If you’re asking whether you need a fractional product leader, you probably already know the answer. Here are a few scenarios (not an exhaustive list) you might recognise. Ask yourself “Does this sound like my business?”
Scenario One: Your Compelling Pitch Deck Fails to Convert Prospects
A lot of companies get to their first round of funding based on their pedigree, a clever technology, and a big, hairy audacious goal (BHAG).
Not a product.
This is especially true for complex B2B IT infrastructure, a space that the KickDrum Partners team understands well.
But then those companies often then hit a wall. A charismatic leader with a clever analogy can get people to the table. The promise of a groundbreaking, bleeding edge technology can convince people to watch a demo. But if you’re not solving those peoples’ problems in a way that works for them, it’s a waste of time.
Product is the answer to a different set of questions than what appeals to investors. Who wants this? What problem does it solve in a meaningful way? How is it packaged and priced? How does it integrate into my operations?
This problem becomes visible subtly. Your first sales hire’s opening question is “What exactly are we selling and to whom?” You take them through the pitch deck. The prospects he brings to the table – from his own address book – ghost you after the first couple of calls. They might tell you it looks great, and they will nod and go along with your cool analogy story. But they just don’t have the budget or quite the right use case.
A fractional product leader helps bridge the gap between vision and sales. They focus on building early systems to enable the company to:
- Prioritise features
- Establish early pricing
- Position the technology in the market
- Narrow down the customer profiles most likely to buy
They give you capacity to run a proper search for a full-time hire. The right one will also help you see where the product-to-business transition requires more than a product leader. That’s a different conversation, but it’s worth having early.
Scenario Two: You’re Burning Through Sales Peoples’ Contacts
And the sales people too!
I’ve watched this play out many times. A company with a real product churns through sales people. Every time you bring a sales person on, they go through the same pattern – see the lack of mid-funnel pipeline, burn through their contact list, run the demos, and eventually tell company leaders it’s a complex sale with a long cycle. Then they leave, or you ask them to, and you hire someone to start the cycle again.
Running the business on relationships instead of customer value means nobody has figured out how to get in front of the right buyers without knowing them personally. Nobody is making sure the product generates the magnitude of value that makes introductions unnecessary. Recent B2B buying behavior research reveals that 94% of buying groups rank their vendor shortlist before they ever initiate contact with sales. If your messaging and product value aren’t connecting digitally first, relying on personal relationships will fail to scale.
If you’re looking for your first 20 clients, that’s a legit strategic intent. But if you’re at the point where you’re trying to penetrate or create a market, you can’t scale this way.
Positioning is wrong, messaging isn’t connecting, or nobody has done the rigorous customer discovery work to figure out exactly who buys this, why they buy it, and how to reach them before a salesperson has to call in a favor. Product leaders sit at that intersection of customer insight, positioning, and marketing feedback loops. That means having a seasoned product person who can perform detailed and deep customer discovery conversations, perform competitive analysis on the problem space, and determine the right words and experiences a buyer needs to have to say yes.
It’s not about managing a roadmap or grooming a backlog, although a fractional product manager can do those things. A fractional product leader provides the extra capacity and strategic insight to figure out why a product should exist by executing the heavy lifting of human interaction and competitive analysis.
Scenario Three: Revenue is flatlining
The machine is running, but it could run harder
In this case, things look okay from the outside. You’re making money, customers are successful, and you only have the usual emergencies. But revenue has leveled off, and that’s not the goal. Unfortunately, all your time is consumed by business operations activities. You’re so busy working in the business that there’s no time to work on the business.
The intuitive reaction is to add salespeople or throw money into marketing. Sometimes that works. Often you sink the capital, wait three or six months, and don’t see the needle move.
What you missed was a system problem: a pricing model that caps deal size, a service offering too custom to scale, or you’ve missed a feature that’s excluding you from an entire segment. These things are hard to see from the inside, especially when you’re the one keeping it running.
This is where having a fractional product leader can provide that extra horsepower to the machine. A seasoned product leader looks at the whole system: the offering, the pricing, the delivery model, the competitive position. They build hypotheses about what’s blocking the next stage of growth, and test them before anyone commits to a grand strategy that might solve the wrong problem. They can also take on some of the day-to-day business operations so you can spend more energy on your strategic intents.
Scenario Four: You Suddenly Have A Leadership Gap
When the person who knew the answers just left
Your head of product resigned. Or your VP of Product got promoted past their ceiling and everyone has quietly acknowledged it. Or your founding PM has been with you since the beginning, and they’re running on fumes, and you owe them something better than grinding them into dust.
A fractional product leader keeps the operation functioning while you run a diligent search rather than a panicked one. They can also do something a search firm can’t: help you write a good job description by doing the job for a while. The job description you write after six weeks of watching the role from the inside looks nothing like the one you wrote the day someone handed in their notice.
What Fractional Should Mean
..and why KickDrum Partners is the better choice
For a company with high growth potential, a fractional employee should know they’re working themselves out of a job. They provide you with the growth and justification to hire their full-time equivalent.
For a slower-growth company, a fractional product leader can augment teams for a particular project or initiative rather than acting as a placeholder. They can help evaluate changing pricing models, perform root cause analysis on high churn low activation issues, design growth loops, and build platform modernization plans. Or they can be the one you call when you need to kill a product.
A full-time hire made in haste because something is on fire is how companies end up with the wrong person in the wrong role making the wrong decisions for a year before anyone will say it out loud. Fractional is what you do when you’re solving a problem that goes away with the right effort or the right long-term hire.
Where KickDrum Partners shines is in being able to bring more than a product leader to bear within the same contract structure. Unlike pure product consultants, KickDrum partners has additional specialists across marketing, business development, public relations, and go-to-market strategy such that as your needs evolve, your fractional team can evolve to meet them.
If you recognised any of these scenarios and think Fractional Product Leadership could be a good fit in your organisation, reach out and let’s have a no obligation conversation.