PM Manager Contract (One Page)

A one-page written agreement with your manager, drafted by you in week one, agreed by the end of week two. New PMs fail in two ways: they optimize for the wrong definition of good, or they discover the real definition at the 90-day review. The contract kills both failure modes for the cost of one conversation.

You write the draft. Drafting is power: the conversation anchors on your version, and your manager edits instead of dictating.

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The contract template

# Working Contract: [Your name] + [Manager name]

**Date:** [Week one or two]
**Review:** [Day 45 and day 90, on the calendar now]

## What I own

[Three to five bullets. Surfaces, metrics, or problems, not task lists.
"The activation funnel from signup to first value" not "onboarding tickets."
If you and your manager cannot agree on this section, that disagreement
IS the finding. Better at day 10 than day 90.]

- [Owned thing 1]
- [Owned thing 2]
- [Owned thing 3]

## What good looks like at day 90

[Three bullets, each one falsifiable. Your manager should be able to read
each and say "yes, shipped" or "no, not shipped" with no debate.
Bad: "ramped up on the domain." Good: "shipped one bet with a measurable
result, killed or escalated one inherited zombie, and produced a signal
map the team actually uses."]

- [Outcome 1, checkable]
- [Outcome 2, checkable]
- [Outcome 3, checkable]

## How we decide

[Which decisions are mine alone, which are mine-with-a-heads-up, and which
are yours. Write actual examples, not categories. "I decide sprint scope
and experiment design. I decide-and-inform on roadmap sequencing within
the quarter. You decide anything touching pricing or another team's
headcount." Most PM-manager friction is two people holding different
unwritten versions of this paragraph.]

- Mine alone: [examples]
- Mine, with heads-up: [examples]
- Yours: [examples]

## Escalation norms

[When do you want to hear about a problem? Most managers say "early" and
mean "early, with a proposed answer attached." Get the real version.
Also: preferred channel and response expectations. "Slack for same-day,
doc comment for this-week, meeting only if we're stuck after two rounds
of async."]

- Bring problems when: [threshold]
- In this form: [problem + proposed answer / raw flag is fine / etc.]
- Channels: [what goes where]

## The silent worries question

[The answer to: "What are you worried about with this role or this team
that you have not said out loud yet?" Asked in the week-one conversation,
answer recorded here in your manager's words. This single question
routinely surfaces the real job: the stakeholder who burned the last PM,
the metric the team quietly stopped believing, the deadline nobody put
in the job description.]

- [Worry 1, their words]
- [Worry 2, their words]

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The week-one conversation script

Book 45 minutes. Send the half-filled draft the day before with one line: "I drafted how I think this role works. I'd rather find out where I'm wrong in week one than at the review."

Minute 0 to 5. Frame it. "I want to leave this meeting with a shared one-pager: what I own, what good looks like at day 90, and how we make decisions. I'll keep it updated and we'll review it at day 45."

Minute 5 to 15. What I own. Read your three to five bullets out loud. Then: "What did I miss? What did I claim that isn't mine?" Write the edits live, in the doc, while they watch. Live editing signals the contract is real.

Minute 15 to 25. What good looks like. For each bullet, ask: "If I do exactly this and nothing else, is day 90 a success?" If they hesitate, the real bar is unwritten. Ask: "What would make day 90 a clear win in your view?" and write their answer verbatim.

Minute 25 to 35. How we decide, and escalation. Use a real decision coming this month as the test case: "Next month I'll need to decide X. Walk me through how you'd want that to go." Their answer fills both sections better than abstractions ever will.

Minute 35 to 43. The silent worries question. Ask it 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 comes after the pause is usually the most important paragraph of the contract.

Minute 43 to 45. Close. "I'll send the cleaned-up version tomorrow. Anything in it you'd change, change it. Day 45 review is going on the calendar now."

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Maintenance

• Day 45: 20 minutes against the contract. What is on track, what changed, what gets rewritten. Contracts that never change were never real.
• When the role shifts: new team, new scope, reorg. Redraft within a week. The old contract is evidence of what you delivered; the new one is the next bar.
• Day 90: the contract is the rubric for your day-90 note. If you wrote "what good looks like" truthfully in week one, the review writes itself.