Product management

Name the decision, the users you will talk to, and what you will stop building.

Product consultants are hired when a roadmap is a list of requests and nobody can say what this quarter is for. The proposal should name the decision, the evidence, and the output: a roadmap a team can refuse work against.

What this quarter is for

Write the decision as a bet. Serve the larger accounts and let the small ones wait. Fix onboarding before adding a module. Kill the feature the founder loves because five users asked for something else. If the client will not let you put a bet in the proposal, you are being hired to facilitate a list, and you should price a short workshop instead of a quarter.

Say how many users you will talk to, and that they will be users the client helps you reach. A product engagement with no access to users is a stakeholder summariser. You can do that for a week. You should not call it discovery.

A roadmap the team can refuse work against

The artifact is a short roadmap with a 'not now' column the team is allowed to cite. Include the meeting where the founder agrees to that column in public. Without that meeting, the document is a poster and the next sales call will overwrite it.

Design production, engineering delivery, and a full discovery of every persona are out. You leave a decision and a backlog shaped by it. The people who design and build already work there, or they are a different hire. Say so, because founders often hope a product consultant is a team.