Most of the blog posts that I read about tech show how thorough typical workflows are: we take a systematic approach when trying to solve problems in software development, data science, and product management. So why not be just as systematic when thinking about how we work within our team and company?

I recently had the opportunity to think about this in some time that I had between jobs. As part of this, I read a book called The First 90 Days. There are a few key ideas in this book that captured a very systematic approach to joining a new team and organisation; I feel that being aware and mindful of these points helped me in the first 90 days of my new role. In this post, I’m going to summarise five broad ideas that I picked up while reading it.

Understand what kinds of problems you gravitate towards

The premise of the book is that you are either joining a new organisation or have been promoted into a new role that has a wider scope than the one you had before. Both of these situations are often met with great enthusiasm — and a desire to immediately get to work and start ‘doing stuff.’ Who doesn’t want to roll up their sleeves and dive right in?

Different parts of the book, however, describe that ‘getting things done’ — say, creating a new product feature or changing a process in an organisation, requires solving different types of problems at the same time. These include technical (e.g., building systems), political (e.g., prioritising conflicting strategies), and cultural (e.g., maintaining team dynamics) problems. A key point that I picked up through some of the early exercises in the book is that we all naturally gravitate towards a certain type of problem over others — perhaps because it is the type of problem that we have worked on in our previous role.

The issue with naturally gravitating towards a certain type of problem is that (a) you are only working on one third of what it really takes to ‘get things done’ in an organisation, (b) you can blindside yourself to the real problems that need solving, and (c) you can alienate your new colleagues who do not gravitate towards the same kind of action that you do.

A spurious scenario that would capture this would be: imagine learning about a system that your team maintains, and immediately seeing that there are some huge problems — bugs or technical debt — that you know how to fix. These are technical problems, and perhaps, as an individual, you gravitate towards these. However, these technical problems may have originated from how the team made decisions or how they worked together before you joined. By immediately diving in to squash bugs, you may not only fail to solve the root cause of the technical problem, but you may also fail to make a positive contribution to other efforts at resolving it that focus on a different angle of the problem.

Meet stakeholders, natural historians, and cultural interpreters

Joining a new organisation naturally involves meeting a lot of new people. In most cases, we’ll be quickly introduced to people that the book characterises as vertical relationships: people that will report to you and stakeholders that you will report to.

The First 90 Days discusses other types of people to look out for. An obvious starting point are people who may be characterised as horizontal relationships — your neighbours. If I recall correctly, there’s a mention of something along the lines of “you don’t want to be meeting your neighbours for the first time when your house is on fire”: horizontal relationships may not help on a day to day basis, but they may be critical at some point in the future when things are going wrong.

There are two other types of colleagues that we should also be on the lookout for, that no one will explicitly introduce you to.

The first group are natural historians. These people will be able to give you the background to a team or project — they broadly answer the question “how did we get to where we are today?” I recall some quote that said that joining a company will be a new chapter in your life, but it will not be the first chapter in that company’s story. There’s a common saying that captures the importance of meeting natural historians — “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” — without having the right historical context, your initial work in the team may be repeating mistakes from the past.

The second group are cultural interpreters. These people will be able to onboard you into the cultural practices of your new organisation. Where are decisions made? What amount of open conflict is expected or tolerated, and how is it resolved? Why do certain teams work well together (or not)? Having someone who can openly give you some insight into these can let you adapt quicker to your new environment. For example, your previous company may have used meetings as a forum to fiercely debate the pros and cons of a particular decision before making it. Your new company, instead, may use meetings to announce decisions that have already been made. If you come into your new job expecting (and trying to) fiercely debate a decision that has already been made, then your efforts to steer that decision are coming too late and will have less impact.

Learn systematically by asking the same questions many times

The First 90 Days has a huge focus on learning —one of the biggest take-aways from the book is that we should set time to learn proactively and systematically during this transition phase.

In many companies, there will be an onboarding process or set of welcome/introduction-to sessions. These sessions tend to focus on business as usual (‘what problems are we solving?’), perhaps broken down by team. The other perspectives that are less frequently covered — and therefore are up to you to proactively figure out — are about connections (‘who will I work on solving these problems with?’), expectations (‘what part of this problem will I be working on?’) and culture (‘how do we collaboratively solve problems?’). While all four of these are equally important, the book places the responsibility of learning about these on you — it’s your job to learn about how the pieces of your organisation fit together, rather than their job to tell you.

One-to-one meetings are emphasised as a massive opportunity to learn and get quick, varied insight into a company’s dynamics. I used to treat these kinds of meetings as a way to get to know a person (and still believe that this is an important part of a 1:1 meeting), but I would never really come prepared with specific questions. The book suggests different ways of approaching this. For example, you could focus on challenges and opportunities: what are our biggest challenges? Why are they challenges for us? What are our most promising opportunities, and what do we need to change to achieve them? What would you focus on and why? Alternatively, you could focus on the past, present and future: Why was this done this way? How are things going now? Where would we like to be in the future?

The benefit that I found from having a structured set of questions that I asked everybody in my first 1:1 with them went beyond the information that I learned from their answers: I got insight into the variance between answers to the same question. This variability has more information about the company’s structure than anything else that I’ve come across to date — it encodes where teams are aligned and focused, and where frictions may be emerging.

The other question that I tried to ask everybody at the end of each meeting was “who do you think I should meet next?” Keeping track of this was a very interesting experiment; my hypothesis is that people will frequently point you towards others who they feel have a large amount of influence or insight.

Diagnose the organisation as a system

The previous points have covered (a) knowing yourself, (b) meeting others, and (c) structuring how you learn. Based on these, the book talks about making an assessment of what ‘state’ your new team or company is currently in, which is a key part of understanding how you fit in and what you should do next. To do so, the book talks about the STARS model.

This acronym stands for different scenarios that a team can find itself in, and captures what kind of action is needed:

• Start-up: a team that is assembling the initial capabilities (people, technology, etc.) in order to get a new project off the ground. You will be dealing with _bootstrapping-_type of problems and will need to work on maintaining focus.
• Turnaround: a team that is trying to save a project that is widely acknowledged to be in deep trouble (a ‘burning platform’ situation). Efforts will need to focus on re-energising a demoralised team and making effective changes quickly.
• Accelerated growth: a team that is scaling extremely quickly or managing a rapidly expanding business. Onboarding many new team members at the same time is a challenge to maintaining productivity and culture, particularly when structures that were previously unnecessary become essential.
• Realignment: a team that faces problems which will drift it into danger. It is not quite yet at the _turnaround _stage, but complacency will take it there; the main difference may even be that the team doesn’t recognise that changes are needed.
• Sustaining success: a team that needs to preserve the vitality of recent successes and take it to the next level. While this is generally a great situation to be in, your arrival marks a change — and so finding ways to maintain success given that change become a major area of focus.

An interesting detail that is mentioned is that within the same organisation, different teams may be in a different ‘state’ of the STARS model. Having a broad assessment of where your and other teams are gives you insight into how you can start working, both within your team and with other teams.

Avoid common pitfalls in your first contributions

Finally, now that we have learned about ourselves, met others in a structured way, learned about the company, and made an assessment about where things are, we can start thinking about what we will do first.

The First 90 Days has plenty of anecdotes about people coming into a new position and falling prey to some kind of pitfall which tarnishes how their colleagues view them — and even ultimately defines their success or failure in that role. Many of these failures are attributed to the points above, i.e. not spending time learning about your new oganisation and role.

I noted down a few specific pitfalls. These include:

• Coming in with “the” answer. Approaching a problem in your new role with a specific answer can be a really negative experience for your colleagues. For example, imagine that you leave a large tech company to join a small tech start-up, and every time that a problem arises, you say: “in [large tech company], we did X, and it worked.” In these cases, you are not only failing to adapt to where you currently are (a small start-up), but could also be implicitly undermining the opinions of colleagues who do not have experience at an equivalent large tech company.
• Change for change’s sake. It’s often tempting to do something — after all, it is easier to feel that we are being productive when we are doing something rather than do nothing. Making a change in order to satisfy our ego, rather than solve a problem, is dangerous. Instead, the book hints at looking for early wins in areas that those who you will work closely with care deeply about.
• How you contribute matters as much as what you do. When we come into a new role, our “fresh” eyes may quickly allow us to identify some quick wins — say, a product feature change that may significantly shift a metric that everyone cares about. However, if you achieve this early win but, in order to do so, you break cultural norms and practices in your team or undermine others, your quick win may not be so useful after all.

Conclusion

I was initially fairly sceptical that I would find value from what seems to be a popular book for business leaders while moving from one data team to another. I therefore treated the book like a textbook — referencing different sections, jumping back and forth between them, and skipping others.

Now that I have spent more than 90 days in my new role, a lot of the issues that this book highlighted feel useful. It’s clearly too early to say that I have succeeded or failed by using them — but equally, they nearly seem obvious in retrospect, and have become a reference point that I go back to from time to time.

Starting a new job is always an exciting time. Equally, it is an opportunity to proactively shape how you work with others, and how they see you. Thinking about an organisation as a system that can be characterised around various principles, qualities, and structures, changed how I viewed what it means to work — and I hope that these notes may help you do the same.