TCW #019 | Your New Job Ramp Playbook
Diving right in might feel good in the short term, but a strategic ramp-up will pay dividends in the end.
Today, we’ll switch gears away from job searches to talk about the first thing you’ll be doing on the job: ramping up.
There is a subtle art to optimizing this special period of time in your tenure at a company.
Most people rush into the day-to-day work, trying to build credibility quickly and make an impact right away.
While this feels good in the short term (and you’ll get lots of praise for those “quick wins”), you’re probably short-changing yourself in the long run.
I’ll share the job ramp playbook that I’ve gleaned from high-performing people who earned fast promotions after ramping up strategically and taking the time to:
build a high-trust relationship with their manager
make a positive first impression with 5-10 key peers
gather data and insights to inform their future role trajectory
establish a cadence of managing up that got them noticed by execs (and made their manager love them for making them the bearer of great news)
Let’s dive in.
Ramping Up: the Honeymoon Period
Early in my career, a director-level colleague gave me this advice:
“Take your time to ramp up. Don’t cheat yourself of the ability to be a sponge. You’ll never have this much unscheduled time again, so take it while it’s there.”
Since then, every time I start a new job, I hear her advice echoing in my head.
With 5 company ramp-ups under my belt to date, I wholeheartedly agree with the advice.
When you’re new to a company or role, it’s a once-in-a-role time period wherein you:
can gather intel and pain points from peers and your manager — with limited expectations that you’ll solve the problem right away (after all, you’re a newbie)
will have an open calendar and colleagues willing to make time for intro conversations
can soak up varied signals (both clear and nuanced ones) to inform your first moves at the company
The Hub-and-Spokes of Ramping Up
The big unlock for me came when I understood that ramping-up is actually a system of optimizable equations.
Once you understand the parameters, you can optimize globally across the system for your initial impact and long-term visibility.
There are three critical optimization areas in the first month:
Scope
Relationships
Strategy (aka prioritization)
Visualizing them as a hub-and-spokes reminds me that each area requires dedicated effort on my part, as well as gathering data and perspectives from different people.
Let’s dive into each area and get tactical about how to ramp on each one.
Relationships
Your first month on the job should be focused 80%+ on meeting people and gathering information that will set you up to work on the right things at the right time.
There are three main work relationships that matter at this time:
peer relationships
manager relationship
relationships with higher-ups
To keep the categories manageable, I’m pretty permissive in my definition of peers, which can include people in other teams, orgs, or parts of the business. Think of a peer as anyone you work with who isn’t a “higher up” or your manager.
Peer relationship building
First, work with your manager to write down every person they think you need to meet with, including cross-functional team members.
Ask for their help prioritizing the list using their context and internal priorities.
Come up with a plan for each conversation. What do you need to learn from the person? How can they help set you up for success? How can you return the favor?
Then reach out to each person with a quick “I’m new!” blurb.
Schedule a time and have an agenda pre-set, so they don’t have to think about what to talk to you about. In your note, be specific about your intent to meet with them, ie:
“Hi 👋 I’m Erika, and I’m new to the engineering org. I’m building out the engineering operations function, and John suggested that I should meet with you to hear more about your current projects and areas of friction you’d like some help to resolve.
I tentatively dropped a meeting on your calendar for a time we’re both available, and a starter agenda is in the meeting invite (feel free to add items).
Looking forward to meeting you!”
In the meeting, be on time (of course!) and stick to the agenda.
Note: your agenda can and should definitely include some flex time for getting to know your colleague, if that’s comfortable for you and for the general vibe at the company. But make sure you cover the agenda — personally, I find that strong work relationships are best forged through productive work together, not in pleasantries alone.
If there are action items from your peer syncs, make sure you get them done and report back. First impressions set the tone of your future working relationship.
If you do this for your most critical 5-10 peer relationships, you will get a lot of great intel while establishing yourself as a prepared and reliable colleague.
If you follow up on action items proactively, you’ll find it’s very easy to get more help (and time!) from these peers in the future.
Manager relationship building
People don’t leave jobs. They leave managers.
Your manager will always be one of the most important on-the-job relationships you’ll have.
If you do it right, your manager could become a long-term career advocate and mentor who propels your career to new heights.
Do it wrong, and things can get rough pretty fast.
Some basic approaches you’ve probably already considered or read about elsewhere (and should definitely implement):
Manage up (run a campaign of optimism and make it easy for them to beat the drum for you.)
Be reliable (set expectations, then meet or exceed them)
Over-communicate (avoid negative surprises)
Be proactive (don’t wait to be asked. if you see a way to help, then help.)
Give more than you take (this is easier the more senior you are in your career, so don’t fret if you’re a new grad or in the first 5 years of your career and you know you’re taking more than you can give to your manager. It’s ok, we’ve all been there 😊).
👆This is all sound advice that you should take.
But you’re not here for things you can read elsewhere. You’re here for the inside scoop.
Advice to build the Taj Mahal of manager relationships: treat your manager like a human.
Recognize that they have needs and goals of their own, and become an ally in their plans.
At the end of the day, you’re a foot soldier for your team, as is your manager in their reporting chain. Be the best foot soldier you can be.
One of the most successful employees I’ve hired was exceptional at using our time together to learn more about my challenges so that he could then help solve them.
By doing this, he quickly became my right-hand person and got access to major strategic projects and outsized career opportunities. He earned my trust and leveraged my influence in the organization to carry them out.
To this day, I mentor and guide and advise him, as he does for me. We both open doors for one another professionally, and ours is perhaps one of the most rewarding manager-employee relationships I’ve ever had.
So, how do you get one of these manager relationships? Here’s a simple 5-step plan:
In your first 1:1 with your manager, ask about their biggest challenges and pain points.
If the opportunity arises to help assuage, solve, or create inroads for solving their problems, take the opportunity and then report back. This can be opening up your network and making warm intros, doing some research and synthesizing findings, taking something off their plate, and a wide array of other “acts of service.”
In every subsequent 1:1 with your manager, follow up and check in on their challenges (it’s fine to do this after you get your questions answered, of course, the oxygen mask analogy applies here too).
When you see a way to help, take it.
Repeat.
Too often, we treat our managers as our personal problem solvers. We see them as existing to unblock us. Try flipping the tables and see if you can unblock them. You’ll quickly build an unprecedented level of trust that will supercharge this key relationship.
Higher-ups relationship building
Building relationships with higher-ups is an area of contention in the career coach world.
Note: I have strong opinions on this, but my opinions reflect an upbringing in a certain type of tech culture (one that attempts to be meritocratic), and you might take this with a grain of salt if you’re in a more hierarchical culture.
In general, I advise employees to focus on their peer and manager relationships as a primary goal.
Use your “managing up” efforts to provide a steady stream of positive updates to your manager, which they can then share with their reporting chain (a campaign of optimism). Over time, the higher ups will recognize your name and associate it with success. This is good for your career, at times it’s even more effective than if you attempted to build relationships with them directly.
In general, I do not recommend going around your manager or chain of command to build separate relationships with higher-ups, as it can reflect poorly on you and can have a negative effect on your manager relationship.
Note: this advice assumes that you have a positive and productive manager relationship. There are certainly situations where it is advisable to skip-level, though. I’ll write in the future about how to handle soured manager relationships professionally and gracefully.
Scope
Understanding your job starts with assessing the full scope of what needs to be done today and in the future, as well as the opportunity space that could be in-scope for the role.
current scope
near-future scope
areas of opportunity (blue sky)
Tactical advice: In general you should take action in this same order (nail your current scope before adding future scope or reaching for blue sky areas). But it’s important to use your ramp-up period to understand the full scope available so you can find ways to expand and grow your career on-the-job.
Some questions to ask yourself and your manager and peers in your initial conversations:
Have any priorities shifted since our discussions in the interview process?
Are there any new or emerging expectations or areas of responsibility for this role?
Has anything changed in the organization (strategy, funding, M&A, etc) since I interviewed? Do any of these changes require a shift in thinking about the role and scope?
As you’ve had more time to think about the role, is there anything else you’d like me to own or participate in?
Strategy (& prioritization)
I recently read that strategy is “everything you don’t do.” By this definition, strategy and prioritization are one and the same.
Strategy only works when based on a foundation of facts and well-founded assumptions and hypotheses. In your ramp-up period, become a detective searching for the facts and assumptions. It will become clear what needs to be done, why, by when, and in what order — and then strategic planning will be well informed by reality on the ground.
I tend to use ratios to help me prioritize. For example, ROI is a ratio of the return divided by the investment made. Some companies are more revenue focused, so ROI or incremental TAM may be great ratios for you to use.
Innovation or R&D companies will likely use other ratios, and depending on your role, you might measure investment or returns differently (ie in terms of effort or engineering hours, or in terms of net new users or eyeballs if you’re in growth or marketing).
Regardless of what metric you use to prioritize, you will need to be on a fact-finding mission to estimate these metrics and set your priorities.
Some questions to ask yourself and your manager or peers in your initial conversations:
What are the company/team/org level priorities, and how do projects map to them?
What’s the most important lever for prioritization of my work? (ie revenue, eyeballs, new users, NPS score, etc).
How has the business strategy involved since my interview process (if at all)?
What does success look like (for a given project or the role as a whole)?
Asking these questions upfront when you’re a newbie will be welcomed and will give you an up-to-date lens on the facts and assumptions that can guide your strategy and prioritization of your efforts.
🎉 Voila! Now you can walk into your next role with a strategic ramp-up plan (and the quiet confidence that it’s OK to ask questions and get strategic before diving right in).
Give this a try and let me know how it goes.
💡If you’d like to grab a printable New Job Ramp Checklist from me, you can grab it here.
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