FRACTIONAL PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Solve Product Challenges to Clear a Path to Repeatable Revenue
Every complex B2B tech. company reaches a point where pushing harder stops working. The pipeline stalls, the sales cycle lengthens, and pilots fail to convert. It’s not because the revenue team isn’t trying, but because the bottleneck is buried upstream in your product operations.
KickDrum Partners gives you access to senior product management and product operations on a fractional basis, embedded where the constraint actually lives.
Why this Matters
Building a complex B2B product or service proposition is hard. Selling it repeatably is harder still. When your product, pricing, and processes aren’t aligned to your buyers’ decision-making, no amount of sales effort will close the gap.
We can add deep expereince across product management, product marketing and product operations on fractional basis. We idenitify the constraint and help you to fix it without stopping the business while we do.
DIAGNOSTIC
Find the specific bottleneck choking your pipeline – not the obvious one, the real one
FOCUSED
A dedicated outside perspective that isn’t pulled into the daily noise of your operations
FRACTIONAL
Senior product operations leadership at the right time, without the cost or committment of a full-time hire
FAST
Embedded and delivering value from week one, with a structured four-week audit to kick off every engagement
How we Deliver Product Management Results
We don’t just advise, we help you fix the system.
Fractional Product Management Unlocks Potential
There can be many reasons why a product or service is not reaching its full potential. Adding seasoned product management and product operations expereince into your team can help pinpoint the underlying reasons
PIPELINE DIAGNOSTIC
We break down where deals stall, why pilots fail to convert, and what’s driving unpredictable sales cycles. We trace each symptom back to its operational root cause
PRICING AND PACKAGING ANALYSIS
We stress-test how your pricing model lands in a real buying conversation, identifying where structure, presentation, or assumptions are creating friction
CUSTOMER DISCOVERY STRESS-TESTING
We challenge how your team uncovers and internalises customer pain to expose where process gaps are masking a product operations problem as a sales problem
AI TOOLS AND WORKFLOW INTEGRATION
We identify and implement the specific tools, automations, and operating rituals that remove friction from your team’s day-to-day.
ROADMAP AND RELEASE ALIGNMENT
We help untangle priority churn, reduce release delays, and ensure what your team is building is directly tied to what triggers a buying decision
Three Reasons to Choose KickDrum Partners
“More analysis” will only get you so far when what’s broken is how your product reaches revenue.
Experience
We bring decades of incubation experience and a Silicon Valley track record of taking complex B2B products from stalled pipelines to repeatable revenue. We’ve seen this problem from the inside, as a builder, an operator, and a diagnostic partner for founders who’ve already tried the obvious fixes.
Method
We take a systems-level diagnostic approach to surface the most critical bottlenecks – not the most common one across the industry, but the specific one in your business. That diagnosis drives everything that follows.
Breadth
KickDrum delivers fractional product management capability as part of a broader team of fractional resources. Our team has deep expertise across marketing, business development, and go-to-market strategy. We can translate decisions into execution across the full commercial spectrum, executing sales motions and campaigns that drive new opportunities and revenue.
Your KickDrum Partners Team
Depending on the engagement and your challenegs, your fractional team will likely be comprised include one or more of:
Craig Chadwell
Partner, Product and Operations
A seasoned product leader, Craig provides fractional support for organisations needing immediate expertise in Product Management, Product Marketing, or Product Operations.
Over the course of his career, he has worked in both startup and corporate environments, bringing rigor and clarity to product and pricing strategy, messaging, and competitive analysis. Drawing from an early background in rapidly scaling operations, he specializes in identifying and resolving the strategic bottlenecks that hinder a product or service from reaching its full potential.
Based in North Carolina, he has worked in leadership roles at organizations like SoftIron, Lenovo, NetApp, and Dymium.
Andrew Moloney
Managing Partner
For over 30 years, Andrew has led product, marketing, and sales teams in a range of hardware, software and cloud businesses for both start-up and leading enterprise brands.
Prior to founding KickDrum Partners, Andrew served on the leadership team for 4 years at leading Private Cloud innovators, SoftIron, latterly serving as Chief Strategy Officer.
Former roles include leading the SMB networking business unit at 3Com (now part of HPE) and leading EMEA Marketing at Information Security leaders, RSA Security.
Camaryn Berry
Marketing Partner
Camaryn brings 20 years of marketing experience across private enterprise, full service creative agencies and technology startups spanning the USA, EMEA and APAC.
With core skills in branding, content production, campaign strategy and execution, she helps to deliver creative, commercially-oriented marketing initiatives to support the growth of your business.
Fractional Product Management FAQs
What is a fractional CPO?
A fractional Chief Product Officer (CPO) gives your business access to a senior product leader on a part-time or engagement basis without the cost or commitment of a full-time executive hire. Rather than adding a permanent role to your org chart, you bring in experienced product operations capability exactly when and where you need it, scoped to the problems your business is actually facing right now.
Fractional Product Manager vs. Fractional Chief Product Officer: Which Does Your Business Need?
The difference comes down to where the problem lives. A Fractional Product Manager typically works within an existing product structure to manage delivery, maintain a roadmap, and keep cross-functional teams aligned. It’s an execution-layer role, and it works well when your product strategy is sound but your team lacks the bandwidth or seniority to carry it out.
A Fractional CPO operates at a different level. The focus isn’t managing the product, but it’s diagnosing why the product isn’t performing commercially and fixing the system around it. That means looking across product, sales, and go-to-market simultaneously to find where the disconnect lives. If your problem is pipeline conversion, unpredictable sales cycles, or a roadmap that keeps shipping without moving revenue, the constraint is almost certainly a product operations problem not a delivery problem.
KickDrum’s Fractional CPO engagement is built for the second scenario. And because it sits within a broader team with expertise across marketing, business development, and go-to-market strategy, the diagnosis spans the full revenue system, not just the product org.
How is a fractional product manager different from a consultant?
A consultant typically diagnoses from the outside and hands off a report. A fractional product engagement is part of your team and stays through implementation. They operate as part of your team’s daily operations, participating in the work, and accountable to the same outcomes you are. The test isn’t whether the recommendation made sense. It’s whether your team is operating differently once the engagement is complete.
What kinds of problems does fractional product management solve?
The most common signal is a gap between effort and results. It could be a pipeline that isn’t converting despite a working product and an active sales team, a roadmap that keeps shifting without clear business impact, or sales cycles that are lengthening without an obvious reason. A Fractional CPO will find where those disconnects live and fix them at the source.
When is the right time to bring in a fractional product leader?
If you’re pre-revenue or still finding a problem-solution fit, it’s probably too early. If you have a working product, an active pipeline, and execution that isn’t producing the results it should – that’s the moment. Every month a product operations bottleneck goes undiagnosed is another month of capital spent on execution that can’t fix a strategy problem.
What does a fractional product engagement actually do?
It depends entirely on what the evidence points to. A CPO might join sales calls to observe how your product is being positioned in live buying conversations. They could review your CRM data and pipeline history to find patterns in where deals stall. They might develop new processes and train your team on them, or run workshops on customer discovery strategy, positioning, or roadmap-to-opportunity alignment. The work follows the diagnosis – not a fixed playbook.