Why hire a fractional product leader? (and why it matters for B2B SaaS)
In the early, messy stages of a startup, teams don’t urgently need product leadership, they need output. The job is to ship fast so deals close, and everything else can be figured out later. Until it can’t.
When I went fractional earlier this year, it was a buzzword I’d heard so often I assumed everyone knew what it meant. But the more conversations I’ve had, the clearer it’s become that most people don’t. I’ve written this to share where I think this new way of working tends to thrive, especially in early-stage B2B startups.
What happens when the cofounders can’t be everywhere anymore?
It makes sense to try to delay hiring product leadership as long as possible. Sometimes it’s because the cofounder wants to keep doing it themselves—even if they’ve never worked in product or tech. Sometimes it’s because the team isn’t sure what “product leadership” really means or how it would help. Mostly, it’s just cost. Leadership is expensive, and hiring the wrong person is even more so.
But eventually, the cracks start to show. A cofounder stops being the only one doing sales. Inbounds slow down without a strong marketing team (another function notoriously difficult to hire for). The product story gets fuzzier. There’s no clear “why now,” and worse, no clear “what’s next.”
This is when companies often try to hire a head of product. And it’s also when that hire often fails—because the team doesn’t actually know what they need yet.
That’s where fractional can help.
Fractional product leadership ≠ consulting ≠ full-time hire
Fractional means embedded. It’s someone who joins your team part-time, on a contract instead of a W2. They learn your context and start delivering real value right away. Not once they’ve settled in. Not six months from now.
Unlike a typical consultant, they aren’t showing up with the same deck they give every company. They don’t hand you a playbook and disappear. They do the work. They implement it. A good fractional leader adapts. They notice what’s not working and change course. They operate like a senior teammate, not a guest speaker.
Because of the part-time nature, fractional leaders are forced to prioritize. They don’t have time to boil the ocean or go down rabbit holes of pet projects that just waste time. That time box is a feature, not a bug. It forces alignment and focus on both sides.
So what does a fractional product leader actually do?
Here comes my favorite product line, “It depends.” That is, on what you need. The beginning of every good engagement starts with this simple question:
What are the 1–3 highest-leverage things we can focus on to unlock progress?
Sometimes it’s about making sense of a feature backlog that’s been growing for months, where you’ve got more asks than engineering hours for the next year. Sometimes it’s about helping the company pick a lane—because saying yes to everything has created a product that’s sprawling, incoherent, and increasingly hard to sell.
Sometimes it’s helping your team ship faster or creating accountability. Or it’s helping them slow down and do discovery. Sometimes it’s clarifying your roadmap. Or your org chart. It can be any combination of the above, and more.
There’s also a case for bringing in a fractional leader in addition to an existing head of product. Because when have you met a product leader who has everything down pat? One who doesn’t work weekends just to stay afloat? Who always has perfect context? Who implements every process flawlessly and is equally strong across strategy, people, delivery, and influence?
That person doesn’t exist. Sometimes staff augmentation in the form of another senior product leader—a right-hand partner who can plug gaps, challenge blind spots, or take on high-leverage work—is exactly what the team needs. In this way, it’s about reinforcing, rather than replacing, leadership.
Fractional can work as force multiplication: someone experienced enough to lighten the load, bring perspective, and help the existing team breathe again.
What does a typical engagement look like?
Every fractional leader works a little differently, but some patterns tend to hold:
Weekly 1:1s with the cofounders and/or leadership team
An async wrap-up every week outlining what got done, what’s next, and what needs attention
Collaborative documents that create alignment, especially for teams that haven’t written anything down before
Process scaffolding that’s lightweight but durable
A scope that evolves (because it always does)
A good engagement doesn’t need to be fully ironed out in advance. It’s a partnership. You talk, you learn, you adapt. That’s part of the value.
Is this a pitch for me? Sort of. But also not really.
Yes, I do this work. But I’ve only been fractional for a few months as of this writing. Before that, I led product teams for 10 years inside early-stage and post-growth SaaS companies. I’ve worked on launches, hiring, GTM, messy roadmaps, $50M product lines, layoffs, OKRs—and more.
This post isn’t merely a thinly-veiled ad for what I do; it’s about giving you language for what you might need.
The hardest thing about hiring product leadership—full-time or fractional—is that you’re often looking for clarity from someone before you’ve figured out what clarity looks like. If you’re not ready to hire full-time, or not sure what you’re hiring for, or you’ve tried and it didn’t work out, or your team is too overloaded to stop and think, fractional might be the right move. It’s faster. It’s lower-risk. And it helps you figure out what good looks like before you commit to it full-time.