A Framework for Strategic Impact in Tech Leadership

Your First 90 Days: A Framework for Strategic Impact in Tech Leadership

Starting a new role is exciting, challenging, and often, more than a little daunting. This is as true when you’re stepping into a senior leadership position like CTO/CPO or Head of Digital, joining a new organisation, or taking the reins of a complex new project or team. The pressure is on to learn quickly, build relationships, and – most importantly – make a meaningful impact.

One question often comes up in interviews, and it’s one you must ask yourself on Day 1: “What will you do in your first 30, 60, or 90 days?”

Interviewers aren’t just looking for a task list. They want to see your strategic thinking, your understanding of how to integrate into a complex system, your approach to learning, and how you prioritise for impact. And in the role itself, a clear plan helps you cut through the noise, focus your energy, and build momentum effectively.

This isn’t about being busy; it’s about being impactful. It’s about strategically understanding the landscape, identifying where you can add the most value for the firm, your team, and the leadership, and laying the groundwork for sustainable success. It’s also a crucial opportunity to gain fresh perspective without getting immediately bogged down by historical baggage.

Drawing from experience (including a background rooted in design thinking, which emphasises understanding user needs and pain points), I’ve found a simple, adaptable framework helps structure this critical period. Think of it less as a rigid set of instructions and more as a set of guiding principles and phases to ensure you’re orienting effectively, synthesising your findings strategically, and activating with purpose.

Let’s call it the Orientation, Synthesise, Activate (OSA) Framework.

The OSA Framework: Your Guide to Purposeful Progress

This framework breaks down your first 90 days into three overlapping phases, each with distinct goals and activities designed to build on the last.

Phase 1: Orientation (Roughly Days 1-30) – The Deep Dive & Deep Listen

• Goal: Rapidly immerse yourself in the environment, build foundational relationships, and gain a deep understanding of the current state, underlying challenges, and immediate priorities. This is your essential “Discovery” phase – not just hearing, but truly understanding the ‘whys’ behind the ‘whats’, much like understanding your users’ core needs and motivations before designing solutions.
• Why it’s Crucial: You absolutely cannot lead effectively or identify the areas of highest impact without truly understanding the context, the people, the history, and the current operational reality from multiple perspectives. Deep listening here is key to avoiding assumptions, understanding the real root causes of issues, and sidestepping getting caught in surface-level problems or historical conflicts that might not be the true path to future impact. It prevents you from just being busy reacting to noise.
• Key Focus Areas & Activities:
  • Practice Deep Listening in 1:1s: Schedule dedicated time with your direct reports, skip-level reports, key peers (Engineering, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Operations, etc.), your manager, and other critical members of the Exec/SLT. Go beyond the surface. Ask open-ended questions and listen for the underlying concerns, motivations, and unarticulated needs.
    • Examples: “Tell me about a time when [process/collaboration] worked really well/really poorly, and what you think the reasons were.” “If you had a magic wand, what’s one thing you’d change about [area]? Why is that the priority?” “What keeps you up at night regarding [team/product/digital strategy]?”
  • Review with a Critical Ear: Dive into existing documentation – strategic plans, OKRs, product roadmaps, user research, market analysis, performance dashboards, team structures, process documents. As you review, connect it back to what you’re hearing in your conversations. Where do the official documents align or conflict with lived reality?
  • Experience and Understand: Use the product/service yourself, deeply understanding the user journey and points of friction. Talk to front-line teams (support, sales) not just to hear their processes, but to understand their pain points and the customer’s pain points they witness daily.
  • Uncover Immediate Realities (The Essential “Common Sense”): Absolutely, ask directly about:
    • Are there any major deadlines looming that must be met?
    • Are there any active, critical “fires” that the team or organisation is battling? Understand their history and impact.
    • What key initiatives are already in flight, and what are the expectations around your role in them?
    • What are the established communication channels and decision-making processes? Understanding these avoids early missteps.
  • Observe the Dynamics: Pay attention to how people interact, how decisions are really made (beyond the org chart), and the unwritten rules of the culture.
• Output: A truly insightful understanding of the current state – the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, the political landscape, and the cultural norms. You’ll have established initial trust through listening and have a solid grasp of immediate, non-negotiable priorities. This phase is about building a foundation of understanding necessary for impact, distinguishing critical issues from mere noise or historical baggage.

Phase 2: Synthesise (Roughly Days 31-60) – Finding the Signal in the Noise

• Goal: Process the wealth of information gathered through deep listening and review. Identify patterns, validate your initial hypotheses, and start formulating a preliminary strategic direction and concrete plan focused on areas of highest potential impact. This is where you synthesise your discoveries to “Define & Ideate” solutions.
• Why it’s Crucial: Simply collecting information isn’t enough. You need to discern the signal from the noise, identify the root causes of pains and the true nature of opportunities. This phase is about connecting the dots, prioritising based on potential impact aligned with business goals, and translating insights into actionable strategies, ensuring you don’t just create more work, but meaningful work.
• Key Focus Areas & Activities:
  • Synthesise Your Deep Listening: Organise and process your notes and observations. Look for recurring themes in challenges, opportunities, and feedback across different stakeholders. What are the most frequent, high-impact pain points? Where do different perspectives align or conflict, and why might that be? (Your design synthesis skills are invaluable here!).
  • Validate and Prioritise for Impact: Hold working sessions or follow-up meetings with key stakeholders (including your team) to share your initial observations and validate your understanding. Collaboratively prioritise potential areas of focus based on potential impact for the organisation, feasibility, desirability (does it solve a real need?), and viability (does it make business sense?). Focus ruthlessly on what moves the needle.
  • Formulate Preliminary Direction: Based on the synthesis and validation, begin to outline a draft vision or set of strategic pillars for your area that clearly align with the company’s overall goals. How will your work lead to measurable impact?
  • Identify “Early Wins” with Purpose: Pinpoint 1-3 tangible initiatives that can be scoped and potentially delivered within the next 30-60 days. These should be chosen specifically because they address a real, validated pain point or capitalise on a clear opportunity, demonstrating early impact and building credibility.
  • Draft Your Impact Plan: Outline your concrete plan for the next 30 days and sketch out the key milestones and focus areas for the 90-day mark and slightly beyond. Frame this plan around delivering specific outcomes and impact, not just completing tasks.
• Output: A prioritised understanding of key challenges and opportunities, a preliminary strategic framework focused on impact, identified candidates for early impactful wins, and a drafted plan for the next phase. You’ve translated insights into actionable steps that will deliver on the “benefits you can bring” and are focused on impactful work.

Phase 3: Activate (Roughly Days 61-90) – Building Momentum & Delivering Value

• Goal: Begin executing the plan, initiate the identified early wins, clearly communicate the strategic direction, establish key operating rhythms, and start demonstrating tangible progress and impact against your defined priorities. This is your “Implement & Iterate” phase – putting strategy into action.
• Why it’s Crucial: Learning and planning are essential, but impact comes from execution. This is where you translate your insights and strategy into action, rally your team around a shared purpose, and start delivering measurable value that stakeholders can see and feel. It’s about channeling energy into the right things.
• Key Focus Areas & Activities:
  • Communicate the impact: Share your refined vision, strategic pillars, and 90-day plan (with initial thoughts beyond) with your team and key stakeholders. Crucially, explain the why – how this plan directly addresses the needs and pains you uncovered and will lead to specific, positive impact for the business and its customers.
  • Drive Early Wins for Impact: Lead the execution of the identified early win initiatives. Monitor their progress and, importantly, measure and communicate their impact. Use these as tangible examples of progress and the value of your approach.
  • Establish Effective Rhythms: Put in place the necessary meeting cadences, reporting structures, and communication norms to ensure your team operates efficiently and stakeholders are kept informed of progress and impact. This might include regular team syncs focused on outcomes, leadership updates highlighting achievements against goals, or cross-functional working groups tackling key initiatives.
  • Focus Ruthlessly on Key Priorities: Begin work on the larger, critical initiatives identified during the synthesis phase. Ensure resources are allocated to maximise potential impact, and dependencies are actively managed.
  • Refine Team/Processes (Thoughtfully): Based on your observations and plan, begin making necessary adjustments to team structure, roles, or key processes – but do so collaboratively and explain how these changes will enable greater impact.
  • Track and Communicate: Ensure you have clear, agreed-upon methods to measure the success and impact of your initiatives and the overall health of your area. Start tracking them and report on them regularly, demonstrating the value you’re creating.
• Output: Visible progress on key initiatives, including completed early wins with demonstrable impact; a clear direction understood and supported by your team and stakeholders; established effective operational routines; and initial data showing the positive results of your strategic focus. You are now actively delivering on the “benefits I can bring” for the organisation.

Principles Guiding the Entire Journey

• Obsess About Impact, Not Just Activity: Constantly filter every task and initiative through “How does this contribute to the company’s strategic goals and deliver measurable value?” This is the core difference between being busy and being effective in leadership.
• Nurture Relationships Relentlessly: Continue to build trust and rapport with your team, peers, and leadership throughout. Strong relationships are foundational to driving change and achieving widespread impact.
• Be Flexible & Iterate: This framework is a guide, not a straitjacket. Be prepared to adapt your plan based on new information, shifting priorities (yes, those unexpected “fires” will still happen!), or feedback. Your initial hypotheses will need adjustment as it clashes with reality – embrace it.
• Communicate Proactively & With Context: Keep your manager and key stakeholders informed of your process, what you’re learning, your emerging plan, and your progress. Use appropriate indication which shows why you’re prioritising certain things, linking it back to the needs and potential impact you’ve identified.
• Leverage Your Strengths: Use your background – be it design, engineering, product management, etc. – to your advantage. For instance, your design background’s emphasis on deep understanding, empathy, synthesis, and iterative problem-solving is a superpower for understanding complex organisational systems and identifying high-leverage opportunities.

Conclusion

Having a structured approach like the Orientation, Synthesise, Activate framework provides a practical method of hitting the ground running, building essential relationships, cutting through complexity, and focusing your energy where it can make the biggest difference.

It helps you avoid the trap of just making yourself busy. By prioritising deep understanding in the Orientation phase, strategically focusing in the Synthesise phase, and executing for results in the Activate phase, you ensure your efforts translate into tangible, meaningful impact.