30 60 90 Day Plan for Executives

If you’re an executive joining a new company or interviewing for a job, there’s a good chance you’ll be asked to prepare a 30 60 90 day plan. This is a document that outlines the action steps you’ll take in your first 3 months to get up to speed quickly and lead your team effectively. The reason that you may be asked for this plan in an interview process is that leaders are looking to see how an executive would approach getting started, how much help they’d need and what type of questions they ask.

You have two important goals in building this plan:

• Assemble a solid plan that is well-thought out and could help you get started quickly
• Impress the CEO (or whoever is interviewing you) and demonstrate your competence

In this article, I’ll walk you through the fundamentals of how to build a 30 60 90 day plan for executives. You’ll of course need to make adjustments to fit your own team.

Before Starting

If I hire an executive, I expect them to be highly engaged and deeply involved in my business. A strong sign that they’ll have the dedication I’m looking for is when they are eager to start learning before they are officially on payroll. If they accept a job and give one month of notice to their prior company, during that time on the nights and weekends, I’d hope they’d want to learn more about my organization, and ramp up on learning so they can come in on day one and hit the ground running. Some specific things you may include in your 30 60 90 day plan:

• Read as much documentation as possible
• Review customer history in the CRM
• Read the company’s recent marketing and sales material (ebooks, etc)
• If technical, begin reviewing the codebase
• Reach out to anyone in your network who uses the product to get feedback
• Reach out to anyone in your network who could be a potential customer for the company
• Identify what mentors of yours (if any) could be helpful for you in the new role

In addition to these tactical steps, a great way to help transition to a new role is to write a recap, just for yourself, of your previous role and outline what you learned and what you would do differently. This document is designed to be private for you, like a journal entry, and is a great opportunity to reflect and think of new ideas to try in your next role, which you can then include in your 30 60 90 day plan.

Day 1-30

Focus: ramping up

In your first 30 days, I expect an executive to be productive quickly. It can often be pretty clear in the first 30 days whether an executive hire is going to be successful or not. Specific things that you should be focused on at this time:

• Listen as much as possible and absorb everything… join meetings, customer demos, etc
• Meet with each of your direct reports, and potentially skip level meeting with junior staff
• Get access to your budget and do a comprehensive review to understand your options
• Review the company financials so you understand financial levers of the business
• Get introduced to significant customers and schedule calls to learn about their use-cases
• Meet with any strategic partners or evangelists that may work with your department
• Make notes and initial assessments about the performance of your current staff
• Jump into any urgent matters with your staff to immediately add tactical value

The first 30 days for an executive can be intense, and the goal is to learn as much as possible. While you may be eager to make changes to the team structure, process and staff, it’s often better to get a solid amount of data before implementing those changes, which you can do in the next section.

Day 31-60

Focus: implementing process

In your second month in a new executive role, you’ve likely gathered enough data and learned about the organization to the point where you can add some process and make changes. When a new executive is hired, the intention is often for them to make a department more effective, so the success of your role is often determined by what changes you choose to implement, and whether or not they make the team more productive towards specific goals. Consider these suggestions for a 30 60 90 day plan for executives:

• Hold a weekly staff meeting (if it wasn’t being done already)
• Collect weekly written updates from each team member
• Create goals for the month or quarter
• Document best practices and processes for key team activities
• Create a hiring plan and adjust your budget accordingly
• Review the existing tools and platforms your team uses incase any need replacement

Day 61-90

Focus: grow and change

In an executive’s third month, most CEOs expect you to be fully productive and capable of operating your department. There should be a clear plan for either the month or quarter that you are working towards. You should have a solid understanding of your staff’s capabilities and a hiring plan to fill or replace any gaps. You should also have a solid understanding of the economics of the business and the budget constraints of your functional area. You may include these items in the last section of your 30 60 90 day plan:

• Foster alignment between other functional areas with regularly scheduled sync meetings
• Execute your hiring plan to ensure you have an A Player in every seat on your team
• Track progress towards your quarterly goals and ensure they line up to the annual goals
• Replace poor performing tools (e.g. software) with new ones that increase productivity
• Conduct regularly scheduled one on one meetings with your team members
• Contribute to broader company strategy in executive team meetings

As you can see, by day 90, the “training wheels” are off and you are pretty much operating in the normal capacity of your role.