The First 90 Days Playbook for Tech Leaders
With thousands of hours coaching Seed-to-IPO engineering orgs, we’ve seen the pressure new tech leaders face when they step into the hot-seat and have 90 days to prove they belong.
That’s why we wrote this playbook—to share the frameworks, checklists, and battle-tested moves we’ve seen turn first-time leaders into trusted, high-impact CTOs and VPs.
Your roadmap to owning the first 90 days
Landing a leadership title feels great—until the real work starts.
In those first three months you’re expected to win trust, tame tech debt, chart a product vision, and still ship. Miss the window and the narrative sticks.
This playbook is your GPS through that maze—whether you’re a brand-new Head of Engineering, a freshly promoted Tech Lead, or a seasoned architect grabbing the reins.
What’s inside:
The 30-60-90 Game Plan
A week-by-week breakdown of goals, conversations, and quick wins that build momentum fast.
Rapid Systems Audit
A lightweight method to surface bottlenecks in architecture, tooling, spend, and team workflows—before they blow up.
Credibility-Building One-on-Ones
The questions that unlock psychological safety and surface the unspoken truths in your new team.
Designing for Scale (Without Rewrites)
Patterns for incrementally modernising legacy services while still shipping new features.
Metrics That Matter
How to choose and socialise the three numbers that prove engineering value to the C-suite.
Risk & Incident Playbooks
Templates for on-call rotation, post-mortems, and stakeholder comms that keep you calm during 2 a.m. pages.
Crafting Your 12-Month North Star
A storytelling framework that connects roadmap, headcount, and budget in a single crisp narrative execs will fund.