Interim Head of Product
The seat is empty, or the founder is still doing product at 2am. I step in and own the function.
Hiring a Head of Product takes four to six months when it goes well. Meanwhile the roadmap drifts, engineering picks its own priorities, and every decision routes through a founder who has three other jobs. I fill that seat part-time or full-time, run the function properly, and hand over an operating system rather than a dependency.
When this is the right call
Interim leadership is the right instrument in a narrower set of situations than people think.
- Your Head of Product left and the search will take two quarters.
- You've grown past the point where the founder can run product, but not to the point where a full-time VP is justified.
- You have PMs but no product leadership, and they're being managed by an engineering lead who doesn't want the job.
- A board or investor has asked for a product strategy you don't currently have.
What I take ownership of
Ownership means accountable for outcomes, not advising from the side.
- Product strategy and the roadmap that follows from it — defensible in front of a board.
- Leading, coaching and where necessary hiring the product team.
- The operating cadence: planning, discovery, reviews, the rituals that make decisions repeatable.
- Stakeholder alignment across exec, sales and engineering.
- Killing the work that shouldn't happen — usually the highest-value thing I do in month one.
The first 30 days
I don't touch the roadmap in month one. I find out how decisions actually get made here first — because teams rarely fail by picking the wrong feature, they fail because nobody can say why it was picked.
- Week 1: talk to everyone who touches the product, write down the contradictions.
- Week 2: trace one shipped feature backwards, end to end, to find where prioritisation actually breaks.
- Week 3: ship something small that's been stuck for structural rather than technical reasons.
- Week 4: one page — what we're optimising for, the three bets, and what we're explicitly not doing.
Common questions
- Interim, fractional, or consultant — which is this?
- Interim means I hold the role and the accountability that comes with it. Fractional means the same thing at fewer days per week. A consultant advises and leaves the decisions with you. Most engagements here are interim at 2–3 days a week.
- Will you hire your own replacement?
- Usually, yes — and it's often the best value in the engagement. I know what the role needs by month two, which is more than a job description written before anyone understood the problem.
- Do you work with the existing team or replace it?
- With it. I've never started an engagement by recommending you fire someone. Most underperforming product teams are badly instrumented, not badly staffed.
- How quickly can you start?
- Usually within two to three weeks. Availability changes — the badge at the top of the home page is kept current.
Tell me what's stuck
A 30-minute call. If interim leadership isn't what you need, I'll say so and point you at what is.
Discuss interim cover