Product Advisory Service
Helping Founders and Heads of Product scale their amazing companies, products, and organizations through periods of high growth.
Engagement Purpose
The purpose of the advisory engagement is to serve as a coach, thought partner, and sounding board to help the Founder/Head of Product learn best practice and develop their craft, find and mature product market fit, navigate the dynamic challenges of scaling product organizations, and avoid catastrophic mistakes better than they otherwise could without an advisory partner.
Engagement Structure
Advisory engagements involve focused 1-hour discussions with the Founder/Head of Product to answer questions, provide feedback on in-progress work products, and offer targeted guidance. Rather than step in and do the work directly, the goal is to help them do the best job possible to help drive a strong outcome for the company, customers, and team members.
Engagement Terms
Advisory terms are flexible and low risk. Engagement subscriptions are month-to-month and can be cancelled at any time. Meeting cadence is weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, and the cadence can be adjusted at any time.
Hot Topics
Topics may vary depending on the company’s stage and the priorities / challenges of the Head of Product. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of typically hot topics that could be addressed:
People
Identify the right profile for the Head of Product (first PM, first Director, first VP, first CPO)
Define a first class PM hiring process
Establish a PM career development / performance management framework
Establish clear organizational structure, including:
Charters per team
Target ratios between engineering, product, and design
Goal setting (KPI’s) per team
Establish platform / shared service engineering teams with clear ownership
Process
Clarify the division of responsibility between CEO / Founders and Head of Product
Establish an effective product development process with engineering
Implement a customer first problem and solution validation process
Establish a prioritization framework
Leverage OKR’s to communicate executive priorities to team
Async/remote work best practices
Internal and external communication strategy and artifacts
Product
Define a clear product strategy that maps to company/GTM strategy
Identify and effectively target an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Pricing & packaging strategy, tactics, and optimization
Product led growth strategy, tactics, and optimization
Leverage product themes to communicate direction
Mitigate problems of technical scale such as performance and security
Portfolio/investment management framework
Open source strategy
Leadership & Communications
Help the Head of Product work effectively with the CEO & exec team
Big stage presentations & executive presence
Guidance helping negotiate priorities and direction with stakeholders, especially GTM
Help the Head of Product navigate board dynamics
IPO readiness