30-60-90 Day Plan: The 2023 Guide [Templates + Examples]

While starting a new job is one of the most exciting moments of your life, there’s a lingering fear that you may not learn everything quickly or meet expectations that led your hiring manager to choose you above other applicants.

A 30-60-90 day plan helps you adjust to your new position quickly. You set goals in order of high priority that you’re going to achieve in the first 30-60 and 90 days of your new job. You also establish metrics to measure success during this period.

In this article, we’ll show you how to create a 30-60-90 day plan as well as provide templates that can be used by applicants during an interview, new hires during the first 90 days, and managers who are onboarding new employees.

What is a 30-60-90 day plan?

A 30-60-90 day plan is a document that maps out a new employee’s goals and strategies within the first 90 days of a new job. The plan consists of manageable milestones that are tied to an employee’s position. 

For a new employee, the plan will help you maximize your work output and productivity in the first 90 days. It will also help your employers to visualize how you plan to contribute to your organization over the next three months.

However, a 30-60-90 plan is not only for employees. Managers can use the 30-60-90 day plan to onboard new hires and help them get familiar with the company’s goals and expectations in their first 90 days at work. 

What makes a good 30-60-90 plan?

A good 30-60-90 plan must outline your personal goals and break them down into small achievable tasks. More importantly, it maps out your process to achieve each goal.

However, note that your 30-60-90 plan must align with the overall mission of your company. Otherwise, there will be a disconnect between your goals and your company’s goals. 

How long should a 30-60-90 day plan be?

While there is no set documentation length for a 30-60-90-day plan, it should be skimmable, so about one to two pages long. Instead of focusing on the length, you should focus on including information like: 

• Onboarding and training materials for your new job
• Milestones you’ll achieve at the end of each phase 
• Stakeholders you’ll be collaborating with as well as resources you’ll need to meet these goals 

When should you make a 30-60-90 day plan?

The best time to make a 30-60-90 day plan varies. Sometimes, you might have to make a plan during the interview period at the request of your hiring manager. 

Generally, you create a 30-60-90 plan before starting a new job, after you have a better understanding of your roles and responsibilities. You may even have one created for you by your manager.

Benefits of a 30-60-90 plan

Focus on important tasks

Getting a new job can be overwhelming. There’s a possibility that some tasks might get ignored in favor of others. A 30-60-90 days plan helps you cut through the noise and focus on important milestones. 

Keep track of your goals

A 30-60-90 day plan is great for keeping track of your goal and progress in the first few months of your new job. It gives you a sense of direction about how you plan to add value to your company as a new employee. For managers, it makes it easy to track the performance of your employee during the early days.

Build trust and team cohesion

Many new employees are eager to dive in and impress. They nitpick and point out mistakes that could be improved upon. Most times your suggestions are not met with excitement by your teammates because you don’t really understand the product or company. A 30/60/90 plan ensures that new employees are on the same page as their teams and managers before implementing huge changes. A plan helps you learn before you lead. 

Better time management

Since a 30-60-90 day plan is time-bound, it helps you to manage your time more efficiently on tasks that are actionable and quantifiable.

Encourages periodic performance review

A 30-60-90 day plan allows you to self-review your accomplishments. For managers, it’s a great way to track the performance of your new hire and give constructive feedback that improves job performance.

What should be included in a 30-60-90 day plan?

When creating a 30-60-90 plan, ensure that your plan includes the following elements:

• Focus
• Goals
• Priorities 
• Metrics of success

Focus

The focus is your objective for each phase of the month. For the first 30 days, you’ll be learning more about your new company and how your team operates. This is also a great time to absorb any information or onboarding materials that your manager provides. You’ll also be learning about:

• Your roles and responsibilities
• Software programs that your company uses
• Your team members 
• Your company’s products, industry, and target customers
• Your company's goals, KPIs, and milestones

In the second phase, you’ll be focused on how to add value to your organization. In this phase (usually in the second month), you’ll draw up a strategy on how you can contribute to your team. You can introduce new processes or suggest ways to optimize the existing processes. 

The third phase (third month) is where you’ll execute the strategy that you’ve mapped out in the second phase. Here, you’ll be actively involved in contributing to projects and working with your team to get the best results.

Goals 

How do you plan to achieve your overarching goals? Set goals that complement your stated focus. For example, you could break your goals into categories like learning and onboarding, personal goals, and performance.

Your learning goals could be acquiring skills and information to be successful. Performance goals could be concrete goals you want to complete as part of your new role. Personal goals could be building relationships with your teammates and finding your place within your new company.

Priorities 

Goals are broad. Hence, setting priorities allows you to outline high-level priorities that should be completed first in each phase. For example, If you’re a sales rep, your priorities for month one might be learning about your company’s sales funnel or listening to a sales call that left a prospect dissatisfied. 

Metrics of success

Each goal or priority must be tied to metrics that allow you to measure your performance. Having the right metrics will help you visualize what success looks like and determine whether you’re making progress or not. 

How to write a 30-60-90 day plan

Writing a 30-60-90 day plan might seem like a daunting task. So we’ve broken it down into eight easy steps that you can implement right now. 

Think long term 

While a 30-60-90 day plan focuses on quick wins, your ultimate goal should be adding long-term value to your organization.

Before writing goals or specifying metrics, think about your overall reasons for joining this company. Why did they hire you? What problems do they expect you to solve? Your priorities should deliver on that purpose. Start with what you need to achieve right now and use it as your compass for future goals

Be flexible 

Having a plan is great but sometimes you need to make adjustments to your approach. Not everything on your list will follow a linear route. Customize your plan based on your expertise, what you know about the organization, and your responsibilities at the new job. Always ask for feedback and use it to tweak your goals.

Draft a template

Save time by grabbing a premade template to manage your 30-60-90-day plan. The template you choose should have space for entering goals at each milestone and actions required to achieve these goals. There should also be provisions for tracking success along the way.

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Create action items 

Break your goals into small and achievable milestones. Create action items to assess if you’ve met your goals and to what extent. Doing this will encourage you to be accountable and to distribute your time and resources effectively.

Set SMART goals 

Your SMART goals should be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Time-Bound

For example, rather than setting a goal to increase ranking for your website, your SMART goal could be to increase traffic by 2% in the first 30 days.

Determine KPIs

How will you determine the impact of your work? Each SMART goal should be tied to a metric. As a rule of thumb, metrics should be quantifiable. However, some goals are qualitative such as building relationships with your teammates or improving user experience with your product.

When determining your KPIs, you need to be able to answer the following questions:

• Is the metric related to your overall objective?
• Is it measurable, whether quantitatively or qualitatively?
• How quickly can your manager and teammates see the impact of your work?
• Does the metric motivate you to achieve other SMART goals?

Ask questions 

Asking questions is pivotal to learning and growth. Whether you’re at the interview stage or just starting at a new company, ask questions that help you better understand what’s expected of you and how to reach your goals.

A great approach is to ask most of the questions during the interview stage, so you can use the answers to frame your 30-60-90 day plan.

Examples of questions to ask include:

• What’s the typical timeline to reach x goals?
• What’s expected of me in the first 90 days?
• What pressing problems are you looking to solve?
• What’s the onboarding process like for new hires?

30-60-90 Day templates

30-60-90 day plan for a manager 

As a manager, your 30-60-90-day plan establishes concrete goals that you expect employees to achieve. When setting goals, consider your new hire’s strengths and weak points. At every stage, offer feedback on what they can do better.

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30-60-90 day plan for an interview and new job

Since the average job posting attracts roughly 250 resumes, a 30-60-90 day plan helps you stand out from other candidates.

To evaluate how you manage time and prioritize tasks, a hiring manager may ask an interviewee to create a 30-60-90 day plan they would implement if they get the job.

Start by searching for commonalities between the job description and job qualifications. How can you turn them into achievable goals over a three-month period?

For example, if you’re interviewing for a social media manager role and the responsibilities include growing the company’s social media channel and driving leads, you can use this to create an action plan. It could explain how you’ll use the first 30 days to learn the company’s current process. In the second month, you’ll build a strategy to improve the current social media account and in the third month, you’ll lead your time towards implementing your plan.

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30-60-90 day plan for onboarding

Onboarding is the final step in the hiring process and a critical part of creating a great experience for your new hires. Organizations with a great onboarding process enjoy 54% more productivity from new employees which leads to better performance.

To help employees ease into their new role, consider using a self-onboarding tool that allows employees to onboard at their own pace. You should also use a template to outline goals for new hires as well as the weekly tasks you want them to accomplish. 

30-60-90 day plan for executive and virtual assistants (VA)

In order to have a successful onboarding process, having a 30-60-90 day plan for an executive assistant (EA) or VA will help them develop a strong understanding of the company and executive's goals and where they can lend a hand to drive operational efficiency.

Your 30-60-90 day plan for an executive assistant should include:

• Establishing and building relationships with key personnel
• Learning the company's systems and processes
• Developing an understanding of the company's goals and objectives getting started with any tasks they can hold to improve organizational efficiency or productivity
• Assisting the executive in achieving their goals

30-60-90 day plan for IT managers

For new IT managers and outsourced IT teams, having a 30-60-90 day plan can help them get up to speed quickly, provide them with the tools to hit the ground running, and support their team from day one.

Apart from learning about the responsibilities of the team, the company's mission, values, and history, it's important for IT leaders to create a plan that caters specifically to any gaps they identify during the first 30 to 60 days. 

Any 30-60-90 day plan for IT needs to include these key responsibilities:

• Learning about the company's IT systems and infrastructure
• Getting to know the team and how they work together
• Understanding existing processes and procedures
• Shadowing experienced employees
• Taking on small projects to support the company
• Identifying key areas for improvement or where there is a priority project that can improve operational efficiency
• Understanding any security and risk context
• Completing any required training or certifications

30-60-90 day plan for data analysts

Using a 30-60-90 day plan for new data analysts should provide them with the tools to help stakeholders make better business decisions early on. 

A 30-60-90 day plan for a data analyst should include activities such as: 

• Auditing and analysis
• Becoming familiar with the company's historical and trends
• Identifying and presenting opportunities for improvement
• Learning processes and procedures
• Participating in projects across cross-functional teams
• Creating reports and presentations to communicate their findings to teams and stakeholders

30-60-90 day examples

30-60-90 day plan for sales

30-60-90 day plan for product managers

Maximize your impact with a 30/60/90 day plan

A 30-60-90-day plan maximizes employee impact from day one by clearly aligning new hire objectives with the company’s mission. Both employees and managers benefit from these clearly-defined, organizationally-aligned objectives. New hires get clear expectations, priorities, and goals. While managers improve employee productivity by helping employees quickly understand their role, the organization, and the company’s direction.

Frequently asked questions

How do you present a 30-60-90 day plan in an interview?

There's no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as the best way to present your 30-60-90-day plan will vary depending on the specific job you're interviewing for. However, you can make sure your presentation is impactful and impressive with these tips.

1. Make sure your 30-60-90-day plan is specific to the company you're interviewing with. Tailor your goals and objectives to match the company's culture, values, and needs. This will show that you're truly invested in the role and prepared to hit the ground running if hired.
2. Keep your presentation concise and focus on the most important points. Hiring managers don't want to hear a long, drawn-out plan - they want to see that you're able to articulate your thoughts clearly and focus on the most important details.
3. Practice, practice, practice! This is perhaps the most important tip of all. The more you rehearse your presentation, the more confident you'll feel and that will come through to your hiring team.

What should you ask new employees after their first 30 days?

After an employee's first 30 days on the job, it's important to check-in, build trust, and ensure your new hire understands what's expected of them to quickly deliver value. These questions will give you a good idea of how the employee is adjusting to their new job and whether or not they're on track to being successful in the role. If you have any concerns, this is also a good time to address them.

What questions should you cover in a 90-day review?

The key to success for any employee is hitting the mark on the manager’s expectations for the first 90 days. It’s also a time to reflect on whether new employees are working well in the organization. Employees can complete a self-assessment review and may also want to nominate colleagues for peer reviews. 

Here are some questions to help structure your conversation: 

• Where do you think you have been successful so far here? 
• Where do you think you could improve? 
• What can I do to better support you? 
• Where would you like to grow professionally? 
• How do you feel about your performance against goals?

Ensure you build trust and productivity during every one-on-one with these key questions and agendas.

How do you write a 30-60-90 day plan for a new manager?

Assuming you have a good understanding of the job responsibilities, here are five steps to help write your plan:

1. Research the company's culture, values, and needs. This will help you tailor your goals and objectives to match what the company is looking for.
2. Outline your goals and objectives for the first 30, 60, and 90 days. Make sure these are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
3. Develop a strategy for how you will achieve each goal. This should include both short-term and long-term action items.
4. Create a timeline for completing each task. This will help you stay on track and ensure you're making progress toward your goals.
5. Identify any resources you will need to achieve your goals. This could include access to certain software, additional training, or support from your team.
6. Finally, practice presenting your plan. This will help you feel more confident and ensure that your thoughts are clear and concise when delivering the presentation.

What questions should you ask during a performance review?

Any performance review can be full of nerves, especially for newer hires. Taking time to reassure your employee about the step-by-step process and what to expect helps ensure a productive conversation. You’ll want to make time to talk about: 

• Self-review and manager review
• Any peer feedback
• Performance-based review, including discussion of goals
• What went well
• Areas for growth
• Any title updates, promotions, or compensation changes

Ensure every performance review and one-on-one builds towards your goals with these questions and agendas.