I'm the fractional product manager founders hire before they can justify a full-time one.
Seed-stage B2B SaaS, two days a week. Your sprints, your customers, your standups. So you stop being the bottleneck.
- 10+ yrs
- in B2B SaaS
- 5 yrs
- Head of Product at a software agency
- $20M+
- ARR legacy SaaS rebuilt
- 0→1
- products launched from scratch
You didn't plan to be the product manager.
It happened because you were the only one who could be. Then you raised, the team grew, and it stopped scaling.
- Every product decision routes through you, and you are supposed to be fundraising, selling and running marketing.
- Your roadmap changes every week depending on who spoke to you last.
- Your engineers are shipping steadily, and nobody is learning anything.
- You raised recently and now you need to show a roadmap tied to real metrics.
- You know how to build it. You are less sure what to build, and why.
- You need product covered while you run a proper search, or while someone is on leave.
If two or three of those landed, we should talk. If none of them did, you probably don't need me yet, and I'd rather say so now.
Six ways to fix this, and I'm only one of them.
Here they all are, with what each one really costs, including the two where you shouldn't hire me.
Hire a full-time Head of Product
£104,750–£154,000 base in London. Roughly £10–12k a month once you add NI and equity. Plus a three-to-nine month search, and a year of commitment, decided before you know what you actually need.
When it winsRight when you have a product org to lead and the runway to wait.
Keep doing it yourself
It is free until you count your own week. You become the bottleneck at exactly the point you are needed for fundraising and sales.
When it winsRight before product-market fit. Genuinely. Do not outsource product this early.
Promote an engineer or designer
You lose an engineer and gain a first-time PM, at the moment you can least afford either.
When it winsRight if they already want the job and you have someone to coach them.
A product agency or dev shop
Nobody owns the outcome. When the engagement ends, the context leaves with them.
When it winsRight when you need delivery capacity, not product judgement.
Do nothing for now
You keep shipping on instinct. Sometimes that works. Mostly you find out eighteen months later which features nobody used.
When it winsRight if you already know exactly what to build for the next two quarters. If you do, hire the engineer instead of me.
Bring me in
This one is meFrom £3,000 a month, month-to-month. In your standups next week, not next quarter, and gone again when you have outgrown me.
When it winsRight when you have customers and engineers but no one whose job it is to decide what gets built, and you are not ready to commit to a permanent hire.
Salary range: Robert Half 2026 UK Salary Guide, London Head of Product (£104,750–£154,000 base). Let's talk.
The job, and the boundaries around it.
What I do
- Run your customer interviews, and synthesise them into something decidable
- Own the roadmap, and keep it alive between planning sessions
- Write the specs your engineers build from
- Design the feature wireframes so everyone can see it before it is built
- Sit in sprint planning and standups with the team
- Run design sessions and UI/UX reviews alongside your designer
- Hold the line between dev, design and the commercial side
What I don't
- Write production code
- Design your UI or your brand. I will wireframe the feature, but I am not your designer
- Run your hiring end to end. I write the scorecard and sit on the panel
- Work outside the days we agree
- Line-manage your existing product team
The second list matters more than the first. It's how you know what you're actually buying.
The first thirty days
- 01
Week 1
Listening. I sit in standups, read the backlog, meet the team and talk to whoever owns the customer relationship. I change nothing.
- 02
Week 2
The decision-rights conversation, and the first customer interviews. You get a written read on what I think is actually broken.
- 03
Weeks 3–4
One honest prioritisation pass on the roadmap. First specs written. The discovery loop starts running.
- 04
By day 30
A roadmap that survives contact with the team, a discovery cadence that runs without you, and specs your engineers can build from.
Start with one week, not one year.
The Product Audit
£999fixed
One week start to finish. Ninety minutes of your team's time, and one call.
Book a product auditMost engagements start here. You send me your roadmap, your backlog and whatever you shipped last quarter. I go through it, sit down with you and your tech lead for ninety minutes, and come back with a ranked list of what is costing you most and what I would fix first.
What you get
- A written audit of how you decide what to build, where it breaks and why
- The three things costing you most, ranked, with what to do about each
- A 45-minute readout call to talk it through and answer your questions
Embedded
from £6,500 / month
10 days a month · about 2.5 days a week
Already scaling. You need product owned, not advised on.
- Weekly product planning
- Continuous roadmap ownership
- 10 customer interviews a month
- Daily standups and sprint planning
- Continuous feature wireframes and UI/UX review
- Quarterly roadmap workshop
Momentum
Most commonfrom £4,500 / month
6 days a month · about 1.5 days a week
Building toward product-market fit.
- Fortnightly product planning
- Weekly roadmap updates
- 6 customer interviews a month
- Fortnightly sprint planning
- Feature wireframes, twice-weekly design sessions
- Quarterly roadmap workshop and competitive analysis
Foundation
from £3,000 / month
4 days a month · about 1 day a week
Post-launch. You need clarity and direction.
- Monthly product planning
- Fortnightly roadmap updates
- 2 customer interviews a month
- Sprint involvement
- Feature wireframes and weekly design sessions
- 24-hour response on working days
These are a starting point, not a menu.
No two startups are in the same situation, and I have never run two engagements that looked alike. Treat the plans above as a guide to the shape and the range. We will work out what you actually need on the call, and if none of these fit, we build one that does.
Retainers start at £3,000 a month, month-to-month after an eight-week minimum, 30 days' notice.
How this ends
The goal is that you stop needing me. Engagements usually run four to nine months and finish one of three ways.
- 01
You hire a full-time PM. I sit on the hiring panel and manage the product handover to whoever you pick.
- 02
You take it back yourself, with a working system and the documentation to run it.
- 03
We scale down to advisory.
What stays behind either way: the roadmap, the discovery process, the specs, the wireframes, the interview archive and the hiring scorecard.
Most fractional PMs have done this at one company. I did it at dozens.
I spent five years as Head of Product at a software development agency. Product ownership across a lot of products rather than one: early-stage launches at one end, rebuilding legacy SaaS doing $20M+ ARR at the other.
The useful part isn't the variety. It's that I've watched the same three or four things go wrong repeatedly, in companies that all thought their situation was unique.
I'm also building products of my own right now. So when you talk about runway, or shipping the wrong thing for a quarter, I'm not remembering that feeling. I'm having it this week too.
Which is the whole argument, really. You're not hiring someone who read about your problem.
Straight answers.
- Is product not the founder's job?
- Your product vision is yours and it should stay that way. I am not here to own it. I am here so it survives contact with a six-person engineering team while you are fundraising. Vision is judgement; what I run is the operating system underneath it: discovery cadence, prioritisation, spec quality, and keeping dev, design and the commercial side pointed the same way.
- Is two days a week really enough?
- It is if the days are fixed and I am actually inside the company rather than reporting into it. We agree the days up front. I am in your Slack and your standups on them, and I take no more than three clients at a time so those days do not move. If you need someone five days a week, you need a full-time hire and I will tell you that.
- How will this land with my engineers?
- My first two weeks are listening, and I have a decision-rights conversation with you in week two so nobody is guessing about who decides what. I sit in the team's tools rather than appearing for a monthly review. I am not there to supervise anyone. I am there so the team knows why it is building what it is building.
- Does fractional mean you could not get a full-time job?
- I do this deliberately. I like the seed stage, I am better at nought-to-one than at running a forty-person product org, and working across several companies at once is precisely what makes the pattern-matching worth paying for. I am also building my own B2B SaaS, which is why I am not describing your constraints from memory.
- How does this work contractually? What about IR35?
- I am a fractional hire. The whole arrangement is designed to be temporary, which is what puts it outside IR35: I work with several clients at once, I use my own equipment, and you are engaging me for an outcome rather than employing me. If it ever started to look like a permanent job in disguise, that would mean the engagement had run past its useful life and we should be talking about your full-time hire instead. Happy to work through the determination with your accountant before we start.
- Should I spend this on product help or on another engineer?
- If you already know exactly what to build for the next two quarters, hire the engineer. Genuinely. I am worth paying for when the problem is deciding what to build, not building it faster.
Let's talk about your options. I'll say if I'm not one.
Thirty minutes, no charge. If it's worth going further, the Product Audit is £999 and takes a week.
- What happens
- You talk, I ask questions.
- What you leave with
- A straight answer on whether you need me.
- What it isn’t
- No deck, no pitch, no sequence.
- Response
- Personally, within one working day.