Product Craft is the fractional product leadership practice of Roman Levin, a fractional chief product officer who embeds with B2C and D2C startups 2–3 days a week to own product strategy, roadmap, design direction and engineering execution.
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. The job is the same as the full-time one. I own the product strategy and the roadmap, work closely with your designers, run prioritization, lead the product and UX work, and sit inside the engineering and leadership conversations where the decisions actually get made.
What is different is the overhead and scope. 200+ employee companies mostly need a full-time CPO. A startup with up to 50 employees, especially if it's founder led, does not need a full-time CPO, but it very much does need a CPO.
The Fractional CPO model can be a great fit for you startup if you fit in that sweet spot.
There are three ways to work together, from running the product function outright to monthly mentorship.
See the engagement modelsDelightful products require a mix of disciplines: customer empathy, human psychology, deep technological expertise, great design and data working together. A subset of them produces OK products, but all of them produce exceptional ones. To execute well, we need even more.
Deep customer empathy is a secret weapon of great Product Leaders. Truly caring for customers, getting into their shoes, talking with them, feeling their pain - produce prodcuts that they actually care about. I love talking to customers and building that unique intuition about them, that's what makes a real difference.
People do not behave the way specs assume. They avoid loss more than they chase gain, they take the default, they abandon at the moment the effort stops feeling worth it. Most conversion problems are not missing features, they are that unclear path that customers don't want to take, or the 1 choice too much.
Knowing what is genuinely expensive to build changes what you choose to build. Having real software engineering experience (as a dev and CTO) means I can tell the difference between a two-week problem and a two-quarter one, push back with engineering, and design AI-native products around what the technology actually does well.
A working product is great, but it's not a delightful product. Delightful products are what makes customers come back again and again, and then tell their friends. Those delightful products require a unique design eye, deep UX understanding, customer empathy and a sense of what actually works.
Opinions are cheap and mine are no exception. I'm a deep believer in Data and analytics, and I make sure it is reliable. We define real and useful KPIs and OKRs, and we make sure that we know how to measure them and how to use data to make impactful decisions, not just based on opinions.
Roman Levin has spent 20 years building consumer and tech products, as a senior product leader with B2C and e-commerce companies in the US and as a hands-on partner to founders. He has built product with teams at Sunbit, Shutterfly, CLEAR, easyplant, FlowRx, Fignel, Linx, WODOX and many more, across e-commerce, marketplaces, fintech, identity and others, including AI native products.
That range is the whole point. I've built products from the ground up, I've scaled products to millions of users, and I've worked with founders of small startups to CEOs of multi-billions companies.
As a founder myself, I know what it takes to build a real product that users love, and I know how to help other founders do the same.
Bottom line, I have been the person accountable, which is a different job from advising the person accountable.
I take one or two clients at a time, deliberately. Product leadership done properly means being available and deeply involved, and that does not scale past a couple of teams.
A free 30-minute intro call. You'll leave with a clear read of your product challenges, ideas how to solve them, and a sense of whether we want to work together.