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, but quickly put it out of my mind. In early 2025, I was laid off after sunsetting my product line. I devoted that spring to R&R, including my honeymoon, and then I launched a job search that I abruptly paused 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 salaried model was not my only option 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 opened Alicia Hurst LLC as my web design and development agency-of-one, which I operated for nearly three years. At the time, with very little work experience, I struggled with motivation and income. I’ve 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, and this new attempt could even be redeeming. 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. Now that I work on a contract, I want to do a great job for myself, perhaps even more than when I was full-time. This transition has been a choice about how I want to spend my time, including of what quality. I feel more focused on impact and my own value than before. Being intrinsically motivated is great because…

What feels different

I am now, 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 was 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’m judged on.

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 outside of product, because everyone is aware of my hours. I reprioritize my time and shift to dos to next week without pushback. No one expects me to work extra hours because I do not have unused hours to bill, nor is it in their budget for me to.

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 calendars speaking in meetings and telling people what to do 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.

On the other hand, part-time means less time for discovery calls, exploration, or ideation. Whenever I start a new fractional role, there is time pressure to onboard quickly—I usually say in about 60 hours—and I 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’m grocery shopping at 2pm, I’m not on anyone's clock. There is no one asking me why I’m not responding quickly, if I can hop on a call, or what I am doing with my time (which I already communicate to leadership in weekly updates). Being full-time before, I certainly took the occasional extended lunch break or 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’s a burden many of my non-product coworkers do not carry.

That’s the best benefit of being fractional. I work around my meeting schedule and the team's availability, and when I check in, it’s because I want to. I also have always had a severe case of the Mondays, and now I work very little that day without feeling bad about it.

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, and I’ve still procrastinated finishing a really good book.

I’m also unsure about the degree to which I should proactively cultivate business relationships. Since I do long-term, open-ended engagements, I don’t have a huge need for outbound sales, and yet, I do want a pipeline. I’m still trying to gauge 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.

My outlook

There is room for all kinds of work arrangements. Though I won’t endorse calling yourself fractional as cloud cover for a full-time job search—but you do you—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, may take budget from otherwise full-time roles. 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. 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 worth calling out.

But the companies that genuinely work with fractionals understand the trade and 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!