Fractional, one year in

I went fractional a year ago last week, and I wanted to share an update on how it has been going.

Background

I first fantasized about working part-time after the pandemic and quickly put it out of my mind. In early 2025, I was laid off after sunsetting my product line at the startup where I worked. After devoting the spring to R&R, including my honeymoon, I launched a job search but abruptly paused it after just a few interviews. The desire to have more free time came flooding back—anything from maintaining the pickleball practice I started during my time off to simply working to live, not living to work. I realized the five-day work week model was not what I wanted for the back half of my working life.

The decision to become self-employed was not an easy one. A few years out of college, with the US still in recovery from the Great Recession, I created Alicia Hurst LLC for a web design and development agency-of-one, which I operated for three years. At the time, with very little work experience, I struggled with motivation and income. I have always regretted not staying on the full-time path back then. I worried I could struggle again, despite the decade of high-achieving full-time work behind me now. Still, I couldn't let past missteps stop me. I quit my job search and filed my Articles of Formation with New York State as I began contracting with my first client. It felt like jumping onto the back of a train as it was accelerating away from the station.

One year later, I have been continuously engaged, no gaps, working 10 to 25 hours a week total across three clients.

What feels the same

The product management work has not changed. Showing up, engaging with teams, and following process look the same, outside of industry-wide shifts like AI. The relationship with peers or leadership is no different either. That is because I work part-time, but not as a consultant. The role is the same; the hours and payment are not.

My level of stress is similar, but for different reasons. Being self-employed and on contract, I want to do a great job—perhaps even more than when I was full-time. Now, it’s less about pressure and more about what I want to be doing with my time. Working full-time, the fear is more of a layoff than a firing. When you are working part-time without a full-time salary, there is definitely a bit of insecurity there. That is why I say my stress level has stayed about the same.

What feels different

I am more economical with my time, in both good and bad ways.

The good: I avoid unnecessary meetings. No one piles on extra work or responsibilities, because everyone is aware of my hours. I can push to dos to another week without anyone batting an eye. No one expects me to work extra because I do not have extra hours to bill.

On the other hand, part-time means less time for discovery calls, exploration, or ideation. Whenever I start a new role, there is time pressure to onboard quickly—I usually say within 60 hours—and often need to produce a strategic document within a month, whereas a new full-time hire may get 90+ days.

My relationship with working is now guilt-free. I bill when I work. When I am grocery shopping at 2pm, I am not on anyone's clock. There is no one asking me why I am not responding quickly, if I can hop on a call, or what I am doing with my free capacity (which I already communicate to leadership in weekly updates). Being full-time before, I certainly took the occasional longer-than-usual lunch break or a mid-day walk, but it made me feel guilty, as if I would be found out and disciplined, despite my best efforts to put outcomes over outputs. This was entirely self-imposed, and it is a burden many of my non-product coworkers do not carry.

This is the best benefit of being fractional. I set my hours around my meeting schedule and the team's availability, and when I check in, it is because I want to. I also get really bad cases of the Mondays, and I work very little that day without feeling bad about it.

I am also, genuinely, easy to get rid of. There is none of the HR bureaucracy that protects full-time employees—the process a company builds because it is afraid of being sued. That friction slows everything down and, in my experience, disincentivizes everyone on both sides. As a contractor, I lose that cushion entirely. Some people hear that and wonder why I would ever want it. But I am tired of optimizing for the performance review, tired of the game. A lot of product leaders get let go regardless of how protected they are on paper; I would rather just do good work, in real time, and let that be the thing I am judged on.

What I'm still figuring out

I'm managing how to feel the most fulfilled during the time I am not working, which is a lot more than before. I meant to spend it on long-term personal projects, but I often find myself on a Tuesday doing the general to-do list I used to save for the weekend.

I am also navigating how to cultivate other business relationships. Since I do long-term, open-ended engagements, I do not have a need for most outbound sales, and yet, I do want a pipeline. I am trying to figure out what to share on LinkedIn, on my blog, and with others. Most people use these channels solely for sales and marketing, which is not my most authentic intention.

The biggest thing I have learned about leadership is that it takes a lot of time, thought, and listening. Perhaps that is why so many product leaders I have worked with have done such a poor job. They pack their time speaking in meetings, telling people what to do, and making decisions. They do it with insufficient information and act overly confident about it. Working fractionally does not necessarily help with this, but I compensate by being more focused than most leaders I have worked with. So many of them dabble in everything and finish nothing—a lot of motion, not much progress. I would rather do a few things well than spray and pray.

My outlook

There is room for all kinds of work arrangements. I cannot recommend using a fractional role as cloud cover for a full-time job search—though you do you—but I do recommend hopping off the 40+ hour-a-week treadmill in a way that preserves your energy for other areas of your life.

In some cases, fractional work, especially in product, takes away from full-time roles. Some companies use fractional arrangements to pay half as much for someone with full-time qualifications—take this rate or take nothing—while still expecting a full-time employee's output. That is exploitative, and it is worth naming. But the companies that genuinely work with fractionals understand the trade: they are asking for less and paying for less. Product thinking and leadership take real time, and there are days I roll my eyes at myself, thinking this should not be a part-time job. Still, I think there is a real use case, especially for smaller teams that are early in building out their function and company. In my case, both sides get less—less money in exchange for less time spent—and it works.

I have no plans to end my fractional practice, so here's to another year!