Fractional CPO for B2C & D2C startups

A fractional CPO is a Chief Product Officer who works with your company part-time, usually two to three days a week, on a monthly retainer. You get a senior product leader who owns strategy, roadmap, design direction and delivery, without the salary, equity and recruiting cycle of a full-time executive hire.

Product Craft charges an agreed monthly retainer, scoped to how much of me you actually need. Advisory is a few hours a week; a fractional CPO engagement is two to three days a week. Either one is a fraction of the $300K+ in salary, equity, recruiting and ramp that a full-time CPO costs. The number is agreed upfront on the intro call, with no variable fees and no surprises.

Build. I run a business where AI agents handle most of the work end to end, from performance marketing and SEO through to finance operations, and I shipped an AI recommendation engine for a US e-commerce platform that drove a 400% lift in incremental revenue. I have also had the failures, so I know where agents break, where they cost more than they return, and when a plain piece of engineering is the better answer. That judgment is the part you cannot get from someone who has only read about it.

Hire a fractional CPO when you need senior product judgment now but cannot yet justify a $300K executive line item. It fits founder-led startups shipping without a senior product owner, and teams whose PM needs a seasoned thought partner. Hire full-time once the product org is big enough to need a leader in the building every day — usually past roughly 200 people.

Yes, because those hours go to decisions rather than to status. Most of a full-time product week disappears into standing meetings, decks and re-litigating calls that were already made. I spend the time on strategy, roadmap, design direction, analytics, engineering collaboration and leadership alignment. Add 20 years of pattern recognition and most questions do not need a three-month discovery phase to answer.

A consultant studies your company and hands you a recommendation. A fractional CPO joins the team and owns the outcome. I am in your standups, roadmap reviews, design sprints, hiring loops and the hard conversations, and the decisions ship with my name on them. You are not buying analysis, you are buying a product leader for a couple of days a week.

Bad contractor experiences usually come down to three things: no ownership of outcomes, working next to the team instead of inside it, and a standard set by someone who has never carried the responsibility themselves. I have been the accountable product leader at US consumer companies including Sunbit, Shutterfly and CLEAR, and I have founded companies of my own. I join as part of your leadership team, not as a pair of hands.

The free intro call and the first engagement exist to answer exactly that. Product Craft is usually a strong fit for a founder-led B2C or D2C startup that is shipping but has no senior product owner, for a team whose PM needs a seasoned thought partner, and for anyone trying to turn AI from a demo into shipped product. It is a poor fit if you want someone to execute a fixed spec or produce a strategy deck for the board. It is also a poor fit for deep B2B enterprise or infrastructure products — my 20 years are in consumer, and consumer is where the pattern recognition is worth paying for. The first engagement runs about three months, with a clear way out.

Both, though most engagements are with startups of roughly 10 to 200 people where there is no senior product owner yet. Scaleups usually call for a different reason: the product org already exists, but nobody in it has built AI-native product before, and the AI roadmap keeps producing demos instead of shipped features. That tends to be an advisory engagement alongside your existing product leaders rather than me running the function.

Yes. Most of my product career has been with US consumer companies, and I work with remote teams worldwide. Engagements run on your core hours with meaningful overlap — the model only works if I am actually in the room for standups, roadmap reviews and the decisions in between.

Usually within two to four weeks of the intro call. I deliberately work with one or two clients at a time so each one gets real focus, which means availability is limited. If I am booked, you will hear the exact date I can start on the call, not an imaginary one.