> How much time is normal for a team/project to get its bearings? (It depends, I know...)

If you mean figure out their process, this can happen incrementally, starting simply and building up as you go, with a team of people who are open to that.

It can also happen that some people come in and want to recreate the fleet of tools and best-practice processes that they know from a different company. This isn't my style, but it's not necessarily a bad idea, if everyone is onboard with that. But their prior experience might not fit the different situation (e.g., trying to do things the FAANG way in a post-ZIRP early startup).

If you mean get their bearings on what they're going to build, I don't know, but it usually starts with figuring out your users'/customers' needs, and the business constraints (e.g., resources, milestones that need to be met for revenue or to get funding, etc.).

If there's a new or unfamiliar technology, there might also be exploratory/learning time with that, in parallel (e.g., there's a bias that you will use certain emerging tech or an approach someone thought of, to solve what you initially suspect is the MVP problem, and you have to play with this a bit, and see what you can and can't do with it, in parallel with figuring out what problem you're actually going to solve for MVP).