VP of Engineering: The First 90 Days Playbook
· 8 min read
A newly hired VP of Engineering has three things the org watches closely: what they cut, who they keep, and how fast they announce a plan. Get the sequence wrong and credibility is gone by week 4 — the org decides you're either a reorganiser or a lame duck before you understand the codebase. Michael Watkins' The First 90 Days is the foundational reference, but it's written for general executives. Engineering orgs have specific traps.
The counter-intuitive move: announce less in the first 30 days than you think you should. Not "listening tour" theatre — an actual measured pause while you read the org's calendar, incident history, and deploy pipeline.