What should I do in my first 90 days at a new job?

Spend the first month understanding before changing anything, build relationships deliberately, and find one small useful contribution early. The most common failure isn't incompetence — it's arriving with opinions before understanding why things are the way they are. **Days 1-30: learn.** - **Meet people individually.** Book short one-to-ones with everyone you'll work with, plus a few adjacent. Ask: what do you work on, how does your work touch mine, what should I know that isn't written down, who else should I talk to. This is the highest-return activity of your first month and most people under-invest in it. - **Ask questions freely now.** There's a window where 'why do we do it this way?' is charming and expected. It closes around week six. Use it, and write the answers down. - **Learn the systems and the informal process** — not just the tools, but how decisions actually get made and who to ask about what. - **Understand what your manager is measured on.** Your job is largely to make that go well, and surprisingly few people ask directly. **Days 30-60: contribute.** - Ship something small and visible early. A minor bug fix, a documentation improvement, a small feature. Early delivery builds credibility that buys patience later. - Start forming opinions, but frame them as questions: 'I noticed X — is there history behind that?' Almost always there is, and asking first avoids the classic new-hire mistake of proposing something that was tried and failed for reasons nobody has written down. - Ask for feedback explicitly at the 30-day mark rather than waiting for a review. **Days 60-90: own.** - Take clear ownership of something. - Now propose improvements, with the context you've earned. - Have an explicit conversation with your manager about expectations for the next six months. **The mistakes that do real damage:** 1. **Criticising how things are done** before understanding why. 'At my last company we...' is the phrase to ration carefully. 2. **Hiding confusion.** Nobody expects you to know the codebase. They do notice someone quietly stuck for two weeks. 3. **Only talking to your immediate team.** Cross-team relationships are what make you effective in month six. 4. **Over-promising early** to prove yourself, then missing deadlines. Under-promise while you're still calibrating. And keep a running document of everything confusing you encounter. It's your onboarding improvement list — writing it up at day 60 is genuinely valuable to the team, and it's a visible contribution only a new person can make.