Someone owns the roadmap.
A senior marketplace product lead in the seat, not alongside it. We hold the roadmap, make the supply and demand sequencing call each quarter, and are accountable for how it turns out. For the stretch where the decisions have outgrown the founder and a full-time hire cannot be justified yet.
Find out whether the seat is the problem.
Thirty minutes with a senior practitioner. Tell us what product decisions are queuing up, and we will tell you which of a fractional lead, a consultant or a full-time hire you actually need.
Marketplaces do not usually fail on execution. They fail on unowned decisions.
A two-sided marketplace asks a founder to make a continuous series of calls about which side to serve, in what order, and at whose expense. Very few of those calls are hard on their own. What breaks companies is that nobody is holding all of them at once.
The decisions outgrow the founder before the salary can be justified.
There is a stretch between a working product and a Series A where the product questions arrive faster than one person can answer them well, and a full-time product leader is still an expensive bet on a company that has not proved itself yet. Most founders resolve that by answering the questions themselves, at speed, between everything else. The decisions get made. They just get made badly, and the cost only shows up two quarters later.
Someone has to own the supply and demand sequencing.
Every quarter a marketplace has to decide which side it is solving for. Add supply and demand waits, or court demand and suppliers churn because nothing fills. That call cannot be made by consensus and it cannot be made by whoever is loudest in the room. It needs one person who makes it, writes down why, and is answerable for how it turns out.
Most of the waste is a translation failure.
You know your market intimately and describe what you want in market language. Engineers hear a feature request. Something gets built that matches the request and misses the intent completely. Someone fluent in both removes an enormous amount of that waste, and they do not have to be in the building five days a week to do it.
Four things with our name against them.
The test of a fractional engagement is what it owns rather than what it advises on. These are the artifacts you should hold us to, and the ones you should ask about when you talk to anyone else.
The roadmap, including what comes off it
A maintained roadmap with one name against it.
Not a backlog and not a wishlist. A sequenced roadmap that says what is being built, what is deliberately not being built yet, and what changed since last month. The unpopular half of the job is the removals, and that is the half a roadmap by committee never does. You get a document you can put in front of an investor and a build team that stops relitigating priorities every fortnight.
- A maintained quarterly roadmap, reviewed with you every two weeks
- A written record of what came off it and why
- Scope decisions made in the week they arise, not banked for a quarterly review
- One accountable owner, named, for every item on it
The sequencing call between your two sides
Which side gets solved this quarter, and the reasoning behind it.
Liquidity is the health metric that matters: whether a demand-side user searching your marketplace finds a match and completes a transaction. Whether that improves next quarter depends almost entirely on which side you invest in now. We make that call against your actual numbers, state the hypothesis in a form that can be proved wrong, and revisit it on a fixed cadence rather than when someone complains.
- A quarterly supply-versus-demand position with the reasoning written down
- The liquidity metrics we are steering by, each with its denominator stated
- A falsifiable hypothesis per cycle, reviewed at the end of it
- Honest reporting when the call was wrong
The specs your build team works from
Written before the work starts, not reconstructed afterwards.
A spec is where product decisions stop happening by accident at four o'clock on a Friday. Each one names the side it serves, the liquidity metric it is meant to move, the states nobody thinks about until launch week (no supply, one result, a stale listing, a cancelled booking, a refund, a dispute) and the tracking events that will tell you whether it worked. Your engineers build from these whether they are your team, ours, or a contractor.
- User stories with acceptance criteria, one side per story
- Edge and cold-start states specified up front
- The tracking events each release must emit
- Specs written to work with your build team, not only with ours
The metrics the team steers by
Including killing the ones that only ever go up.
Registered users, total listings and cumulative transactions only ever rise, which makes them useless for deciding anything. We replace them with cohort measures that can get worse: match rate, time to match, search to booking conversion, repeat rate by cohort, supplier retention at month three. Then we instrument them properly, because a metric nobody can compute is a metric nobody uses.
- A metric set with cohort definitions and stated denominators
- Event schema and instrumentation review
- A monthly read that separates a behaviour change from a definition change
- Vanity metrics removed from the reporting, with the reasoning recorded
A fixed rhythm, and decisions made when they arrive.
Take the seat
We read what exists, talk to both sides of your market, and go through your numbers. At the end of it you get an honest written position on where your marketplace actually is, which usually disagrees with the internal story in at least one place.
Own the rhythm
A biweekly roadmap review with you and a weekly demo with the build team. Specs land ahead of the work rather than alongside it. Decisions that arrive between those meetings get made when they arrive, not banked.
Re-cut the sequence
The supply and demand call gets remade against the numbers, last quarter's hypothesis gets marked right or wrong in writing, and the roadmap is re-cut around the answer. This is the meeting that keeps a marketplace from optimising the wrong side for a year.
If three of these are true, this is the right call.
- Your marketplace is live and you have validated that both sides will transact
- Product questions arrive continuously, and each one takes an hour rather than a day
- You are making calls you know you are not the right person to be making
- You have build capacity, in-house or contracted, but nobody holding the product line above it
- You are willing to hand over decisions rather than have them confirmed back to you
- A full-time product leader is where you are heading, but not this year
A fractional product lead is the wrong answer if any of these is true.
- You have not launched, or have not validated that both sides will transact. Product leadership on an unvalidated idea produces a well-managed march in the wrong direction. Start with pre-development.
- You do not have a product to run yet and need one built. That is Build and Launch.
- The platform works and the problem is traction rather than direction. That is a go-to-market engagement.
- You have one large question rather than a continuous stream of them. Buy consulting instead, and buy less of it.
- You are a product person yourself and want to stay in the seat. What you need is capacity underneath you, not a peer above you, and it is cheaper to find that out now than in month four.
- You have three squads and a platform doing real volume. Fractional is a stopgap you will outgrow in a quarter. Use it while you run the search, not instead of running it.