I joined a product team that seems to be very disorganized without any project manager or project planning or tracking. Manager is new and also confused. Goals, roles and scope are not properly defined. Heavily understaffed and high attrition rate (4 product people left in 6 months). This is my 3rd week of joining and I’m joining when 2 product people will be leaving this week.

Any advice on how to manage this, set expectations, and also be successful in running this team?

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Start small. If they are stressed out then asking about strategy may just cause a panic and tailspin.
Focus on just next month. Find out what the team are working on next month. Ask if they have what they need and how you can help with what they will work on next month. Observe, be patient, build relationships. Follow that piece of work really closely.
After that, you’ll have more of an idea of who people are, what is working and maybe an idea of the worst parts so you can plan what you want to nudge first. Eg I had a shambles of a team and it took me about 3 weeks to establish that they a) had shockingly bad sprint completion rates (30%), b) they had lots of half done work as there was no definition of done.

So the second and third sprint I let them stick with their goals/mess (no roadmap at ALL), but I got a definition of done agree, cut sprint scope way down, and pushed completion rate up to 80%. After that I outlined some direction and started talking about velocity. The point though is that in that team, that was more important than planning or tracking…it was just creating some kind of motion, as all the planning in the world is useless if nothing ever gets out the door. Just worrying about all the problems wouldn’t have got me anywhere, I needed to learn and then think about how to creat change.

Anyway, your specifics will look different I’m sure but hopefully the story is inspiring in some way!
(Ps within another 6 weeks I’d halved the team size and doubled total velocity…but that had to come after some basic unsticking)

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Tysm for writing up this reply! This is very helpful. I’m realizing I have to be very patient here. I’ve been concerned about what I can deliver and how i can plan around if i dont know what the priorities are, how i can contribute and where i fit in tbh

This cannot be resolved alone. This is where the competence of your manager and your team leader is being scaled. It is supposed to be a teamwork.

The cool thing about that, even though it’s a bit scary….is that you have a chance to lead! Seriously! You can’t make it worse! You are going to shine with every baby step you help them make

I’ve been in this position before and it’s tough.

Everyone’s comments above are solid and I don’t have much to add, except don’t put too much pressure on yourself to fix these problems if no one is willing to accept change. Depending on the reasons for why people are leaving, there’s probably a high likelihood that they were in your position too and couldn’t get the support they needed from their teams or leadership to make the right changes.

Just try your best for a couple of months and if things don’t feel like they’re getting better, then you can always leave.

I can sense the frustration and people I’ve been meeting daily have explicitly expressed this to me multiple times. I’m trying to best too to make a good first impression but don’t know the right approach

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