The Best 30-60-90 Day Plan for Your New Job [Template + Example]

I remember my first day at HubSpot. I was so nervous and had a million concerns swimming around in my head.

Will I adapt to my new job? How long will it take for me to get the hang of things? Can I manage the workload and maintain a good rapport with my coworkers?

Fortunately, my outstanding manager at the time prepared a comprehensive checklist to be completed over a few months, and it helped me slowly but steadily adapt to HubSpot. Fast forward a few years, and I'm a rockstar at my job.

The checklist was called a 100-day checklist, but it followed the rhythm of a typical 30-60-90 Day Plan.

A 30-60-90 Day Plan, or something similar, is imperative to the success of a new employee as it helps them set and reach attainable goals and acclimate to their new position.

To help set your new employee, or yourself, up for success, here's what you need to know about crafting the best 30-60-90 Day Plan.

Learning the nuances of your new role in less than three months won't be easy. But crafting a strong 30-60-90 day plan is your best bet for accelerating your development and adapting to your new work environment as quickly as possible.

You‘d write a 30-60-90 day plan in two situations: during the final stages of an interview and the first week of the job. Here’s how each type can be executed:

30-60-90 Day Plan for Interview

Some hiring managers ask candidates to think about and explain their potential 30-60-90 day plan as a new hire.

As a candidate, this would sometimes confuse me in the past, but I now understand they just want to see if a potential hire can organize their time, prioritize the tasks they likely take, and strategize an approach to the job description.

For a new hire, a well-thought-out 30-60-90 day plan is a great way to help the hiring manager visualize you in the role and differentiate yourself from all other candidates.

But how can you outline your goals before accepting a new job? How are you supposed to know what those goals are? I've found that starting with the job description is an excellent stepping stone.

Typically, open job listings have separate sections for a job‘s responsibilities and a job’s qualifications. Work to find commonalities in these two sections and how you might turn them into goals for yourself.

Then, stagger those goals over three months.

For example, let‘s say a job requires three years of experience in Google Analytics, and the responsibilities include tracking the company’s website performance every month.

I would use these points to develop an action plan explaining how:

I‘ll learn the company’s key performance metrics (first 30 days)
Strengthen the company's performance in these metrics (next 30 days)
Lead the team toward a better Google Analytics strategy (last 30 days)

30-60-90 Day Plan for New Job

The second situation where you‘d write a 30-60-90 day plan is during the first week of a new job, which I highly recommend whether you’re a new employee or a manager working with a new hire.

If you're the hiring manager, this plan will allow you to learn how the new employee operates, address their concerns or preconceived notions about the role, and ultimately help them succeed.

If you‘re starting a new job and are not asked to craft a 30-60-90 day plan during the first week of that job, it’s still a good idea to write one for yourself.

A new position can feel like a completely foreign environment during the first few months, and having a plan in place can make it feel more like home.

Even though 90 days is the standard grace period for new employees to learn the ropes, it's also the best time to make a great first impression.

The purpose of your plan is to help you transition into your new role, but it should also be a catalyst for your career development.

Instead of just guiding you over your job's learning curve, the goals outlined in your plan should push you to perform up to your potential and raise the bar for success at every stage.

HubSpot's Senior Manager of Content (and my former manager) Meg Prater suggests having a solid template for your plan that allows it to evolve.

“Anytime I onboard someone, I review all training docs and ensure they're up to date,” she says. “I also ask for feedback from the folks on the team who have most recently been onboarded. What did they like? What didn't work for them?”

She also says moving the plan to a more interactive platform proved to be helpful to new employees.

“One of the most helpful shifts we've made recently is moving our 30-60-90 plan (or 100-Days Plan) from a static Google Doc to Asana,” she says. “The plan is organized by week, and each task contains relevant readings and links. It's much easier for folks to move through, and it gives me better insight into where folks are in the plan.”

Meg onboarded me when I started at HubSpot, and I can confirm that my checklist in Asana was a game-changer because it helped me stay on task and visually track my progress.

The checklist below isn‘t mine, but it’s one she set up and follows the same format as the one she created for me.

Parts of a 30-60-90 Day Plan

An effective 30-60-90 day plan consists of three extensive phases — one for days 1-30, one for days 31-60, and one for days 61-90.

Each phase has its own goal. For example, the goal in the first 30 days is to learn as much as possible about your new job.

The following 30 focus on using learned skills to contribute, and the last 30 are about demonstrating skill mastery with metrics and taking the lead on new challenges.

Each phase also contains components that help define goals and describe desired outcomes. These parts include:

Primer

The primer is a general overview of what you hope to achieve during the current 30-day period.

I prefer sitting down with my manager to pinpoint a primer that aligns with my goals and desired company outcomes, and I encourage you to do the same.

This ensures you and your manager are on the same page about expectations early on in your journey with the company.

Theme

The theme is a quick-hitter sentence or statement summarizing your goals for the period. For example, your theme might be “find new opportunities”, “take initiative,” or “be a sponge.”

Learning Goals

Learning goals focus on skills you want to learn or improve to drive better outcomes at your job. For example, if you're responsible for creating website content at your company, you should learn new HTML or CSS skills.

At the start of my career with HubSpot, some marketing trends and jargon were unfamiliar, and I wasn‘t used to the company’s writing style.

As a result, my learning goals as a new blogger were to become more well-versed in marketing and to adapt to HubSpot's writing style.

Performance Goals

Performance goals speak to specific metrics that demonstrate improvement. These include making one more weekly content post or reducing the revisions management requires.

For example, I was only writing one article per week when I started HubSpot, but it was my performance goal to be able to write multiple articles by the end of 30 days.

Initiative Goals

Initiative goals are about thinking outside the box to discover other ways you can contribute. This might mean asking your manager about taking ownership of new website changes or upgrades with a specific deadline in mind.

Personal Goals

Personal goals focus on company culture — are there ways you can improve relationships with your team members or demonstrate your willingness to contribute?

30-60-90 Day Plan for Managers [Template]

Almost all 30-60-90 day plans consist of a learning phase, a contributing phase, and a leading phase — which we'll review in the example plan below. This includes plans that are designed to guide people in new management roles.

What sets apart a manager‘s plan from any other is their obligation to their direct reports and the decisions they’re trusted to make for the business.

If you're accepting (or hiring for) a new manager role, consider any of the following goals and how to roll them out at a pace that sets you up for success.

Featured Resource: 30-60-90 Day Sales Onboarding Template

Download the Free Onboarding Template

Get to know your team's strengths and weaknesses.

Recommended phase: First 30 days

Everyone is learning the ropes in their first month at a company. For managers, much of that learning happens by talking to the team.

If you're a new manager, grab time with your direct reports and get to know their roles. What do they like about them? What are their most significant pain points?

Making your team happy is a challenging goal, but it‘s an essential responsibility as a manager. Your first step is to figure out how you’ll manage and coach your employees through their day-to-day work.

Help a direct report acquire a new skill.

Recommended phase: Second 30 days

Even though you‘re new to the company, you were hired for a reason: You’ve got skills. And you can bring these skills to the people you work with, particularly those who report to you.

After meeting with and learning about your new colleagues, you might use the second month of your onboarding plan to find skill gaps on your team that you can help fill.

Do you have expert-level experience with HubSpot, and your new company just started using HubSpot Marketing Hub? Teach them to do something on a platform they didn't know before.

Improve the cost-effectiveness of your team's budget.

Recommended phase: Final 30 days

Managers often have access to (and control over) the budget for their department's investments — software, office supplies, and new hires.

After you spend the first couple of months learning what the team spends its money on, consider using the final 30 days of your plan to make suggestions for new investments or how to reallocate money where you think it needs to be.

Is there a tool that can automate a task that‘s taking your team forever to do manually? Draft a financial strategy that includes this tool in the following quarter’s budget.

Draft a training strategy that can help guide your direct reports into new roles.

Recommended phase: Final 30 days

You won‘t be expected to promote people in the first three months of your new job, but you should still have learned more about your team to decide who’s good at what and how to coach them to where they want to be.

In the final 30 days of your 30-60-90 day plan, you might agree to a goal to develop a training strategy that outlines how to manage your direct reports and, ultimately, how to guide them into new roles in the future.

30-60-90 Day Plan for Executives

Executives are different from managers in that higher performance expectations come in. As an executive, you'll need to be highly engaged with the organization from the first day and implement high-impact changes in your role as soon as possible.

At the same time, context is essential, and you'll need to understand the culture, team, current operating processes, and challenges before you solve them.

Here are some critical steps to include in your 30-60-90 day plan in an executive role.

Soak up as much information as possible.

Recommended phase: First 30 days

It's only a point in taking action with context, so start your ramp-up period by gathering information and charting the lay of the land.

That means reviewing existing documentation, attending as many meetings as possible, meeting with direct reports and skip levels, and asking many questions.

Create alignment between you and the team.

Recommended phase: First 30 days

You'll meet new people in the first 30 days and understand their organizational roles. Ultimately, your job as an executive is to set the vision for the organization while removing roadblocks for your team as they strategize and execute it.

One of the best questions you can ask as you familiarize yourself and align with your team is, “In your opinion, what are some existing threats to our business (external or internal)?”

This shows you care about their opinion and trust their expertise while getting unique perspectives from multiple vantage points in the organization.

Plus, if you start hearing some of the same points from various team members, you can identify the most significant pains, equipping you to make the highest impact changes.

Identify the A players on the team.

Recommended phase: First 30 days

An A player is a member of your team that goes above and beyond what‘s expected in their role.

While not every employee will be an A player, you’ll want to ensure that critical roles and teams have at least one A player to lead, inspire, and strengthen camaraderie.

From there, you can figure out the existing gaps in staffing and training, whether it's team members who need a lot of guidance and must be coached up to performance or empty roles that need to be filled altogether.

Create goals based on what you've learned.

Recommended phase: Second 30 days

When interviewing or shortly after being hired, you'll get a feel for the types of pains the executive team has and the objectives for bringing you on.

Once you have more context about how the organization works, you can translate this vision into concrete, measurable goals that will take your department to the next level.

Diagnose process issues.

Recommended phase: Second 30 days

Companies of all sizes run into operational issues as they implement processes that are efficient and work at scale. Sometimes, when an executive team isn't aligned with middle management, operations can become unwieldy.

Learn why things are done the way they are, and then figure out if there are workarounds you can implement to streamline operations. It's as simple as eliminating bottlenecks or adding automation to specific functions.

Put together and implement a hiring plan.

Recommended phase: Final 30 days

You know your A and B players, and you will have a plan to retain, invest in, and mentor them. However, you‘ll likely come across gaps you need to fill and positions that need to be created to eliminate bottlenecks.

From there, you’ll want to create a hiring plan to execute short-term, mid-term, and long-term needs.

Effect changes in operations.

Recommended phase: Final 30 days

Speaking of bottlenecks, the final 30 days of your plan should be focusing on the areas of the business that can achieve the results the fastest.

Once you've identified these, you can focus on removing these roadblocks to start hitting goals and achieving higher performance.

Contribute to broader company goals.

Recommended phase: Final 30 days

As an executive team member, you'll also be looped in on high-level company initiatives, and the other company executives will be relying on you to contribute your deep discipline, expertise, and experience.

Be ready to lean in on executive meetings and contribute to the vision and strategy of the organization as it moves forward.

How to Write a 30-60-90 Day Plan

No matter what job level a company is hiring, improving an employee's skills requires concrete performance goals, so watch out for vagueness in the objectives you set for yourself.

“Writing a better blog post” or “getting better at brainstorming” are terrific ambitions, but they don‘t give you a way to measure your progress.

Set goals that are realistic, quantifiable, and focused. You’ll know exactly how to achieve them and gauge your success.

To write challenging yet feasible performance goals, you need to:

Understand your team's goals.

Try to understand the purpose behind your team‘s goals. It’ll give you more insight into why you and your team should achieve them, motivating you to work as hard as possible to meet those goals.

Identify top priorities.

By connecting your responsibilities to your team‘s goals, you’ll know exactly how to align your tasks with the team's needs, which keeps you accountable and compels you to help your team achieve its goals.

Define specific progress measurements.

Tracking your progress helps you gauge your performance and rate of improvement.

To see how you‘re doing, set up weekly meetings with your manager to ask what they think of your work and track the progress of your performance metrics, like the growth of your blog posts’ average views or the amount of qualified leads your eBooks to generate.

My weekly one-on-one meetings with my manager were crucial to my success at HubSpot because I got constant feedback and tips on improving.

Reaching your performance goals is one of many paths toward future success in your new role.

You also need to study the ins and outs of your team and company, take the initiative, and develop relationships with coworkers — all things many new hires underestimate the importance of.

Consider setting the following types of goals during each stage of your 30-60-90-day plan:

Learning Goals: How will you absorb as much information as possible about your company, team, and role?
Initiative Goals - What will you do to stand out?
Personal Goals - How will you integrate with your company and team?

Aiming to achieve these goals will help you hit the ground running in all the right areas of your job. And if you stick to your plan, you‘ll notice you’ll be able to spend less time learning and more time executing.

30-60-90 Day Plan Template

Download Your Free Template

HubSpot's 30-60-90 day plan template includes space for all critical elements of your plan — primers, themes, and goals — making it easy for you and your manager to see exactly where you are in the plan, what comes next, and how things are going so far.

While our template is a great starting point, it‘s worth cross-referencing this high-level plan with a more detailed description of your goals and desired outcomes to ensure you’re aligned with company expectations.

30-60-90 Day Plan Example

We've created a quick 30-60-90 plan example for new employees using our template.