Jason Hood
1. Assess: Listen more than you speak
Your first 30 days are for discovery. Your mission is to understand the landscape, not to change it. Schedule meetings not just with your peers, but with the senior engineers who hold institutional knowledge, the sales leaders who hear client complaints and the finance partners who understand the real budget pressures.
I learned this lesson on a major lab transformation. The official documentation was a waterfall-style mess — pristine on paper but hopelessly outdated the moment it was approved. The real source of truth? It wasn’t in a binder. It lived in the heads of three people: a lead architect, a senior developer and a key operator from the business side. So I didn’t spend my first week huddled with VPs. I spent it at a whiteboard with that trio, teasing out what was really going on. And the breakthrough didn’t happen in isolation. It came when we brought IT and business perspectives together in the same room. Those sessions didn’t just give us a map — they built a bridge between two groups that had been working at arm’s length. That bridge saved us months of missteps down the road.
2. Align: Find the ‘burning platform’
After you assess, your next job is to find the one or two “quick wins” that solve a real, recognized pain point. Don’t invent a problem to solve. Find the “burning platform” that everyone already agrees is on fire. Is it the slow development environment? A buggy checkout process? A manual report that takes three days to run? By aligning your first actions with an existing, acknowledged problem, you aren’t asking for trust — you are earning it by being a practical problem-solver.
