How to Make the Most of Your First 100 Days as a Tech Executive

According to Aviv, “There is always a window of malleability that comes with transitioning to a new role, which is a limited time you can get credit for making changes. People anticipate that things will change when a new sheriff is in town.”

However, this window of malleability is pretty slim—roughly a quarter of a year. After this period, people assume it’s business as usual. If you don’t seize this time to make changes, you’ll have missed your best shot, and it’s often harder to make such changes later.

As a newly appointed executive, your biggest advantage is what Aviv describes as your beginner’s perspective, which is your perception of the company before you become acquainted with its processes, product, people, values, culture, and everything specific to the organization. If you don’t take note of the company’s weak points and idiosyncrasies, you’ll miss out on key insights.

According to Aviv, “Tech leaders are often great at the technical requirements of their role, but struggle with the leadership aspect and end up as glorified managers instead of executives.” You have your first 100 days to avoid falling into this trap.

Hence, it would be best to build rapport with colleagues, learn about the company’s visions or plans, and strategically position yourself to get a seat at the decision-making table within the first 100 days.

Time is the most important asset at your disposal during your first 100 days. It’s easy to lose track of it with so much to do so quickly.

As a tech executive, you’ll generally spend a lot of time interacting with people. In your first 100 days, it’s especially important to spend time getting to know the stakeholders to gain full understanding of the company’s product as well as the business, its customers, and competitors—not to mention the company’s five-year strategic vision.

Aviv recommends alloting an average of two hours daily in the first 100 days to learn about the company and build relationships with people.

Who should you talk to?

There is no hard-and-fast rule, but Aviv recommends talking to the following people:

• The brains behind the product: Talk to the Head of Product, Head of UX, and generally anyone responsible for making the product happen.
• Your line manager: Aviv also recommends talking to whoever you report to in order to learn about the fears and risks of your organization in the near future and gain access to the roadmap and strategy.
• Other executives: Next, talk with anyone who is a senior leader, such as the Head of Customer Success, Head of Marketing, and Head of Growth.
• Other employees: You should also have an introductory meeting with everyone, as you may have to work with them occasionally as a tech executive, and you can find out what’s going well for them in the organization and what isn’t. It would help if you also did this routinely. In a small startup, you can talk to everyone once in a while, and in larger companies, directors, managers, and from time to time, everyone else.
• Customers: Finally, you need to understand how your customers act, think, and use your product. Talk to your customers, too—not necessarily in the first 100 days, but in the first few months.

Tips for building rapport with your stakeholders

Talking to your colleagues can be quite a task, since you’re trying to get relevant information from different people, and having these conversations is a great starting point for building a great team instead of a bunch of executives working in silos. Here are two pieces of advice from Aviv to help you navigate these conversations:

• When talking to counterparts, ask about their background. If you understand their path, you will better understand their thinking and what they want to achieve. Also, Aviv recommends finding out the most critical thing the organization can do for them and the biggest risk to be averted. If it’s too big and not immediate, write it down, think about it, and see if you can help later. 
• When talking with subordinates, ask them to introduce themselves and inquire about the unique thing in their current role compared to the rest of their career. Use more open-ended questions to keep the conversation going.

Triaging requests and tasks instead of working on them linearly prevents you from getting overwhelmed. You can add requests and tasks to a to-do list using the Notepad, Google Docs, or a sophisticated task management system like ClickUp to organize requests and monitor your commitments, the promises you made, and the promises you received, so that nothing falls through the cracks.

Afterward, take some time to triage what’s on your desk, or in Aviv’s words, clear the fog of war. Next, you need to come up with a plan, which should be delivered within the first two months into your role. Sooner will be premature, and later will miss the window of malleability.

How to triage requests and tasks

First, you’ll need to quickly put out some fire no matter how unreactive you try to be, so you need to prioritize urgent requests. After you figure out the tasks to be handled right away, find out if you need to execute them personally.

It may turn out that you’re not the right person to handle all requests and will need to delegate to someone else or a different organization. If something isn’t your direct responsibility or doesn’t need to be handled immediately, keep it on your triage list.

Secondly, review all requests in batches. Some may no longer be relevant, in which case you can safely delete them. You may also notice a theme, need more information for some requests, or need to have a follow-up talk with whoever is responsible for such a request.

How to create a plan

Your plan does not need to be a complex or detailed document. It could be a single Google Doc page with summarized notes. More importantly, your plan should feature the following:

• Solutions to burning issues: In Aviv’s words, “Create a list of fires you want to put out and a plan for containing the fires so it doesn’t get to a point where you need to evacuate.”
• Issues requiring further investigation: Aviv also recommends including a list of questions you want to dig deeper into, because you can’t figure out everything you need to know within the first 100 days. There may be features or people you never got to see.
• Solutions to the company’s weak points: You should also add solutions to the company’s weak points, such as changing the company’s business model or organization structure, as well as recommending multiplying something working above the bar in your organization.

Within the first three months, you may need to make some personnel changes in your company, which Aviv refers to as chart debugging. For instance, your company may have too many small teams with managerial overhead or large teams with an overworked manager. Should that happen, you’ll need to figure out a hiring plan to fix these issues.

You may also realize that the company has a high attrition ratio and need to figure out the reasons for that high attrition rate, or make plans to hire more people because you realize the others will leave either way.

Making these personnel decisions is usually not an easy task for most tech executives. As Aviv puts it, “Tech decisions are a lot easier, but personnel decisions are tough decisions and tough conversations that need to be handled sensitively.”

Sometimes, organizational problems can only be fixed by restructuring roles within the company, which may be difficult for the staff and executives. It’s advisable to talk to the individuals affected when making such decisions. You can also consult a trusted advisor to help you figure out these personnel decisions.

A major part of your role as a tech executive will be introducing initiatives to help your organization achieve its strategic objectives, and the first 100 days is enough time to start rolling out these initiatives. Hence, it’s advisable to figure out the big initiatives you’d like to introduce in your organization as soon as possible.

These initiatives can range from determining the projects you’ll be leading to moving your team from a featured one to a product-empowered one. How you introduce these initiatives matters just as much as the initiatives themselves.

Therefore, it’s important to present your initiatives to the right people. According to Aviv, “If there’s something tech executives often get wrong, it’s presenting their initiatives to too many people at the same time.”

Presenting your initiatives to relevant heads of departments and tech executives whose activities may be affected by these initiatives is a more effective method. In addition, Aviv also recommends sharing these initiatives with managers and relevant colleagues to get their input.

Similarly, it may be best to announce initiatives in bits depending on the relevance of each initiative at the time. However, some people prefer to roll them all out at once. Whatever the case may be for you, make sure that you leverage your good rapport with colleagues and consider the company’s strengths and weaknesses when introducing these initiatives.