First 90 Days and Beyond

• Research the company publicly: latest earnings or funding, blog posts, press, Glassdoor signal, recent product launches.
• Read anything you were given: org chart, strategy decks, handbook, recent all-hands recordings.
• Identify (from LinkedIn + your recruiter) the names and rough backgrounds of: your manager, your direct reports, your peer managers, your skip-level.
• Draft a one-page self-introduction: who you are, what you've done, what you care about, what to expect from you in the first few weeks. Keep it human, not a resume recap.
• Block recurring time on your calendar before it gets eaten: deep work, 1:1s, reflection time, exercise.
• Decide on a personal knowledge capture system before info starts flowing — Notion, Obsidian, a single doc, whatever. Don't trust memory.
• Rest. Seriously. The first month will spend energy faster than you expect.

People

• Meeting with your manager — clarify: what does success look like at 30/60/90 days? What's the one thing they wish their last person had done? How do they like to communicate?
• First 1:1s with each direct report (30-45 min). Goal is listening, not directing.
• Identify peer managers and request intro chats this week or next.
• Identify your skip-level and ask your manager when an intro makes sense.
• Deliver self-intro to the team (in person, on a call, or async via a written post — match the team's medium).

Logistics

• Access: all repos, CI/CD, monitoring, on-call rotation, docs sites, dashboards, communication channels.
• Subscribe to the channels and mailing lists your team is in.
• Get added to relevant recurring meetings; decline anything that isn't clearly useful yet (you can opt back in).

Posture

• Default to questions, not answers.
• Write down things you'd change. Do not act on them yet.
• Notice what energizes and drains each team member in conversation — useful data later.

Establish 1:1 cadence

• Weekly 1:1s with each direct report, 30 min, recurring. Their agenda first, then yours.
• Bi-weekly or monthly with key peers and skip-level.
• A shared 1:1 doc per report — running notes, action items, topics for next time.

Listening tour

• Run a structured set of conversations across the team and adjacent teams: what's working, what's broken, what you'd do first in my seat, who else to talk to, what leadership should know, the biggest risk in the next 6 months.
• Track responses in a single doc; themes will emerge by the end of week 3.

Get dirty with the code and systems

• Clone the main repos. Build them locally. Run the tests. Note where setup is painful — that's a signal.
• Read the README and architecture docs; flag what's stale.
• Pair with an engineer on a real task — not to ship, but to feel the developer experience.
• Shadow on-call for one rotation if feasible. Read recent incident reviews.
• Inventory the major services / repos / domains. Sketch a one-page architecture diagram for yourself.

Understand the business

• Re-read the company mission, vision, values. Find out how recently they were updated and whether anyone references them.
• Understand how your team's work ladders up to company priorities. If you can't articulate it in one sentence, you don't understand it yet.
• Learn the revenue or impact model. What does a customer pay for? What metric does the company live or die by?
• Identify the company's current strategic bets and how the team fits in.

Audit existing metrics

• Inventory what's already measured: business KPIs, product metrics, engineering health metrics (DORA, incident rates, on-call load), people metrics (eNPS, attrition).
• For each metric: who owns it, where it lives, who looks at it, what action it drives.
• Note which decisions are made with data vs. without, and which metrics are vanity vs. actionable.

Stakeholder map

• List everyone whose work depends on yours or whose work you depend on. Categorize by influence and interest. Plan how often you'll engage each.

Personal systems

• Stand up a todo / work tracker (e.g., a daily list in a doc, Things, Linear, Todoist — pick one and commit for 90 days).
• Weekly review ritual: 30 minutes Friday afternoon — what happened, what's next, what's blocked.
• Reading queue for things you want to come back to.
• Decision log: when you make a non-trivial decision, write down the context, options, choice, and expected outcome. Revisit in 3 months.

• Write a private assessment doc for yourself: state of the team, top 5 risks, top 5 opportunities, what kind of leadership the moment calls for (turnaround? steady state? acceleration?).
• Share a sanitized version with your manager and ask for pushback.
• Identify 1-3 quick wins — visible improvements you can deliver in 2-4 weeks that don't require strategy buy-in. Examples: fix a hated meeting, clarify on-call expectations, kill a useless metric, improve a broken doc.
• Begin defining your own metrics — what you want to track that isn't already tracked. Examples: % of 1:1s where the report drove the agenda, time-to-first-PR for new hires, weekly hours in meetings vs. deep work.
• Identify any urgent personnel issues. Don't sit on them, but don't fire from the hip either.
• Confirm or revise your understanding of the team's mandate with your manager.

• Draft a team operating plan: mission, priorities for the next 1-2 quarters, what you'll stop doing, what success looks like.
• Socialize the plan with peers and manager before announcing it to the team. Refine.
• Present the plan to the team. Invite challenge. Adjust.
• Define and communicate your operating rhythms: meeting cadence, decision-making process, how you'll give and receive feedback, what you'll escalate and what you won't.
• Set up a recurring forum for team announcements and visibility (weekly written update, monthly all-hands, whatever fits).
• Begin the first goal-setting cycle under your leadership if the calendar allows.