Hit the Ground Running: How to Ramp Up in Your New Job in 3 Weeks

Welcome to my newsletter! I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. I write this newsletter I've called Scarlet Ink, which is a weekly newsletter on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.

Free members can read some amount of each article, while paid members can read the full article. For some, part of the article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member. 99% of my articles are intended to be evergreen (readable and valid forever).

This week is a special article. I wrote this more than five years ago, and it has been one of my most shared articles ever. I occasionally revisit articles to refresh the writing style and ensure that it's as evergreen as it can be. This article has sat in my archives long enough, and I decided it was time to rewrite and share it.

I honestly think that this article speaks to one of the most impactful things you can do for your career, and if you haven't read it recently, it's worth the time.

I get bored easily. Only by introducing variety into my daily work am I able to maintain a high level of focus and energy. It changed my life when I landed at Amazon back in 2007, as as large tech companies tend to support people moving around. As I've told people, it's a bit of a career miracle to work at a place like Amazon. You can get a new job every two or three years without updating your resume.

For my detailed job history, you can look on LinkedIn. In short, I joined Amazon in the Global Payments group, then moved to the Amazon Retail Marketplace, then went to Facebook Ads, then joined AWS EC2 Networking, then moved to Amazon Devices, then Amazon Game Publishing. I finished my employment career at Bezos Academy.

In the 13 years I spent at big tech, I worked at 2 companies for 6 different groups. This might not be impressive for a software engineer, but as a senior leader, this is a long list of jobs.

I liked being able to switch roles when I began to feel bored in a position. However, I was switching roles more frequently than other senior leaders. I knew this meant that I needed to be able to ramp up more quickly than other employees. I needed to be able to provide value as quickly as possible. Ramping up unexpectedly fast would be a key element in being able to grow my career while maintaining the variety that I desired.

What do I mean by ramped up?

When you move to a new team, there are a few things you have to learn before you provide value. I'd generally categorize them as the product you'll be working on, the partners you'll work with, and the systems behind the product.

I think these categories apply to engineers, engineering managers, project managers, designers, finance, product managers, etc. Every role should know something of the below categories. Of course you'd expect the product category of knowledge to be deeper for product managers than engineers (for example). The bullet points below? I think every good employee in any role would know these answers. I'm coming up with this list because as an engineering manager, I knew the answers to these in all 6 roles I had.

Partners

• Who are your partners on your team? In other words, who will you work with regularly and often?
• What are their experience levels? How long have they been there? Who do you need to work with the most?
• Which partners do you have elsewhere in the company, and why do you need to work with them? What are their priorities, and how do (or don't) your priorities line up?

Products

• What features do your products have? Which features are the most used? Which are most important for sales or retention? These are not necessarily the same thing.
• How is the revenue distributed across your customers? Are there a few key customers, or are all customers equal?
• Who are your main customers, secondary customers, and long-tail customers?
• What key metrics does your team watch, and why do they care about those metrics?

Systems

• What core technologies do your systems use?
• What is the basic layout of how your systems talk to each other? Where is the ground truth data stored, and how do systems access it?
• What are the various states of the various systems? Which are new, being rewritten, or in maintenance mode? Which are known to be stable, and which are known to be fragile?

Ramping up: Why the organic method isn't good enough.

Most people ramp up in a position organically. If an engineer gets a bug to fix, they learn how that part of the system works related to that bug. If a manager has to hire a new employee, they meet their recruiting team and learn the hiring process. When a project manager needs to add a task for a team, that's when they learn what that team does.

Organic ramp-up works. It's what most people do.

I also don't think it's acceptable. It's lazy. It's the difference between being uncomfortable and slow for 3 weeks or for 6 months.

Why is reducing this ramp up time so important? Most employees ramp up at a certain speed. Isn't that good enough?

• If you ramp up slower than an average employee, you will look like a bad hire. Fair or not, the impression you give your co-workers is that you are someone with lower energy and lower intelligence than the average employee.
• If you ramp up faster than the average employee, you will look like a great hire. Again, fair or not, you will look more intelligent and more energetic than the average employee.

As you are new, and your co-workers have no other impressions, their first impression of your capabilities is primarily based on how quickly you ramp up. The more you beat their expectations, the more they believe that you're the hire they've always dreamed of.

Everyone knows that first impressions matter. The speed you ramp up in your new role is what you can influence the most. This is your one fleeting opportunity to start off in an excellent position.

Let's get into the details of how to handle those first few weeks.