My 30-60-90 plan died on day one. 6 months of overcorrecting, 21 ignored tickets, and a senior engineer who told me to stop.

Manager.dev

An Engineering Manager shares an honest retrospective of his first 6 months taking over an existing team at HoneyBook. He describes three key challenges: abandoning his planned technical onboarding when he discovered the team had been without real management for 6 months and needed people-focused leadership; over-pressuring the team to hit sprint goals without sufficient technical context, leading to burnout and pushback from a senior engineer; and discovering 21 neglected support tickets that required a focused 'hotfixing blitz' to resolve. The core lesson is that rigid 30-60-90 onboarding plans fail in practice — constant adaptation, paying attention to team signals, and willingness to course-correct matter far more than any pre-made plan.

Managing a team that didn't choose you

manager explaining how he was busy and achieved nothing with a happy end of taking paternity leave
honestly good people don’t need managers
I think that the biggest problems are that POs and Techleads don’t do their job
Techleads tend to manage Product instead of leading Techstack and POs tend to be Scrum-Masters instead of “owning” their product

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“I prioritized the team and people first.”
</blockquote>
Bro, with the pressure you put on your devs, it doesn’t seem like it
<blockquote>
&quot;Someone won $20 on the scratch tickets&quot;
</blockquote>
Oh, wow, an incredible prize to maintain mental sanity in that situation.
Please, remember that even developers are humans and every human deserve space. If your team is in such a bad state, give more time. Do not focus on someone else method and if there are such team reorgs, be clear with your director that you’ll need (more) time.
At least you learned something from this experience. Wish you luck, and congrats for your newborn

I feel like Junior Dev needs to take on product management skills if they want to vibe code