First 12 months of the role
Give the candidate a concrete month-by-month picture so they can judge whether they'd actually succeed here, not just whether the title sounds good.
Elad Gil's scaling framework recommends founders lay out the first two quarters concretely so new executives know what success looks like on day one.
- Month 1-3: what gets assessed or fixed first
- Month 4-9: what gets built or hired
- Month 10-12: what result should be visible
- A 5-year vision, that's a different slide for a different audience
- Milestones with no number attached
- First 90 days has no concrete deliverable, just 'get to know the team'
- Milestones don't connect back to the mandate slide's metric
- Overloading month one with too much, which signals the founder hasn't thought through sequencing
- · Does each quarter have one measurable deliverable?
- · Does month 12 tie back to the number promised on the mandate slide?
Months 1-3: [deliverable]. Months 4-9: [deliverable]. Months 10-12: [deliverable, tied to mandate metric].
"In the first year you'll get up to speed, meet the team, and help us scale to the next level."
"Months 1-3: audit the payroll compliance pipeline across all 96 countries and fix the top 5 error sources. Months 4-9: hire 6 engineers and ship automated compliance checks for 40 of the highest-volume countries. Months 10-12: payroll error tickets drop from 40 a month to under 5, and the team reaches 22 people."
Nimbus example: three quarters, each with a specific numeric deliverable, ending on the same metric named in the mandate slide.
Quick quiz
1. What should the month 10-12 milestone connect back to?
- ○ The comp slide
- ✓ The metric named on the mandate slide
- ○ The competitor slide
- ○ Nothing, it should stand alone
Tying the year-end milestone back to the mandate metric shows the plan and the goal are the same thing, per Elad Gil's scaling framework.
2. What's a common pitfall on this slide?
- ○ Giving each quarter one measurable deliverable
- ✓ Filling months 1-3 with only 'meet the team' and no concrete task
- ○ Tying month 12 to a number
- ○ Naming the deliverable for months 4-9
A vague first 90 days signals the founder hasn't thought through sequencing for the new hire.