First 30, 60, 90 Day Plan as a New Product Marketing Manager

A Professional marketer moving to product marketing roles is usually given strategic objectives for their first 30, 60, and 90 days as a new product marketing manager (PMM).

A common practice in multinational organizational culture is to understand the customer pain points and the benefits your product offers. It is generally the best starting point for new PMMs.

Due to the demanding nature of product management roles, there is both uncertainty and great expectations, especially when discussing SaaS startups. Due to its dynamic nature, product marketing management requires a collaborative resource to coordinate with cross-functional teams for the achievement of common goals – in short, to keep your product up and running.

Having a defined and time-bound plan as a PMM provides the versatility for you to settle into the role quickly.

We have identified a successful roadmap for your first 30, 60, and 90 days as a new product marketing manager to start strong.

What is a 30/60/90-Day Product Marketing Plan?

The 30/60/90-Day Product Marketing Plan is defined as a straightforward course of action for new product marketing managers during the period of their first thirty, sixty, and ninety days. Your 30, 60, 90 days plan as a product marketing manager allows you to set SMART goals and then create an actionable go-to-market plan to successfully achieve those goals.

What Are the Benefits of a 30-60-90 Day Plan?

In addition to offering product marketing managers the opportunity, to begin with, both a mission and vision, there are additional unique benefits of a 30-60-90 day plan.

The same also goes for organizations, those that provide structured onboarding expectations as they experience better retention and enhanced employee productivity.

Here are some interesting benefits of devising a clear 30-60-90 day plan for product marketing management roles:

• The plan sets realistic goals and objectives for new product managers
• Provides PPMs with a clear long-term and short-term focus for tasks
• Settles new product marketers into the company culture and teaches company values
• Consistent learning for 90 days about products, processes, and teams
• Provides clear performance tracking and reviews for PPMs
• Provides data insights to set benchmarks for similar roles

What Should You Include in a 30-60-90-Day Plan?

Even when it’s created by an organization, every 30-60-90 day plan is unique and personalized for different resources. For example, a product marketing manager’s plan will be significantly different from a junior marketing executive.

The best 30, 60, and 90-day plan is designed with the basics in mind that should onboard the employee, give them necessary knowledge, identify expectations, and set concrete goals for them to exhibit their skills.

Professionals identify five important aspects of a successful 30,60,90 day plan for PPMs.

• Clearly identify expectations
• Define concrete goals & objectives
• Learning, training, and knowledge enhancement
• Employee task list
• Orientation

How to Write a 30-60-90 Day Plan?

Creating a 30-60-90 day plan for product marketers requires careful analysis of historic data to identify the right goals, and the ideal strategies to accomplish these goals, and to create a balanced framework to execute the action plan.

Usually, 30-90-60 day plans are categorized under three headings for each time period. You must define your learning goals, personal goals, and performance goals.

Define Your Product Marketing Objectives And Goals

Depending on the professional level of the product marketer, this is where we define the objectives and goals for the new employee. The plan should break down goals & objectives by 30-day periods, allowing the product manager time to achieve targets realistically.

Using the SMART framework is the most popular way to determine the goals of product marketing managers. For example, here is a simple breakdown of goals & objectives for a PPM:

30 days

• Understand the company’s mission (learning goal)
• Create a daily activity schedule (personal goal)
• Manage social media profiles
• Review the overall marketing content of the company for improvements
• Review existing product marketing metrics
• Review brand positioning (performance goal)

60 days

• Review the online buyer journey
• Suggest new content ideas
• Review the sales process
• Observe target audiences, leads, and potential customers

90 days

• Develop a personal product marketing strategy
• Create a product marketing budget
• Collaborate with team to establish product strategy
• Maintain daily task schedule

Identify Strategies To Achieve Those Goals

As we mentioned above, the 30, 60, and 90-day plan requires the SMART framework which informs us that goals should be measurable, attainable, and time specific. The 90 days plan primarily lays down the action plan and strategies to achieve relevant product marketing targets.

From content marketing to sales processes, the product manager should clearly have time-specific actions that can be measured through ideal metrics that are also defined in the first 90 days plan.

For example, the strategies for a product marketing manager can be categorized for 30, 60, and 90 days as follows:

30 days

• Interact with team members
• Research target audiences and customers
• Research marketing content and website experience
• Identify potential competitors

60 days

• Add the set number of new users to the marketing funnel
• Monitor sales strategy for data analysis
• Increase blog traffic by a set percentage
• Add the set number of new social media followers
• Identify the set percentage of potential leads

90 days

• Streamline the marketing funnel for consistent revenue through paid or organic marketing
• Optimize the content pipeline to engage new audiences
• Review the sales strategy to deliver more value before purchase
• Execute free trial offer through social media and email campaigns
• Plan follow-up emails for new customers

Create A Balanced Path To Execute And Achieve Your Goals

Consistency is critical to the success of the 30-60-90 day plan since every task and objective is defined. Using acumen and skills, the product marketing professional should continuously follow the action plan.

A resolute marketing strategy, streamlined action plan, and consistent data analysis are three important pillars of balanced product marketing.

First 30 Days Plan

Now that we know how to write our 90 days plan, let’s begin with the first thirty days and identify important factors to include in the first month’s objectives.

Listen to Your Stakeholders

The first step to strategically executing the product manager role is to listen to all related stakeholders. Senior management, supervisors, colleagues, customers, and target audiences provide crucial insight that can identify important needs and issues of these stakeholders.

Collaborating with team members and meeting with senior management is essential to keep the 30,60,90 day plan in check. Important insights can be used for sales enablement, operations optimization, and process enhancements allowing you to make radical improvements along the entire product supply chain.

Social listening remains one of the most popular techniques to understand and analyze target audiences. Since these are your potential customers, listening to their ideas, needs, and pain points can be a massive advantage in your pursuit of planned goals.

Build Positive Relationships

Strong networking and positive relationships are the lifeblood of SaaS organizations, as this cohesion can develop competencies within the organization. Building rapport within teams to enhance the product, marketing, and sales is a very successful way to create a culture that is purpose-driven.

By building these positive relationships with all company stakeholders, product managers can streamline the entire marketing, sales, and operations pipeline. Team collaboration can both enhance marketing funnels and customer experience, leading to delighted customers.

Enhance Your Product and Industry Knowledge

An important objective within the first thirty days is all the product, industry, and company knowledge that you can soak in. The ideal place to begin is the product itself. Educating yourself about what the product does, how it helps customers, and what its limitations are can be very important when identifying buyer personas.

Case studies, video reviews, Win/Loss analysis, industry insights, and local metrics are excellent sources to enhance your business knowledge. This valuable learning will identify essential product marketing tools, audiences, use cases, and opportunities, facilitating the 30-60-90 day plan.

Understand Full Marketing Funnel

A comprehensive product strategy includes every aspect of marketing, therefore it is essential to identify all customer touchpoints before devising a marketing strategy. Using the AIDA model, namely, awareness, interest, desire, and action, you can break down different stages of the funnel for further improvements.

You can determine different audiences within the various stage of the marketing funnel, answering critical questions like:

• Which channels and platforms do we get prospects from
• What is my website traffic analytics
• How convincing is the content messaging
• What content are we publishing, and does it appeal to the audience

The real target for you here is to collect as many insights as possible to strategize every stage of the funnel. Understanding the marketing funnel can identify the right marketing channels, ideal content marketing strategies, appealing areas of interest, new product use cases, and how effective the funnel is.

Identify and Execute Quick Wins

As discussed above, team collaboration is a major objective of the 30-day plan. Building strong relationships allows you to work together with teams to achieve quick wins. These quick wins are an essential determinant for senior management to be convinced with the talent they have employed.

First 60 Days Plan

The 60 days plan is where the strategic and analytical aspects of product marketing actually begin. You should now be ready to establish operational plans, make specific improvements, determine essential KPIs, consistently learn, and identify quick wins regularly.

Do Strategic and Operational Planning

As the second month begins, your ideal plan should be to evaluate product marketing activities like sales, product offers, new product launches, inbound marketing, etc. With a detailed view of the marketing funnel, you can identify improvements and completely remove certain initiatives based on results.

Create Dedicated Plans to Improve Specific Areas

Once the strategic and operational planning & analysis is complete, you must determine an action plan to improve specific areas.

For example, improving the traffic of your website through SEO audit, or increasing engagement through social media by delivering valuable content.

You can analyze the sales process to make it more educational, improve the customer journey for better lead nurturing, and innovate CTAs for online conversion optimization.

Develop Effective KPIs

In accordance with your 30,60,90 day plan goals, the product marketing KPIs for your role should include online conversions, website traffic, sales team support, customer retention, customer lifetime value, and cost of customer acquisition.

The best strategy is to identify all relevant KPIs and choose the ideal ones that identify the success or failure of product marketing campaigns.

For example, if your goal is revenue growth then we must take a look at conversions, CAC, CLV, churn rate, etc. If your goal is engagement then we must track website & blog traffic, social media following, ebook downloads, email open rates, social post likes, etc.

Apply Continuous Learning

Learning is a continuous objective for a product marketing manager. Regularly updating your knowledge gives you the opportunity to build better relationships, identify trends & opportunities, communicate better, and optimize ROI based on this learning.

A great aspect of product marketing is the ability to identify crucial information and disseminate it through meetings, emails, feedback, and content. The ability to assist operations, marketing, sales, and other team members offers rapid career enhancement.

In addition, consistently learning about competitors ensures you are making purpose-driven product marketing decisions.

Identify And Execute Quick Wins

Even in your 60 days plan, there should be a minor focus on resolving intra-team issues to ensure a fluid organizational process. Conducting meetings with senior management to identify pain points and solve them through continuous learning creates resolute trust within the cross-functional team environment.

First 90 Days Plan

Become the Expert of Your Product

As the third month of your product marketing plan begins, you should be well equipped with the necessary knowledge and tools to consider yourself an expert.

This proficiency is correlated to consistent learning, and your valuable research will enable you to be the focal point of information for the entire organization.

Your expert opinion should assist sales in growing conversions, marketing develops precise content collateral, customer success enhances their efforts, and product development creates more valuable product features.

Becoming an expert in your industry will give credibility to your brand among target audiences building trust as they consider you the go-to source for answers.

Measure and Update Your KPIs

As you mature in your role as the product manager, certain KPIs will lose significance and more complex ones will need analyzing. To get additional insight and valuable analyses, it is now time to update your KPIs based on the 90 days plan goals.

For example, your 30 days goal may have been engaging more audiences through ebooks and video tutorials where the ideal metrics were view, likes, share, and comments.

Your 90 days goal should ideally include metrics like conversions from ebooks, leads added to the funnel from social media, cost of acquisition of new customers, customer lifetime value analysis, and churn rates.

Identify and Execute Quick Wins

Once again, it’s time to engage with your in-house stakeholders and execute any quick wins that can help the organization grow, improve productivity, and even add new products. You are now a thought leader within the organization, your ideas can help streamline the entire product marketing pipeline.

Achieving quick wins drives organizational change, helps earn trust, builds momentum, and improves recognition across the board. Here are some important questions professionals ask when identifying quick wins:

• Does it have an easy-to-understand goal and focused scope?
• Does achieving success build credibility with the team, senior management, and other stakeholders?
• Can it be easily measured for success?
• Is this quick win achievable within 90 days?
• Does our team possess the necessary skills to achieve this win quickly?
• How will this quick win make the organization more productive and efficient?

Things You Should Avoid in the 30, 60, 90 Day Plan

The 30/60/90-day product marketing plan is a strategic guide to what is needed to ensure sustainable growth, personal learning, and marketing success. Certain factors must always be kept in check to maintain the effectiveness of the 90-day days’ plan for PMMs. Here are some of the notable ones.

Don’t Create a Strong Opinion Before Having a 360 View

Data must be the focus of your product marketing decision making, therefore it is ideal to listen, learn, and observe before building conclusive opinions. Listening may just be the most important factor that enables new product managers to understand the culture, individual team members, work processes, and the company mission through the eyes of others.

When building a 360 view of the organization, its processes, and its people, it is recommended to observe how sales, marketing, operations, and senior management operate. This will provide considerable insight into your opinions and how to proceed in the first 30, 60, and 90 days as a new Product Marketing Manager.

Never Think You Can Do Everything Single-Handedly

Your 30, 60, 90 days Plan as a Product Marketing Manager is a dynamic strategy and hence requires multiple goals and objectives. One of the biggest mistakes new product managers can make is believing they can achieve everything within 90 days on their own. This is not true.

Organizations are built on the foundations of teamwork and the cross-functional team quickly wins. Talking and listening to your team members across the new organization can allow you to understand workflow faster while enabling you to discover significant competencies to help with your 90 days plan.

Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Another common mistake that product marketing managers make while enacting their 30,60,90 days plan is not performing a personal strength and weakness analysis.

Listing down your available skillset like content production, design, SEO, etc. against time constraints, limited product knowledge, etc. Allows you to perform a personal audit to understand where you stand and where you want to be after the 90-day plan.

Conclusion

Starting a new job can cause a rush of adrenaline, anxiety, and a variety of other emotions. However, being prepared and sticking to a plan will help you succeed as PMM. Embrace the ups and downs of your new role.

We hope our roadmap for your first 30, 60, and 90 days as a new product marketing manager helped you immensely.

We’re rooting for you.

Remember, as a PMM, you can’t expect to do everything on your own. If you get stuck, you can always reach out to Chasm on behalf of your company to acquire our sales effectiveness and strategy consultancy.

At Chasm, we offer SaaS startups centralized product marketing consultancy to help them scale their businesses through data-driven strategies.

Our professional data analysts consult with your team to build winning product marketing strategies in accordance with your market and customer research that assist with demand generation, sales enablement, and conversion optimization.

Chasm does not execute your product strategies, however, we lay down the ideal infrastructure that connects startups with their ideal audiences, enhances lead generation, and optimizes marketing funnels for highly qualified customers.

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