Templates

30-60-90 day plan for a new CTO or VP of Engineering

What a new engineering leader should learn, decide and deliver in the first 90 days, with the questions to ask, the documents to produce and the metrics to baseline.

By the Ryz Labs team · Updated October 2026

A 30-60-90 day plan for a new CTO or VP of Engineering moves through three phases: listen and baseline in the first 30 days, diagnose and make the first decisions by day 60, and commit to a strategy, org changes and a hiring plan by day 90. Each phase ends with a written deliverable for the CEO or leadership team. Success is measured by the clarity of the plan and the trust built, not by how much you change in the first month. The template below lists the activities, deliverables and metrics for each phase.

30-60-90 day plan template for engineering leaders

1. The plan by phase

Phase	Goal	Key activities	Deliverable	Done when
Days 1-30: Listen and baseline	Understand the business, the systems and the people	One-on-ones with every engineering manager and senior engineer; meetings with CEO, product, sales, support, finance; system walkthroughs; read incident reviews, roadmap and budget	Written baseline: what is working, top risks, open questions	CEO and peers agree the baseline describes reality
Days 31-60: Diagnose and decide	Pick the few problems that matter most and start on them	Root-cause the top delivery and reliability problems; review team structure and ownership; assess hiring pipeline and gaps; make one or two visible decisions through a documented process	Prioritized problem list with proposed fixes; first decisions recorded	Leadership team agrees on the top three problems
Days 61-90: Commit and lead	Set direction for the next 6-12 months	Present engineering strategy and roadmap aligned to business goals; propose org changes; launch the hiring plan; set team goals and a review cadence	Engineering strategy, org plan, hiring plan, metrics dashboard	Strategy approved; teams know their goals

2. Questions to answer in the first 30 days

Business and product

☐ What are the company's top three goals this year, and which depend on engineering?
☐ Which customer commitments or dates are fixed?
☐ Where do product and engineering disagree today?

Systems

☐ Which systems cause the most incidents, and which are the riskiest to change?
☐ Where is the technical debt that slows delivery the most?
☐ What would break first at twice today's load?
☐ What does security and compliance require of engineering this year?

People and process

☐ Who are the people the organization depends on most, and are they at risk of leaving?
☐ How do teams plan, ship and review work? Where does work wait?
☐ Which roles are open, and how long have they been open?
☐ What do engineers say is the biggest waste of their time?

3. Metrics to baseline (measure before you change anything)

Metric	Why it matters	Source	Baseline	Day 90
Deployment frequency	Delivery speed	CI/CD	[ ]	[ ]
Lead time for changes	How long work waits	Source control and CI	[ ]	[ ]
Change failure rate	Release quality	Incidents and deploys	[ ]	[ ]
Time to restore service	Operational maturity	Incident tracker	[ ]	[ ]
Roadmap commitments delivered	Predictability	Planning tool	[ ]	[ ]
Open roles and time open	Capacity risk	Recruiting	[ ]	[ ]
Engineering cost per month	Efficiency	Finance	[ ]	[ ]

Use this template

How to use this 30-60-90 day plan

Before day one, ask the CEO for the three outcomes they expect from engineering this year and how they will judge your first 90 days. Write them at the top of the plan.
Book the listening tour in your first week: every engineering manager, senior engineer and cross-functional peer. Use the question list and take notes in one place.
Baseline the metrics before proposing changes, so you can show progress later.
Write the 30-day baseline document and review it with the CEO. Correct it until they agree it is accurate.
In days 31 to 60, pick the top three problems and make one or two visible decisions using a documented process, such as an architecture decision record or RFC.
By day 90, present strategy, org changes and the hiring plan, with the metrics you will report monthly.

Example: a 30-day baseline summary

Area	Finding	Proposed next step
Delivery	Releases happen every two to three weeks because the test suite is slow and flaky; features wait days for QA.	Fix the top flaky tests and parallelize the suite; move to daily deploys behind feature flags.
Reliability	Most incidents in the last quarter came from one legacy service with no owner.	Assign ownership; schedule a stabilization sprint.
People	Two senior backend roles open for months; the data team is one person.	Re-scope the roles; add senior engineers from a partner to cover the data pipeline milestone.

Common mistakes in a new CTO's first 90 days

Rewriting the architecture in month one. Big changes before you understand why things are the way they are cost trust and often repeat old mistakes.
Only listening to engineering. Sales, support and finance know where engineering hurts the business.
No written baseline. Without one, you cannot show what changed, and the first quarter's progress becomes a matter of opinion.
Delaying all decisions to day 90. Teams need to see a few early, well-reasoned decisions to trust the process.
Hiring plan without capacity math. Tie every role to roadmap commitments and the time it takes to fill it.

Need capacity while you build the plan?

New engineering leaders often find milestones already at risk and roles open for months. Ryz adds senior engineers and tech leads to your team, reporting to your leads, on US business hours including New York hours, and AI pod teams that build AI systems in your cloud and repos. Only the top 1% of the tens of thousands of engineers we interview make it, and Fortune 500 engineering teams work with us. Typical cost is $7,000 to $15,000 per engineer per month. Talk to us to scope your team.

FAQ

What should a new CTO do in the first 30 days?

Listen and baseline. Meet every engineering manager and senior engineer one-on-one, meet cross-functional peers, walk through the main systems, read incident reviews and the roadmap, and measure delivery and reliability metrics. End the month with a written baseline the CEO agrees with.

What should be in a CTO's 90-day plan?

A listening phase with a written baseline, a diagnosis phase that prioritizes the top problems and makes the first decisions, and a commitment phase that delivers an engineering strategy, org plan, hiring plan and the metrics you will report.

Is a 30-60-90 plan different for a VP of Engineering?

The structure is the same. A VP of Engineering usually spends more of the plan on delivery process, team health and hiring, while a CTO spends more on technical strategy, architecture and the link between technology and business strategy. In many companies one person does both.

Which metrics should a new engineering leader track?

Start with deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate and time to restore service, plus roadmap predictability, open roles and engineering cost. Baseline them early so you can show change by day 90.

Should a new CTO make big changes in the first 90 days?

Make a few clear, well-reasoned decisions early and save structural changes for after the diagnosis. Fixing an obvious, painful problem builds trust; reorganizing before you understand the system usually costs it.

Questions we didn't answer? Email info@ryzlabs.com.