90-Day Business Analyst Onboarding Plan

1. The Power of a 90-Day Plan

Starting a new role is like launching a new project, and you are the project manager. A 30-60-90 day plan is your project plan for onboarding. It sets clear goals, manages your new manager's expectations, and provides a structured way to navigate the complexities of a new organization.

Dr. Michael Watkins, author of The First 90 Days, introduces the concept of the "break-even point"—the moment you have contributed as much value to the organization as you have consumed. A 90-day plan is your strategy to reach this point as quickly as possible, creating a "virtuous cycle" of early wins and growing credibility.

2. The Anatomy of a 30-60-90 Day Plan

A 90-day plan is typically broken into three 30-day phases, each with a distinct theme that shifts from passive learning to active execution.

The plan's structure can be organized around key areas for each phase, such as priorities, learning goals, performance goals, and personal goals.

Let's break down what each phase entails for a Business Analyst.

3. Phase 1 (Days 1-30): Learn and Observe

The first month is all about absorbing information. Your primary goal is to become a sponge. You are not expected to be a top performer yet; you are expected to learn.

Your key activities should focus on:

• Understanding the Role & Expectations: The most critical first step is to clarify the problem you were hired to solve. Schedule an early meeting with your manager to discuss their top priorities for you and how they define success.
• Learning the Organization: Understand the company's mission, products, and how it makes money. If you're in an AdTech company, this means understanding their ad server technology, publisher network, and revenue models.
• Identifying and Meeting Stakeholders: Begin building your internal network. Identify key stakeholders on both the business side (e.g., sales, marketing, operations) and the technology side (e.g., developers, QA, product managers). Your goal is to understand their roles, their pain points, and how they interact with the systems you'll be working on.
• Understanding BA Processes and Documentation: Get familiar with the company's "BA governance." How do they do things here? Are there existing templates for BRDs, FSDs, or user stories? Where is documentation stored (e.g., Confluence, SharePoint)? This directly aligns with your goal of mastering formal IT documentation.

4. Phase 2 (Days 31-60): Align and Contribute

In your second month, you transition from a passive learner to an active contributor. You start applying what you've learned to make a tangible, albeit small, impact.

Key activities for this phase include:

• Securing an Early Win: This is crucial for building credibility. Find a small, low-risk task you can complete successfully. This might involve documenting a small existing process, analyzing a dataset to answer a specific business question, or helping with user acceptance testing (UAT). An early win proves your value and builds trust.
• Contributing to an Ongoing Project: You might not own a project yet, but you can provide valuable support. Offer to take detailed notes in requirements workshops, help organize the product backlog, or create a process flow diagram for a feature being discussed.
• Deepening Stakeholder Relationships: Move beyond introductions. Schedule follow-up meetings to ask deeper questions based on what you've learned. The "learning agenda" framework can be very helpful here.

5. Phase 3 (Days 61-90): Execute and Impact

In the third month, you leverage the knowledge and credibility you've built to take initiative and drive measurable outcomes. You are now expected to be a more autonomous and proactive member of the team.

Your focus shifts to:

• Taking Ownership: Transition from assisting to leading. This could mean taking full ownership of the requirements for a new feature or leading the analysis for a small project.
• Proactively Identifying Improvements: With a solid understanding of the business and its processes, you can now start identifying inefficiencies or opportunities.
• Introducing Best Practices: After you've earned trust with an early win, you're in a better position to suggest improvements. Perhaps the team's user stories lack clear acceptance criteria, or a process could be streamlined. You can now tactfully say, "On our last project, we faced a challenge with [X]. For the next one, I'd like to try [Y] to help us avoid that."
• Measuring Your Impact: Track the results of your work. Did the feature you analyzed lead to a 10% increase in user engagement? Did your process improvement reduce manual effort by 5 hours per week? Quantifying your contributions is key.

6. Your Final Exercise: Build Your 30-60-90 Day Plan

Now it's time to put all this together into a personal plan. This is your final deliverable for the course and your key takeaway for your job search.

Instructions:

Using the structure from the image LINK (Priorities, Learning Goals, Performance Goals, Personal Goals), create your own 30-60-90 day plan.

1. Choose a Target Role: Imagine you've been hired as a Business Analyst at an AdTech company (leveraging your domain experience).
2. Flesh out Each Phase: For each 30-day block, define 2-3 specific and actionable goals for each category. Use the resources from this lesson for inspiration.
3. Be Specific: Instead of "Learn about stakeholders," write "Identify and schedule 1:1 meetings with the Head of Sales, the Lead AdOps Manager, and the Product Manager for the DSP." Instead of "Contribute to a project," write "Successfully document the 'as-is' workflow for the campaign setup process and get it validated by the AdOps team."

Here is a template to guide you.

My 30-60-90 Day Plan: Business Analyst at an AdTech Company

Phase 1: First 30 Days (Learn & Observe)

• Priorities: Absorb company culture, understand core products, and build foundational relationships.
• Learning Goals:
  • Complete all HR onboarding and mandatory technical training.
  • Read the BRD and SRS for the company's main demand-side platform (DSP).
  • Understand the key AdTech metrics the business tracks (e.g., fill rate, CPM, CTR).
• Performance Goals:
  • Shadow a senior BA in two requirements elicitation sessions and summarize the key takeaways.
  • Gain read-only access to key systems like Jira, Confluence, and the internal reporting dashboard.
• Personal Goals:
  • Schedule 1:1 intro meetings with my manager, my immediate team members, and at least three key stakeholders from business and tech.

Phase 2: Days 31-60 (Align & Contribute)

• Priorities: Apply knowledge to deliver a small win and begin actively contributing to team goals.
• Learning Goals:
  • Master the team's process for writing and managing user stories in Jira.
  • Understand the data schema of the core reporting database by writing basic SQL queries.
• Performance Goals:
  • Early Win: Analyze user feedback tickets for the past quarter and present a summary of the top 3 pain points to the product manager.
  • Take ownership of writing the user stories for a small, well-defined feature enhancement.
• Personal Goals:
  • Find a mentor within the organization.
  • Attend a cross-departmental demo or town hall to broaden my organizational understanding.

Phase 3: Days 61-90 (Execute & Impact)

• Priorities: Take initiative, drive a feature forward, and suggest process improvements.
• Learning Goals:
  • Build a simple Tableau dashboard to track a key product KPI.
  • Gain a deep understanding of the API that connects the DSP to a major ad exchange.
• Performance Goals:
  • Lead the requirements gathering and documentation process for a new feature from start to finish.
  • Process Improvement: Propose and implement a new template for meeting minutes that clearly separates action items, decisions, and open questions.
  • Present the results of a feature I worked on to stakeholders, using data to show its impact.
• Personal Goals:
  • Provide feedback to my manager on how the onboarding process could be improved for the next new hire.

Conclusion and Course Wrap-Up

Congratulations on completing the Business Analysis course! You have journeyed from the foundational principles of business analysis, through the technical skills of SQL, Python, and Tableau, to the practical application of these skills in process modeling, documentation, and agile methodologies. This final lesson on creating a 90-day plan synthesizes everything you've learned: strategic thinking, work management, stakeholder engagement, and a focus on delivering value.

Key Takeaways from this Lesson:

• A 30-60-90 day plan is a powerful tool to impress interviewers and ensure your success in a new role.
• The plan should progress through three phases: Learning, Contributing, and Executing.
• The goal is to move from being a sponge to taking initiative and making a measurable impact.
• Customizing your plan for the specific role and company is essential for showing you've done your research and are serious about the opportunity.

You are now well-equipped to not only ace your interviews but also to excel in your new career. Your unique background in project management and AdTech, combined with the formal BA skills you've acquired here, makes you a strong and versatile candidate. Continue to practice, build on this foundation, and step confidently into your new role as a Business Analyst. Best of luck