Create Your Snapshot

If you’re coming from a programming background, then you may be familiar with the concept of snapshots. They’re the state of a system at a given time. They are often used to allow a program to quickly restore from backup.

Since you’re a management application that has just been deployed into production, you’re going to need to restore from backup. But—oh no! There isn’t a backup to restore from. So, you’re going to need to create one. You will create a snapshot for yourself, and this snapshot will be the basis on which you will begin your work with the team.

Observation outcomes

Now that you’re coming to the end of your first week, you’ll have had your initial meeting with the members of your team and also your manager. You will have also spent time immersing yourself in the team’s work, doing any required onboarding, and making some initial connections with others in the company. You’ll have started to form your own observations about the team and begun to understand how they work together, how happy they seem, and how excited or hesitant you are to lead them.

You form your snapshot by taking what you’ve learned from the team, your manager, and yourself and overlaying them like a Venn diagram. Then, you can begin to work out where particular observations fit into the intersecting circles.