You have customers. You don't have a plan.
Fractional product leadership for software companies: vision, roadmap, customer segmentation, and a go-to-market plan your team can actually run.
Talk about your product
Most software companies hit the same wall. The product works. People are paying for it. And every decision about what comes next is made by whoever is loudest that week, because nobody's job is to own the answer.
You don't need a full-time CPO for that. A fractional CPO gets you the same judgment sized to the question: someone who has done this before and leaves a plan your team can run.
The Product Strategy Sprint.
One month. Fixed price. You end it with four things.
A sequenced plan with the reasoning attached, so your team knows what's next and what isn't.
Who's actually buying, who's staying, and which segment is worth building for. Most companies at this stage are quietly serving three different customers with one product and losing to specialists in all three.
How the product gets in front of the segment you picked, and what has to be true for that to work.
How you keep answering these questions after I'm gone, without hiring someone to do it full-time.
Built with you, not presented to you.
I start by talking to your customers, not just your team. Then I go through what you've shipped, what's in the backlog, what your competitors are doing, and where the market is moving. The output is a working plan, reviewed with you as it's built rather than presented at the end.
You get a clean end date, with no retainer to unwind afterward.
If you want the plan run rather than handed over, I'll stay on as a fractional product leader. Most clients decide that at the end of the month, once they've seen the work.
A product in market, with paying customers.
Software companies with a product in market and paying customers. If you're pre-launch or still looking for the first customer, this isn't the right engagement and I'll tell you so on the call.
There's no revenue requirement. The custom-software side of Fulcrum tends to make sense from around $5M in revenue up, because a build has to be affordable. A month of product leadership doesn't, so the only thing that matters here is whether you have a real product and real customers.
Twelve years leading product.
Twelve years leading product, most of it on platforms with two sides to satisfy and a transaction in the middle. I've built a marketplace from zero, including the team, the research, and the product, run product organizations at public companies, and coached product managers into the job. I do customer research myself rather than reading someone else's summary of it.
I'm also technical enough to build the prototype, so when a roadmap question can be settled by a working version, we settle it that way.
Based in Atlanta, Georgia, working with software companies anywhere.
Tell me where you're stuck.
Send a note about your product and what you're trying to decide.
patrick@fulcrumproductworks.com