pretty | useful

Product Management Consulting & Fractional Engagements

My consulting practice is called pretty | useful. I'm currently working with a startup in a fractional way, and I have bandwidth for one or two other fractional relationships. I think this setup is a win-win because it gives both sides a chance to work closely together before committing, sort of like dating before getting married. 

 

Here are some of the ways we can work together:

 

Fractional VP / Head of Product / Chief Product Officer

• • If you've been the founder/head of product but find you only have 20% of your bandwidth to spend doing product related activities because you're trying to raise funding, or have been focusing on other areas of the business, I can step in to take the load off, and work closely with you to ensure your vision is translating to the rest of the product team.
  • If you feel the team has become a feature factory, focused on output instead of outcomes and engineers are not excited about the work they're being asked to do, I can bring a more strategic lens to the process, to ensure everything the team is working on ladders up to a meaningful goal and there's a mix of incremental and inflection-level work.
    
  • I can help with vetting, interviewing, hiring and mentoring product team members: PMs, Director of Product, Product Designers, UX Researchers.
    
  • If you're a founder/leader in a non-profit or social impact organization and you need a seasoned product person to guide you through the build vs. buy decision

 

Product Manager (Ownership of a specific feature or area of your product/platform)

• • I can bring laser focused product thinking to a specific area that you know needs love, like the onboarding flow, or the checkout/cart experience, working with you to set clear, achievable goals and devise experiments to reach them.
  • I can audit key flows throughout your product/platform, identifying pains and opportunities and a prioritized list of actionable tasks/projects to address them.

 

Big swing ideas:

You know, the kinds of ideas you know the team should be working on to deliver customer delight, and to differentiate from the competition, but somehow always seem to get bumped for the incremental stuff.

Idea generation

I've got quite a knack for this, so I've been told! Sometimes a team is too close to the customer or market, and too wedded to the ideas that fill the backlog and roadmap to see unique new ways to deliver value. I can help here. 

Wireframing & Rapid Prototyping:

 I can whip up inspirational mockups and animated prototypes to get both customers and internal folks excited about new ideas. (Figma & Adobe AfterEffects, Webflow)

Customer & market validation:

To de-risk, and build conviction before committing expensive resources.

Innovation Partner: 
I can work with your existing team to facilitate ideation workshops to bring out the accumulated customer empathy and domain expertise, to identify new opportunities to go above and beyond the expected, to spark wonder and delight, and even a bit of magic.

 

Coaching & Mentoring

Want to invest in the people you already have? Whether it's a young product person, or someone who transitioned to product management from another discipline, there is nothing better than having access to a mentor to level up. I work with startups in this capacity quite often, where they book a block of sessions that take place weekly. 

Let's talk about how we might work together!

📆 Schedule a 30min session with me via Calendly (free, of course!)
​📧 Send me a note via email​