product specifications and reports from customer research. Complete three tasks using your product daily, following your customer’s journey.
Schedule meetings with relevant stakeholders, starting with the core team, such as senior software engineers and designers, marketing, etc. Try to schedule four meetings in a week, as you learn about the product.
Become familiar with all necessary product metrics in the first week.
Read the company’s blog.
Go through the current product roadmap.
Last two weeks — Conduct research into users, competitors, and your target market

60 days.

Decide which features or pieces of the product roadmap to prioritize — create a proposal with three features.
Meeting with the head of product management at the company, present your proposal, and try to get buy-in from the rest of the team.
Begin running product strategy meetings with your team.
Determine what low-hanging fruit you could turn into a win.

Day 61–90

Choose a product feature that your team can prioritize, and break it down into modules that your team could start working on.
Work with the design team to create prototypes for the first three modules.
Start developing
Ship your first feature or product function
Begin work on your next product development priority.

30-60-90 day plan for software engineers

Here’s how you’d plan for your first 90 days if you were starting a new position as a software engineer.

First 30 days

Meet your manager. Try to understand his expectations of you and the team and the current company objectives. Ask about past accomplishments.
Understand how customers use the company’s product.
Set up your dev environment, and understand the team’s process — git workflow, code review, testing, deployment processes, etc.
Understand your team’s hierarchy and that of departments closer to you.
Make at least two contributions to the product per week.

60 days

Understand your team’s software development philosophies, and learn about existing libraries.
Practice and research your weakest competencies.
Be comfortable navigating relevant parts of the codebase.
Complete a challenging task, and ask for pointers from senior developers.

90 days

Discuss your progress with your manager, and create plans to address your weakest competencies.
Keep learning and practicing.
Write technical blog posts, and contribute to product documents. Such as API docs.
Take up larger scopes of work and more tasks.

Sources:

The first 90 days, Michael Watkins: The First 90 Days, ft. Michael Watkins and Asha Aravindakshan, SF ’17
How to build a roadmap for success: How to build a roadmap for success.
This 90-day plan turns engineers into remarkable managers. This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers into Remarkable Managers | First Round Review
Egon Zehnder — Accelerated Integration