When everything routes through the founder, your product work doesn’t scale
I help technical founders step out of execution mode by making product judgment explicit and shared, so you can step back into strategy while your team makes confident decisions without you.
You've Hit the Judgment Bottleneck
Your team is growing. Your product is working. You have active users. And the pressure to ship the right thing, to learn fast, get wins and prove traction has never been higher. And you're stuck heads down in execution.
You need to be thinking strategically about what bets to make. Instead, you're spending your days unblocking, clarifying, course-correcting. Instead, you're caught in patterns you can't quite escape.
You're the product and process glue: decisions route through you, engineers need constant direction, customer signals create decision paralysis. You spend days firefighting instead of thinking clearly about what moves the needle.
The pattern: Product judgment is trapped in your head. As complexity and pressure increase, judgment doesn't scale. You get pulled deeper into execution exactly when you need to operate strategically.
This is when most founders consider hiring a PM or someone to take over the backlog and project management. But that won’t fix it, since your judgement is not made explicit yet. You will have the same problems with an additional person to manage.
Does this sound familiar?
What You're Experiencing:
→ Decisions route through you constantly
→ Engineers need direction on every decision
→ You spend 60%+ time in execution, not strategy
→ Customer signals create decision paralysis
→ Roadmap exists but confidence is shaky
→ Work gets done but not in the direction you expected
→ You're pulled into meetings as "tie-breaker" constantly
→ Strategic thinking happens late at night (if at all)
→ You review work: "fine, but not what I would have done"
Your Stage & Context:
→ Seed to Series A, 5-20 people
→ Active users, proving PMF or traction
→ Under pressure to show clear progress
→ Considered hiring PM, unsure it helps
→ Past "process" attempts didn't stick
→ Building AI solutions that require deep customer context
From Founder-as-Bottleneck to Strategic Product Leadership
Most founders I work with see meaningful shifts within 60-90 days. Not because we've added heavy process, but because product judgment becomes explicit and shared across the team. Here's what that looks like:
You Operate Strategically, Not Reactively
You shift from spending 60% of your week in execution to spending 60% on what actually matters: customers, strategic bets, and roadmap thinking.
Your calendar isn't full of standups and unblocking sessions. You're not the tie-breaker in every debate. You have time to think deeply about direction and the mental space to make confident bets on what moves the needle toward product-market fit.
Your Team Makes Confident Decisions Without You
The engineering team owns execution and bias towards autonomy and self-management. They evaluate tradeoffs within boundaries you trust. Decisions don't require "check with the founder" every time.
What's changed isn't your team's skil, it's that product judgment is now explicit. The frameworks for "what makes a good decision here" are shared, documented, and operated on daily. Your team has the judgment to move fast without you in every conversation.
Product Decisions Are Strategic, Not Reactive
You have a clear process for how signals (customer feedback, data, market moves) translate into bets. Changes to the roadmap aren't driven by whoever shouted loudest, they're evaluated against strategic criteria you can defend.
When a customer requests a feature, when sales has an urgent ask, when a competitor ships something, you have a framework to evaluate it. Not gut feel. Not politics. Clear judgment that the team trusts and operates from.
The goal isn't to remove you from product decisions, it's to get you operating at the right level. You're making strategic bets, not managing tickets. Your team is empowered with judgment, not waiting for direction. And product decisions move fast because the right systems exist.How I work
Most early stage founders don't need a full-time PM. They need product thinking and lightweight systems that scale judgment across their team. I work with a few companies at a time on monthly advisory retainers. And have availability for one fractional engagement. Typical engagements run 3-6 months. The goal isn't to become your PM, it's to build product judgment and product thinking into your team so you can operate strategically.
Advisory
2-4 video sessions per month (typically 60 minutes each)
Async support between sessions (Slack, email, lightweight reviews)
Framework development tailored to your team and context
Implementation support as you roll out new decision-making systems
Direct access when you need a sounding board on tough product calls
Fractional Product Leadership.
Fixed period engagement
Head of Product / AI roles
Product process implementation
Mentoring
Product leader hiring support
I take typical one fractional engagements at a time for founders that want more hands-on support and guidance.
What to expect
We start with diagnosis: What's actually broken? Is it process, product direction, or team dynamics? I observe how decisions get made, where you're spending time, and what's causing things to drift.
Then we build the systems you need:
Frameworks for decision-making (who decides what, and how)
Clear prioritization process (how customer signals become roadmap bets)
Team empowerment structures (boundaries for autonomous decisions)
Strategic review cadence (so you operate at the right altitude)
This isn't "here's a template, good luck." We build these together, tailored to your team and stage, leveraging AI where applicable. And I'm with you as you implement, iterate, and see them start to work. Most engagements run 3-6 months. The goal is your independence, systems that work without me, not ongoing dependency.
A Note on building AI products:
AI amplifies complexity, it makes product judgment harder, not easier. I help you build evaluation frameworks and decision processes that work when quality is ambiguous and "good enough" is unclear. I don't implement AI or build models, I help you navigate the product judgment challenges AI creates.
Let's Figure Out What You Actually Need
Not every founder needs the same thing. The first step is figuring out what you're actually dealing with.
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We'll diagnose what's broken, what would help most, and what your next steps should be, whether that's working together or not.
Currently taking on 1-2 new advisory clients for Q1 2026.