Senior product leadership on a retainer: strategy, roadmaps, UX research, and specs your team can ship from. Embedded in your team, without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire.
01The short version
A fractional product manager is an experienced PM who leads your product part-time, on a retainer, instead of as a full-time hire. You get senior judgment, roadmap ownership, and execution scaled to what you actually need, usually two to three days a week.
Same outcomes as a full-time head of product: a clear strategy, a roadmap people trust, research that settles arguments, and specs your team can build from. A fraction of the cost, and none of the long hiring cycle.
02What you get
I work inside your team and own outcomes, not slide decks. Every engagement covers the same six things, scaled to your stage.
A product strategy tied to real goals, and a roadmap your team and stakeholders actually trust, not a wish list.
Weekly execution, and prioritization that settles the argument instead of extending it.
Founders, sales, and engineering pulling in the same direction, with the reasoning written down.
Research planning, interview facilitation, and synthesis that turns what users say into what you build next.
Documentation your engineers and designers can ship from, written to remove ambiguity, not add process.
Where the product loses people and where the money leaks, read from your own numbers.
The product is rarely stuck for lack of ideas. It is stuck because nobody owns the decision.
That is the job. Not more ideas, and not another workshop. Someone senior inside the team who decides, writes it down, and stays for the consequences.
03How I work
Three phases, every engagement: diagnose what is actually happening, decide what matters, then ship it. Diagnosis starts in week one, and the first sprint-ready specs usually land inside the first month.
UX audit, KPI review, and user research. Where is the product losing people, and where is the money leaking? You get the honest read, including the parts nobody wants to hear.
Roadmap, specs, and trade-offs. A ranked plan with a rationale you can defend to anyone in the room, including the investor who asks why not the other thing.
PRDs, execution, and follow-through. The work gets built, and the metric moves. When a spec is not enough I build the prototype myself, and small, well-defined features ship for real. I stay in the sprint rituals, not in a monthly steering call.
04AI, concretely
Perplexity, ChatGPT and Claude Code compress the mechanical half of product work into days. What to build is still judgment, and judgment is what you are hiring.
Landscape, benchmarks and competitor scans that used to take a week, with the receipts, so you can check them instead of trusting them. The stack I actually use.
I verify, not just generatePRDs written so a developer or an AI coding agent can build from them without guessing. Describe the wrong thing clearly and they will build the wrong product beautifully.
Precision is the pointWhen a document is not enough, I build the prototype myself, and small, well-defined features ship for real.
Built, not describedAI does not own outcomes, settle stakeholders, or decide what not to build. That part is the job you are hiring for.
05Deliverables
Every engagement produces real artifacts your team keeps using after I leave the room. All ten, every time, scaled to the product.
Every screen and journey in your product, mapped. The full picture most teams have never actually seen in one place.
End to endWhat to keep, what to remove, what to change, ranked by impact. Not a 40-page report nobody reads.
Ranked by impactConcrete recommendations and principles your designer can run with, on the screens that matter most.
Principles + specsRewrites for the screens that decide: onboarding, pricing, empty states, the words users actually choose by.
Screen by screenHow the product should be sold, tiered, and priced, grounded in your data and in what the market already pays.
Tiers + rationaleHow the products around you solve what you are struggling with, and what is worth stealing shamelessly.
Market teardownSpecs your developers, or an AI coding agent, can build from without guessing. Split and ready for the sprint, acceptance criteria included.
Sprint-readyThe working version in your hands before anyone commits an engineering quarter to it.
Built, not describedFigma, Notion, or Google Sheets. Organized, shareable, and yours to keep when the engagement ends.
Yours to keepThe prompts, agent instructions and research trail, so your team can re-run the analysis without me.
Re-runnableThe decision on what to implement is always yours. My job is that you never have to guess.
06Who it's for
Skip the job titles. You will recognize yourself by the tell.
07The honest comparison
Same job title, very different deals. This is the comparison I would want if I were the one buying.
| Full-time senior PM | Agency or marketplace | Velonova, fractional | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it costs | Around $163K a year base in the US, before benefits and recruiter fees. | $100-250 an hour, or a retainer with an account layer on top. | From $5,000 a month, month to month. The price is on the page. |
| Time in your team | 40 hours a week, needed or not. | Whatever the statement of work says. | 10-20 hours a week, inside your cadence. |
| Who does the work | The person you hired, once you have hired them. | Often a senior pitch, then junior delivery. | Me, every week. 12+ years of product leadership. |
| Time to start | Weeks to months of hiring, then onboarding. | Fast to match, slower to understand your product. | Days. Diagnosis starts in week one. |
| Spec to something clickable | Whenever the engineering queue allows. | A change order, then a timeline. | Days. I build the prototype myself. |
| If it stops working | Severance, a backfill, and a gap in the roadmap. | Contract cycles and change orders. | Scale down or stop at the end of the month. |
| What you keep | Everything, plus the payroll line. | The deliverable. The context leaves with the agency. | Roadmap, specs, research. Documented and yours. |
Salary reference: Indeed, 2026 (US senior product manager average, base only). Fractional market rates and what sits behind them: my 2026 fractional PM cost guide.
08Pricing
Your embedded fractional product leader. Strategy, roadmapping, UX research, and delivery, scaled to what the product needs right now. Scale up or down as you grow.
Tier by tier market breakdown in my 2026 cost guide.
09Questions
A fractional product manager is an experienced PM who leads your product part-time, on a retainer, instead of as a full-time hire. You get senior judgment, roadmap ownership, and execution scaled to what you actually need: strategy, prioritization, UX research, and specs your team can ship from.
The 2026 market runs $100-250 per hour, or $5,000-10,000 per month on retainer. My fractional product leadership starts at $5,000 per month, at the accessible end of the senior range. That covers roadmap ownership, weekly sprints and prioritization, stakeholder alignment, UX research and user interviews, and PRDs and specs. The full breakdown, tier by tier, is in my 2026 cost and rates guide.
Typically 10-20 hours a week, roughly two to three days, embedded in your team's actual cadence: sprint rituals, roadmap sessions, research, and specs. The engagement scales up or down month to month with what the product needs.
Yes, deliberately. Perplexity compresses the first hour of research, Claude and ChatGPT draft and structure, and Claude Code turns a defined feature into something you can click, so you see a working version instead of a slide. Small, well-defined features ship for real. What AI does not do is own outcomes, settle stakeholders, or decide what not to build, and that judgment is what you are hiring.
If your product needs senior direction but not 40 hours a week of it, a fractional product manager is the better fit. You get the strategy, roadmap, and execution of a full-time PM, scaled to your stage and budget, and you can scale the engagement up or down as you grow.
They sit on the same spectrum. A fractional product manager or fractional head of product owns strategy, roadmap, and delivery for a product or team. A fractional CPO leans more executive: org design, product operating model, and board-level narrative. I work across the range and scope to what your stage needs.
Yes. I work remotely with teams worldwide, in English, Hebrew, and Russian. I am based in Tel Aviv, which overlaps the full European workday and US East Coast mornings, and I have led product with teams across Europe, the US, and Israel.
When your roadmap is settled and the team already knows its next three decisions, when you need one defined deliverable (that is project work), or when you need someone full-time in the seat while you recruit (that is interim). If that is your situation, a retainer would waste your money, and I will tell you so on the intro call.
10Other doors
Book a free 30-minute call. We will talk through your product and your actual challenge, and you will leave with a clear first step, whether or not we work together.
30 min · No pitch · No pressure
