Context Matters

Anytime a new PM joins my team, I prepare a thorough onboarding doc for them. Along with outlining the acronyms, all the past strategy docs, data analysis, user insights, I dedicate one section to the “history” of the team and the overall org. It is typically written as a story of how this team was created, what re-orgs and key leadership changes, if any, led us to where we are today and how the product evolved over time.

The primary purpose of this historical narrative is to give them sufficient context of why we (people and the product) are the way we are and offers them an opportunity to connect with the team and the product intimately.

As someone new to the team, you have a huge advantage of being the “fresh pair of eyes”. You can strengthen this advantage by learning the context and history of origins of the product, philosophies, culture and how the team made the decisions they did.

If you are not getting enough historical context during onboarding, insist on gathering it. Be mindful of human biases and piece it together by asking multiple folks.

With the right historical context, you will be more confident of the origins of team’s culture, how adaptive the team is to change and what factors played a role in shaping the current organizational complexity.

Whether you might want to advocate for a change or preservation of culture is not the question to answer here. The decision here is to invest the time in gathering and comprehending the significance of the past.