In small companies, product leadership and technology leadership are not two jobs. They are two halves of the same job, and splitting them across two outside hires usually produces two people guarding two halves of the same problem. That is the thesis of how we run fractional CPO work.
You are likely here because product is drifting. The roadmap is reactive. Customer feedback is not making it into prioritization. Engineering and the rest of the company are pointing in different directions. The founder is doing product on top of everything else, and it shows.
How the work shows up
Roadmap tied to the strategy of the business, not the loudest customer of the week. Prioritization that survives the next quarter. Customer discovery that engineering can use. The interface between product and engineering — sequencing, scoping, and the conversations about what is actually shippable. Hiring product staff and structuring how they report. Working with sales and customer success so commitments do not sail past what the team can deliver.
When the gap is more product than engineering, we run a CPO scope. When the gap is both, we run CPO and CTO together with a single point of accountability — yours.
Who this is for
Most fractional CPO work at this stage starts in Founders & small teams. The shape varies — a pre-hire bridge while the company runs a full-time CPO search, a post-departure stabilization, or the dual gap where the founder is acting as both head of product and head of engineering and neither is getting what it needs.
How we engage
Every engagement opens with a focused ramp-up — typically 20 to 40 hours of structured diligence in the first few weeks. We work with the product owner, advisors, and where possible your customers to understand what is actually driving the market and the product. We review the roadmap and the issue tracker, sit with engineering to understand what the system can and cannot do today, and run strategy and market-planning sessions with you. Where there is a product manager running day-to-day development, we manage them through this phase rather than around them.
The ramp-up produces deliverables based on agreed upon needs. These often include:
- A Market Requirements Document (MRD) — the document that settles why the product exists: the market need, the opportunity, the target segments, launch timing, and how features should be prioritized. It is the precursor that sets the stage for what to build. When the team is distributed or partly outsourced, an MRD is what gives everyone a common understanding of the problem.
- A Product Requirements Document (PRD) — the detailed specification of what to build: the features, the scope, how each capability should behave, and what “done” looks like. Where the MRD settles why the product exists, the PRD turns that intent into something engineering can estimate, sequence, and build against — one shared definition of the product instead of a backlog of assumptions.
- A Product Roadmap Outline — not a full roadmap, but the priorities that matter now: what the team should deliver in the near term, in what order, and why. It pairs that near-term detail with a lower-resolution view of where the product is headed further out — enough to set direction without committing to the specifics of quarters that have not arrived yet.
- A PR/FAQ — the product described from the perspective of how it will be announced, paired with the hard questions and their answers. It turns the MRD’s strategy into practical decisions: how each element gets achieved, the rationale for each feature, and how customer-facing needs are met.
From there the engagement shifts to ongoing embedded product leadership on a defined cadence — scoped to the situation, anywhere from weekly to monthly, at a set number of hours or days per month. Ongoing work carries the product through execution: maintaining the roadmap, sprint planning where appropriate, the launch plan, and the PR/FAQ plan that keeps each release tied back to the strategy.
Some engagements start instead as a fixed-scope roadmap or product-org review with a written deliverable, and convert into ongoing work once we both see what is needed.
CPO engagements are led by senior product practitioners from the Develomentor team, matched to your situation — leaders like Ashley Baldwin, who brings over a decade of VP and Director of Product leadership, scaled Teachable from $20M to $60M in revenue, and drove 3x year-over-year growth at Resilia.
Tell us what is breaking between product and engineering. Book a Discovery Call.
