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30-60-90 day plan

Also called: 30-60-90 plan, first 90 days plan

A one-page plan for the first three months in a new role: first learn and listen, then fix a few visible problems, then set direction. Each stage has two or three concrete outcomes you can check.

A 30-60-90 day plan is a one-page plan for the first three months in a new role, most often a first job leading a team. It splits the quarter into three stages: days 1–30 to learn how the work really runs and listen to the people who do it, days 31–60 to fix a few visible problems and hand work over, and days 61–90 to set direction and the routines the team will keep. Each stage names two or three outcomes someone can check on a date.

The first weeks in a new role are when habits form, the lead's and the team's. A lead promoted from inside usually keeps doing the old job: the hardest tasks, the fastest replies, every question answered personally. A written plan makes the trade-offs visible: what the lead stops doing, what goes to whom and with how much freedom, what will be measured, and what the lead's own manager has to approve, such as a temporary dip in a metric or time taken from the rota.

Good plans start with the lead's own week, the one thing the lead fully controls, and with listening rather than announcements. Every line names a person, a number or a date. It is worth writing the plan so the team could read it too: no ranking of people, no activity tracking and no verdict drawn from a single column of data. Review it with your manager at day 30 and day 90; a plan that never changes after a month with the team probably wasn't listening.

Example

The new lead of Klasna's Support team logged 186 hours in the four weeks of January, 84 of them (45.16%) on their own tickets. The lead also solved 52 of the team's 69 hardest tickets (75.36%, up from 47.83% in December), and coordinators handed up 101 tickets instead of 42. Week 4 already looked better, at 47 hours, and the plan's first block takes it to a 40-hour week:

Category
Week 4, h
Target, h
Change
Own tickets
15
8
−7
Escalations
9
5
−4
Enabling work (team questions, one-to-ones, planning)
19
22
+3
Admin and tools
4
5
+1
Total
47
40
−7

Check: 47 − 7 − 4 + 3 + 1 = 40.

The rest of the page: days 1–30 (February): a weekly one-to-one with each of the four coordinators; Olha decides refund exceptions inside the refund policy and reports weekly, anything outside it goes to Iryna, the head of operations. Days 31–60 (March, the exam peak): onboarding plans for the two seasonal coordinators. Days 61–90 (April): the hardest tickets rotate across the team. Measure: hand-ups and the team's pooled reopen rate (5.36% for December–January), never a league table. Iryna approves: first replies may slow for about two weeks while hand-ups change.

Common mistakes

  • Starting with the team instead of your own week. A plan that changes everyone except the lead rarely survives the first busy Monday.
  • Listing activities instead of outcomes. "Hold one-to-ones" can't be checked; "each coordinator has had four one-to-ones by 28 February" can.
  • Announcing before listening. Big changes in week one are often reversed in week five; days 1–30 are for questions.
  • Ranking people by one metric. A plan the team can read has no league table by tickets closed and no activity tracking.
  • Writing it once and filing it. Agree check-ins at day 30 and day 90, and change the plan when what you hear contradicts it.

Learn it in the course