SIDEBAR ROUNDTABLE: Onboarding for Senior Product People
Onboarding to a new product management role is hard. It’s even harder when that role is very senior, you need to deliver impact quickly, you’re in a complex problem space, and your organization is highly matrixed and/or remote-first.
Potential discussion questions
What’s the most effective tactic you’ve used to identify or define early wins when onboarding into a complex and ambiguous role?
Can you share a time when you failed to make an early impact? What would you do differently now?
How do you quickly identify and engage with key stakeholders in highly matrixed or remote-first organizations? Any tips for identifying stakeholders or influencers who may not explicitly appear as such by title alone?
What’s one onboarding approach or framework that you’ve found particularly helpful in a senior role? Why?
Have you ever abandoned a formal onboarding plan? If so, why, and what did you do instead?
How do you balance the pressure to deliver immediate results with the need to deeply understand the product and market?
What signals do you look for to know when it’s safe to move from learning to action?
How have you uncovered and navigated unspoken cultural norms in a new organization?
What’s the biggest onboarding mistake you’ve seen a senior leader make—and how did they recover?
What rituals or habits have helped you stay connected and visible in a remote-first environment?
What assumptions did you make early on that turned out to be wrong? How did you course-correct?
Session goals
Learn from others successes (and failures)
Share advice about tactics to make onboarding easier/faster/more effective
Share advice about establishing trust across functions and leaders in the context(s) outlined above
Build connections with more Sidebar members
Commitment
This leadership roundtable discussion is open to all Sidebar members. Please ensure you have moderate to expert level experience with this topic before RSVP'ing as participants will be encouraged to share their knowledge and insights. The event will be recorded and shared across the Sidebar community. Since spots are limited, please only RSVP if you can commit to attending the roundtable.
Please be aware of equitably sharing this space; don’t interrupt, dominate, or talk over anyone else.
About our moderator
This session will be moderated by Chelsea Bullock, Senior Principal Product Manager at Atlassian. Chelsea has nearly a decade of experience building data and AI products, scaling product teams' impact, and onboarding to new roles at companies including Mailchimp and The Weather Company (Channel). She has lots of conviction about product practices, especially about reciprocity between R&D and revenue teams. You'll also find her waxing philosophical about data and AI product standards and experiences wherever she gets the chance.