The PM First-90 Kit: Contract, Map, and Day-90 Note Templates

The standard advice for a new PM is a politeness schedule. Meet everyone, learn the product, do not break anything, find a quick win. I have watched a lot of PMs run that plan. They arrive at day 90 well liked, with a notebook of impressions, and no answer to the only question that matters at the review: what do you know now that the team did not, and what did you do about it?

The failure is not effort. It is that impressions do not compound and instruments do. This kit is four templates for a PM's first quarter. Each one converts something PMs normally hold in their head, the deal with their manager, the flow of customer signal, the org's real decision habits, the shape of their first bet, into a document someone can check.

The short version

Four templates, downloadable below. The manager contract is the one-pager you draft in week one: what you own, what good looks like at day 90, how decisions get made, and the silent worries question that surfaces the real job. The signal map scores the seven sources of customer signal on whether they exist, get captured, get synthesized, and get routed. The decision archaeology worksheet reconstructs the last ten decisions to map the real operating model, with an agent prompt that does most of the digging. The bet one-pager and day-90 note close the quarter with a falsifiable bet and a half-page scoreboard. The plan these serve is the PM 30/60/90; the deep dives are the first-30-days signal map and days 61 to 90, own a bet(coming Jun 29).

What's in the kit

Manager Contract (one page)

Most PM-manager relationships run on two different unwritten contracts, and the difference surfaces at the worst possible time, the review. The template makes the contract written, and makes you the drafter, which means the conversation anchors on your version.

Five sections: what I own, what good looks like at day 90 (falsifiable bullets only), how we decide, escalation norms, and the silent worries answer. The file includes the full 45-minute conversation script, minute by minute.

The question that does the most work, asked exactly:

"What are you worried about, with this role or this team, that you haven't said out loud yet?"

Then stop talking. The silence is the technique. Whatever follows the pause is usually the most important paragraph of the contract.

Use it in week one or two. Review at day 45. A contract that never changes was never real.

Signal Map Worksheet

Most orgs do not lack customer signal. They lack routing. The worksheet maps seven sources, support tickets, sales calls, CS notes, analytics, NPS verbatims, churn interviews, community, and scores each from 0 to 4: exists, captured, synthesized, routed. The empty column at the end, "my subscription," is your personal to-do list.

The gap-scoring rule that matters: fix the highest-scoring broken source first, not the most broken one. A source at 3 going to 4 pays off this month. A 0 going to 4 is a quarter of work and politics.

A row, filled:

| Support tickets | Y | Zendesk | Sort-of (lead's monthly deck) | Nobody outside support | unowned | Daily agent digest, set up week 2 |

The checklist closes with a daily digest setup, including the agent prompt for the highest-value unsynthesized source. Ten minutes a day, one place, every source that scored 3 or above.

Decision Archaeology Worksheet

The one exercise almost nobody runs, and the one with the highest political return. Pick 8 to 12 significant decisions, including two kills, and reconstruct each from the fossils: merged PRs, launch posts, killed projects, escalation threads, pricing changes. Five questions per decision: who raised it, where it was debated, who actually decided, what evidence was in the room, did it stick.

The patterns live in the columns. If the same two names fill the "real decider" column, you found the operating model. If most rows score thin on evidence, evidence-backed proposals are your edge here.

The worksheet ships with a full agent prompt block. Point it at the repo, the changelog, and the planning channels, and it returns 70% of the table in an hour, with citations and "needs human" where it cannot cite. The remaining 30%, especially the real-decider column, takes three or four short conversations. People love telling the story of how a decision really happened, and the gap between the told version and the wiki version is the lesson.

Bet One-Pager + Day-90 Note

The quarter's two closing artifacts in one file. The bet one-pager has five fields: claim, evidence, measure, date, and what would change my mind. That last field is the one that earns trust from engineers, because it proves the goalposts are fixed before the game starts.

The day-90 note is half a page, five sections: found, shipped, bet, killed, measure me on. Written from the manager contract, numbers in every section, sent before anyone asks. The "measure me on" section converts your review from a conversation about impressions into a conversation about a scoreboard you chose.

A fragment from the bet template:

What would change my mind: If the cohort that reaches the milestone retains the same as the cohort that does not, the causal claim is wrong and we stop.

If the bet needs a sharper narrative spine before it goes to stakeholders, storytelling is a PM core skill(coming Jul 6) covers the telling; the one-pager covers the substance.

How to use it this week

If you are in your first month: draft the manager contract tonight, half-filled, and send it before your next one-on-one with the line "I'd rather find out where I'm wrong in week one than at the review."

If you are past month one: run the signal map this week. Three hours, mostly spent asking people "where does X go?" The one-page output, here is where our signal flows, here is where it dies, here is what I'm fixing first, does more for your credibility than any roadmap opinion, because nobody argues with a map of their own plumbing.

Then pick one decision from the last quarter and run the five archaeology questions on it. One decision. The habit starts there.

Sources: Michael Watkins, The First 90 Days for the transition frame, Teresa Torres, Continuous Discovery Habits for the signal-routing discipline the map borrows from, Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets for the bet framing.