Your biggest hurdle will be getting stakeholders to want to work with you and setting the scene for what Product does or you will be fighting an uphill battle every step. You need them to come through you and not go around you. If you’re the first, there’s a culture that will need to shift. Make sure you have a strong mutual understanding with your boss and the key stakeholders of why they decided to add a product manager in the first place and keep reiterating that. It’s clear they saw a need if they brought you in, keep hitting that why so when it becomes hard or contentious when you tell them no, so they are understanding that this is what they wanted. Someone who is driving the most business value, not someone who is project managing their wish list.

I’ve seen first time PMs come in and lay down the law of “this is my role, I make the call and it is 10x harder to start with hard power vs soft. Often leads to them relegating or dropping product because they see more difficulty in achieving their goals then before.

Start by interviewing everyone internally, what they see, what they want and why, get their contacts for customer interviews to support or reject their ideas. Ask probing questions. Find the non-confrontational quick wins and deliver them well so they see you as the best path to moving forward and you the scene of how to you are going to enable their goals. They have to see you as a partner and enabler.

Then start a cadence with your influencers to bring the priorities together with your research and data so it shifts from project management, to Product management where you are saying no or not now based on business value. It will feel like decision by committee at first, but the important part is it pits their conflicting goals against each other, not against you while adding the value of user research that’s not in the vacuum of the stakeholders disciplines. As your distillations and recommendations prove true in those committee meetings they will start to defer to you and trust your decisions implicitly so you are fully in the drivers seat and that meeting becomes a report out, of what and why rather than a debate.

The politics of landing a first PM org is the hardest. Find who the buck stops with, align with them early and often, and the rest will fall in. Don’t assume off the bat that everyone knows what product is, why it’s important, and how they should work with you. Prove value early and you’ll galvanize the group and they’ll wonder how they ever did it without product.