A good plan is imperative to the success of a new employee. I know because my onboarding plan helped me set and reach attainable goals and acclimate to my new position.

One of the many benefits, I’d say. Here are a few more.

Benefits of a 30-60-90 Day Plan

“No one likes showing up to their first day of work wondering what they‘re supposed to be doing or how they should fill the time between onboarding meetings,” says HubSpot’s Senior Manager of Content Meg Prater.

She’s also my former manager.

Prater continues, “A solid plan gives folks a North Star to return to, with readings they can move through during slow periods, colleagues to meet, and training they‘ll receive. Setting clear expectations from an employee’s first day on your team ensures you’re both on the same page and their first few weeks on your team are streamlined and focused.”

And I totally agree. A 30-60-90 day plan helps you:

• Define the parameters of what success looks like for the role
• Outline expectations and drive focus in those key areas
• Empower new employees to effectively manage their workload

Learning the nuances of your new role in less than three months isn’t always 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.

When To Make a 30-60-90 Day Plan

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. More on each scenario below.

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 confused me at times in the past. But I now understand they just want to see if a potential hire can organize their time, prioritize and anticipate their tasks, and strategize an approach based on the job description.

A well-thought-out 30-60-90 day plan is a great way to help hiring managers visualize you in the role. 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. I recommend working to find commonalities in these two sections and turning those 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)
• I’ll strengthen the company’s performance in these metrics (next 30 days)
• I’ll 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, it’s still a good idea to write one for yourself.

When I start a new job, sometimes it feels like a completely foreign environment during the first few months. Having a plan in place makes me feel more at home.

Pro tip: 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 — so use it wisely.

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.

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, my main goal in the first 30 days of my current job was to learn as much as possible about my 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 a primer, theme, and goals that help define the desired outcomes.

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.

Theme

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

Learning Goals

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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 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.

Prater also mentions the benefit of personalizing your 30-60-90 day plan so it’s tailored to your specific needs.

“I love when folks join the team and work with me to move deliverables around or add additional milestones to their plan,” she says. “This is a document meant to help you succeed, of course it will need to be different for each person who joins.”

How to Write a 30-60-90 Day Plan for Managers

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.

How to Write a 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.

Goal 1: 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.

Goal 2: 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.

Goal 3: 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.

Goal 4: 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.

Goal 5: 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.

Goal 6: 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.

Goal 7: 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.

Goal 8: 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.

30-60-90 Day Plan Template

30-60-90 Day Plan Example

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

30 Days

Primer

Many new hires are eager to impress, so they dive head-first into their work or try to make suggestions about their team’s process with limited experience in how their new team operates. But have patience.

Understanding your company‘s vision and your team’s existing strategy is crucial for producing high-quality work and making an impact.

You need to know the purpose behind your role or the optimal way to perform to avoid missing the mark, and your early efforts won’t pay off how you expect them to.

It‘s always better to over-prepare than under-prepare. And it’s okay to take time to learn the ropes — it pays enormous dividends in the long run.

In the first 30 days of your employment, your priority is to be a sponge and soak in as much information as possible. Once you do that, you can try to improve more specific parts of your team’s work style.

Theme: Be a Sponge

Learning Goals

• Study my company’s mission, vision, and overarching strategy.
• Read my company’s culture code to learn more about our company culture and why we implement it.
• Read the customer persona and target audience overview to truly understand who our customers are, their pain points, and how our product and content can help them.
• Meet with my team’s director to learn how meeting our goals will help our business grow.
• Read up on our team’s new SEO strategy, editorial process, and traffic goals.
• Learn how to use the SEO Insights Report to plan and structure blog posts.
• Review my team’s pillar-cluster model overview and understand how to match posts to clusters.
• Meet with my manager to learn more about her expectations.

Performance Goals

• Complete new hire training and pass the test with a 90% or higher.
• Be able to write 3 blog posts per week.

Initiative Goals

• Run the Facebook Instant Article experiment that my manager recommended me to do.

Personal Goals

• Grab coffee with everyone on my team so I can get to know them professionally and personally.

60 Days

Primer

By the end of your first 60 days, you should ramp up your workload, start overachieving, and make a name for yourself on your team.

To do this, start speaking up more at meetings. Feel free to share your ideas about improving your team‘s processes.

This shows you’re quickly conquering the learning curve and recognizing some flaws your colleagues might have overlooked. You still have a fresh perspective on the company, so your insight is invaluable.

Theme: Be a Contributor

Learning Goals

• Learn how to optimize a new post from scratch based on the SEO Insights Report and my competitive research.
• Read every other marketing team’s wiki page to learn about different marketing initiatives and how our entire department works together to grow our business.
• Deep dive into my company’s product roadmap and strategy to fully grasp our mission and vision.

Performance Goals

• Be able to write 5 blog posts per week.
• Be down to one cycle of edits per post.
• Understand how to edit a guest post — clean up at least one rough draft.

Initiative Goals

• Share content strategy ideas at my team’s monthly meeting and ask if I can spearhead the project to boost blog traffic.
• Ask my manager if I can oversee Facebook Messenger and Slack distribution strategy.

Personal Goals

• Meet with colleagues on other teams to learn about their marketing initiatives and develop relationships outside my unit.

90 Days

Primer

By the end of your first three months, you should have a firm grasp of your role, feel confident about your abilities, and be on the cusp of making a breakthrough contribution to your team.

Instead of reacting to problems that pop up at random, be proactive and spearhead a new initiative for your team.

You should also know how to collaborate with other teams to improve your processes. By taking on some new projects outside of your primary role, you’ll start turning some heads and catching the attention of the department at large.

Theme: Be a Leader

Learning Goals

• Analyze my highest and lowest-performing blog posts to date. How can I use this information to optimize new content to perform better out of the gate?

Performance Goals

• Be comfortable with writing five blog posts per week
• Edit one guest post per week
• Try to have 75% of my blog posts not require revisions.
• Write at least one new post that generates over 10,000 views in one month.

Initiative Goals

• Ask the SEO team if they want to partner with the product marketing team to brainstorm content topics related to our product roadmap.
• Ask the social media team if they‘re willing to develop a relationship where we can share each other’s content.
• Ask the sales team what our customer’s pain points are so we can write content that our target audience craves and help them close more qualified leads.

Personal Goals

Join the yoga club.

30-60-90 Day Plan Team Leader Example

Let’s apply that template to a team leader role with another 30-60-90 plan example.

30 Days

Primer

During the first 30 days, the goal of a team leader should be to cultivate connections with their team members and discover where they excel, where they struggle, and where they could use help.

Creating these relationships lays the foundation for solid communication over time, leading to better results.

Theme: Cultivate Staff Connections

Learning Goals

• Identify strengths for all team members.
• Pinpoint current challenges in accomplishing team goals.
• Encourage staff connections through honest communication.

Performance Goals

• Reduce project completion times by 25 percent.
• Increase team member output by 5 percent.

Initiative Goals

• Establish a mentorship connection with one staff member looking to advance.

Personal Goals

• Arrange one out-of-work activity for staff.

60 Days

Primer

For the second month, team leaders should focus on putting the connections they’ve made to good use and creating a mindset of success across the department.

This means establishing clear goals and specific metrics and working alongside staff to deliver critical outcomes.

Theme: Create a Culture of Success

Learning Goals

• Understand where previous team leaders have struggled.
• Identify common themes in goals not being met.
• Clearly define starting points, milestones, and end goals for projects.

Performance Goals

• Ensure current project deadlines are met.
• Deliver at least one project component ahead of schedule.
• Take ownership of one complex task to continue developing team culture.

Initiative Goals

• Based on current project goals, brainstorm two new potential projects.
• Integrate current efforts with sales, marketing, or social media teams.

Personal Goals

• Make time for mindfulness practice at work to help improve your focus.

90 Days

Primer

The last month of your 30-60-90 plan may focus on ensuring the framework you’ve built can be replicated on the next team project and finding new opportunities for your team members to excel.

Theme: Identify New Opportunities

Learning Goals

• Convene with staff to see what worked and what didn’t during the project.
• Look for outcomes that exceed expectations and discover what sets them apart to help drive improved processes.

Performance Goals

• Become confident in assigning staff-specific tasks with minimal oversight.
• Create a regular performance review structure that focuses on helping staff achieve their best work.
• Identify areas for reasonable cost-savings that don’t disrupt current processes.

Initiative Goals

• Look for team members with a passion for leadership and encourage their growth.
• Transition into a more hands-off leadership style that demonstrates trust in employee autonomy.

Personal Goals

• Take up a new hobby to avoid getting burned out at work.

30-60-90 Day Plan Marketing Strategist Example

Let’s apply that template to a marketing strategist role with another 30-60-90 plan example.

30 Days

Primer

During the first 30 days, the marketing strategist will analyze current campaign performance to discover what works, what doesn’t, and how strategy can be improved.

The marketing strategist will also work with team members and stakeholders to learn about existing processes. Investigating performance lays the foundation for how strategy can improve in the future.

Theme: Analyze Current Performance

Learning Goals

• Get familiar with the company’s product, mission, positioning, and goals.
• Consult with stakeholders to discuss existing processes, tools, and buyer personas.
• Learn about completed and ongoing experiments and their results.

Performance Goals

• Conduct content audits and competitor analyses to uncover performance gaps.

Initiative Goals

• Meet with sales reps, account managers, and customer support team members to learn more about customer wants and needs.

Personal Goals

• Get lunch with new team members to get to know them better.

60 Days

Primer

By day 60, the marketing strategist will have identified performance gaps based on the work done during the first 30 days and begun work on brainstorming ways to close those gaps.

Theme: Identify Performance Gaps

Learning Goals

• Research and brainstorm potential new processes that will help improve performance gaps.

Performance Goals

• Identify improvement areas based on the performance audits and competitive analysis results.

Initiative Goals

• Meet with the finance team to discuss the budget for new marketing experiments and initiatives.
• Deliver an experiment proposal to improve one of the gaps found during the audits.

Personal Goals

• Join an interest-based Slack channel to connect with colleagues on other teams.

90 Days

Primer

For the third month, marketing strategists may focus on ensuring the research framework they’ve built can be replicated for new projects and launch experiments to close performance gaps.

Theme: Launch New Experiments

Learning Goals

• Identify performance outcomes that exceed expectations and see what sets them apart from results that do not exceed expectations.

Performance Goals

• Develop a system for measuring and analyzing campaign performance.

Initiative Goals

• Launch a new experiment to help close a performance gap discovered during earlier analyses.

Personal Goals

• Join an interest-based Slack channel to connect with colleagues on other teams.

Making the Most of Your First Months

During the first few months at a new job, I always ask myself the following questions: Is the company a good fit? Can I meet (and exceed) expectations? What does my long-term career plan look like?

Over the years, I’ve learned building a robust 30-60-90 day plan can take some of the pressure off by providing a framework for success that combines big ideas with specific goals to help drive success.

If a 30-60-90 (or 100) day plan worked for me, I’m confident it will benefit you too.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in April 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.