1. Book a 45-minute 1:1 with every direct report before day ten.

2. Ask each of them: what should I keep doing, start doing, and stop doing?

3. Map who actually makes decisions here, not who the org chart says does.

4. Sit through one full Sprint — Planning to Retrospective — and say almost nothing.

5. Find out how the team's work is measured today, and by whom.

6. Write down the three things your own manager will judge you on in 90 days. Confirm them in writing.

7. Identify the team's single biggest recurring impediment.

8. Meet the three stakeholders outside the team who most depend on it.

9. Publish your user manual: how you communicate, how you decide, how you want bad news.

10. Change nothing structural this month.

11. Compare what the team says is hard against what the data says is slow.

12. Review the last three months of delivery and find where work actually waited.

13. Check whether the Definition of Done is real or decorative.

14. Ask the team to rank their own impediments, then compare their list against yours.

15. Identify the one person quietly carrying the team, and the one quietly stuck.

16. Run one small change as an experiment, with a stated end date.

17. Have your first difficult conversation. Do not defer it into month three.

18. Agree with your manager what you will stop doing as an individual contributor.

19. Remove one organisational impediment the team could not remove themselves.

20. Make the one decision the team expected you to duck.

21. Hand back one task you enjoy doing but should no longer own.

22. State the team's next-quarter outcome in one sentence anyone can repeat.

23. Ask every direct report whether anything has improved in 90 days.

24. Write your own 90-day review before your manager writes it.

Your First 90 Days as a Manager

Working through your first year as a manager?