6.5The First 90 Days: Propose and Lead

By day 60, you have credibility. People know you, trust you, and have seen you deliver. Now you can propose larger changes.

Propose Improvements with Data

Do not say "I think we should adopt contract testing." Say "I analyzed our last 20 production incidents and found that 9 of them (45%) were caused by API contract mismatches between services. Contract testing would target this specific failure mode. Here is a 3-sprint plan to implement it, starting with the 3 highest-traffic API boundaries."

The 90-Day Improvement Proposal

Write a short document (1-2 pages) that covers:

1. Current state: What you have observed about the testing practice (strengths and gaps)
2. Key risks: The top 3 quality risks you have identified, with data
3. Proposed improvements: 3-5 specific initiatives, each with effort estimate, expected impact, and dependencies
4. Priority order: What to do first and why
5. Success metrics: How you will measure whether the improvements worked

Share this with your manager first, get feedback, then present to the broader team. This document serves multiple purposes: it demonstrates strategic thinking, it shows you have listened and learned, and it gives your manager concrete evidence of your impact for your first performance review.

Example 90-Day Proposal Outline

Current State Assessment:
- Test automation covers 62% of critical paths (gap: checkout flow, admin panel)
- CI pipeline takes 52 minutes (target: <30 minutes)
- 14 flaky tests causing 3-4 false failures per day
- No contract testing between payment service and order service
- Manual regression takes 8 hours per release

Proposed Initiatives (priority order):

1. Fix flaky tests (Sprint 1-2)
   Effort: 3 days
   Impact: Eliminate 3-4 false CI failures per day, restore developer trust in the suite

2. Automate checkout flow (Sprint 2-4)
   Effort: 2 weeks
   Impact: Cover the highest-revenue user path, reduce manual regression by 2 hours

3. Pipeline optimization (Sprint 3-5)
   Effort: 1 week
   Impact: Reduce CI time from 52 to <30 minutes through sharding and caching

4. Contract testing pilot (Sprint 5-7)
   Effort: 2 weeks
   Impact: Target the #1 production incident category (API mismatches)

5. Deprecate manual smoke tests (Sprint 7-9)
   Effort: 3 weeks
   Impact: Eliminate 8 hours of manual testing per release

Success Metrics:
- Flaky test rate: from 14 to 0
- CI pipeline time: from 52 min to <30 min
- Automation coverage of critical paths: from 62% to 85%
- Manual regression time per release: from 8 hours to 2 hours
- Production incidents from API mismatches: from 9/quarter to <2/quarter