 Hi, welcome to my product school presentation from Product Manager to Product Advisor, monetizing your product management skills. My name is Jamela Holder, and I am a newly full-time product advisor. And in today's presentation, I want to share with you not only a little bit about my journey to getting to be a product advisor, but also some of the things you can consider as you possibly look into doing this full-time or on the side as a side hustle for yourself. With that, I'll give you a little bit about me. I am a second-generation independent advisor. My father has been consulting small businesses and medium-sized businesses for decades now. So I grew up in an entrepreneurial family and also went to work with him sometimes on the client side. I have a 15-plus year career that's pretty expansive and varied across different disciplines. Six to seven years as a product manager, four years in operations, five years in finance, two years as a chief of staff to the COO for North America at SAP. I've done both enterprise and consumer product management, as well as I'm a former product leader at SAP in LinkedIn. I have an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, and I enthusiastically coach people into switching careers into product management or just getting them interview ready regardless of the discipline and industry that they may be entering into. So for today's agenda, a couple of things that I thought would be great for us to cover would be around what's the difference between fractional product manager and a product advisor. There is some difference between the two, and I realized that the rise of the fractional sort of role across various disciplines has become popular over the last maybe a year or two. Why a startup would want to hire a product advisor, the skills that are required, the activities that I do, the benefits, challenges and risks of doing this role, discussing more around proposals and pricing and then how you can get started. So with that, so there are a couple of key differences I'd say between fractional PM and a product advisor. So a fractional product manager is a product manager that comes on, you know, not quite full-time, but offers X amount of hours per week. So they are kind of repeat coming back to the client and working with that client week over week. And because of that, they are a bit more ingrained in the actual culture of the company. They also work a lot more closely with the engineering and the other cross-functional teams. And they're actually seen as part of the team, but also because it's a lot more of an ongoing relationship, they have higher ownership of the product, meaning that they're there for longer. They might be, you know, working across a number of different products at a startup specifically, or they're solving more complex problems because they are there for longer. So a product advisor is someone who comes in on more of a consulting background, looks at a scope of work and identifies what that is. They aren't as implementation focused or they can be, but they don't have to be, right? It's really up to you as to what your scope of work looks like. And I'll get into where I've kind of carved out my own niche with this. But it is more project-based work. They are not necessarily as ingrained in like the team setting and the team culture. They may or may not be attending daily stand-ups. So they do have a shorter-term outlook with regards to the work that they're doing and delivering value very, very quickly is extremely important for a product advisor. And it's also important for a fractional PM, but the product advisor is there for a short time. So they have to be really impactful, basically right out the gate. And they may also offer additional skill sets such as coaching and operations. That's actually what I'm doing. I'm not only doing product advisory. I'm also doing operations, sales, business processes, advisory and executive coaching as well. Now, between these two roles, you are using your established PM skills. So if you've been in product management for a number of years now, then you already have some baseline understanding effort and understanding an effort around how to do product management successfully at another company. So you can think about doing something like this fractionally as a product manager or a product advisor. Neither of these roles are permanent employees, which means they do not have access to health benefits. It's really more on a contract sort of basis. You may be working with multiple clients at the same time. And so that allows for you to determine how many clients you work with at the time. And it also allows for you to have more work flexibility. I haven't been consulting face to face. I have been taking all of my meetings via zoom. For the most part, I should say there's a lot more flexibility around what your hours are right because you are working for yourself and in that way. Are you working during the day? If you are, you know, actually employed within a corporate America sort of setting, you're likely not working during the day. You might be getting this done like late at night or first thing in the morning before you have to log on to do your full time role. In this role, I've also found that these individuals work extremely closely with the CEO and the founder of the company. And so you are advising and giving some recommendations around what needs to be done, but you're also using your executive presence to communicate very clearly and rather frequently with the CEO or founder of the company that you would be advising. So I want to also talk to you about like, why would a startup need a product advisor? Now, I believe that a startup that's in the early stages, we need a product advisor for a number of different reasons. And this is what I have been testing over the course of the last two years. So for myself, what I found is that a lot of founders or the CEOs of their startups in the early stages, especially, and they're still acting as a product manager, meaning they're not only the CEO responsible for the entire company, they're also making the product decisions. They might also be writing the product requirements doc. Obviously, that's not necessarily where they should be focusing their efforts. So they would be looking for someone like my background and possibly your background, someone who has experienced doing product management to support them and lead them in the right direction. Some of these founders are, you know, not necessarily at the point where they're ready to hire a full time product manager because that can be expensive. The more employees you hire, the more expensive things can get for an early stage company who is looking at their burn rate. And so with that, hiring an advisor allows for them to get a lot of value all in one shot, setting things up, whether it's a roadmap, product strategy, product vision, but not necessarily have to extend the full benefits of someone that would be, you know, a full time hire. But they are also looking for expertise, right? So the CEO and founder has gotten the company to whatever stage they're at, perhaps they're at the point where they've raised a seed round, or perhaps they're at the point where they are raising Series A, or maybe they've been invested in a Series A stage, and they are really looking for someone to take them to the next level, especially once they've actually, you know, had an injection of cash, and they now need to be able to prove the growth of that company. What do they do? They might be looking for people to join them fractionally or a product advisor to help them get set up to make the right strategic decisions that are going to help them grow the product and then grow the company overall. So they might also need someone to come in and help them create a roadmap that attracts VC investment later down the line, or as a CEO and founder, perhaps they've already identified a specific user problem, and while they don't have capacity to solve this problem, nor may they have the expertise to solve this user problem from a product management lens, you do. And so that's why they might also be looking for a product advisor. And last but not least, they may also be experimenting with how they hire as they grow. So they may be wanting to take people on fractionally or an advisory capacity, and then see how things work out, and then possibly convert those people to full time hires. So there's a lot of wiggle room I'd say, especially an early stage startup that has not hired a product manager or chief product officer yet to allow for someone with a product background to serve an advisory capacity, or to be a fractional manager, to allow for that CEO to let go of the reins of being the product manager, and allow for someone with more expertise to handle the entire product vision strategy roadmap, and all of those other things that come along with doing the product management role. So these are a number of skills that I have been using over the course of me starting to do my advisory work. And why don't I tell you how I got here. So a couple of years ago, I moved to Miami from the Bay Area. And Miami has been a great place for me to meet a lot of different people. But I started going to tech networking events, and I would meet either founder or funder. And I was neither at the time. And so my thought was how do I add value to this growing community Miami is having a bit of a renaissance let's say maybe a tech renaissance where they are attracting a lot of investments by way of funders moving to Miami, they're attracting a lot of larger corporations in tech moving to Miami, and then a lot of people like myself who work in tech already, and are moving from a number of other cities and states across the country. So as I was going to these events, I would have conversations with more and more founders and tell them, Hey, I'm a product manager. And they're like, Oh, wow, I need someone with your skills that because I'm making all of these decisions. So I initially started just by volunteering I volunteer an hour 45 minutes, help them make a couple of strategic decisions, ask a number of different questions, build my network of people that I knew in Miami, and start to just really flex a different sort of muscle that was more in the advisory capacity than it was in me sitting down and writing out all of their products requirements documents and, and having a much more formal relationship with these founders. But as I was doing this work I realized that I really enjoyed it. It is dynamic work. I'm using all of these different products management skills, I am strategically thinking about not only their organization as I get up to speed really quickly, but I'm also helping them prioritize things. Oftentimes I'm working with the CEO, the founder of the company, and you know they're asking me questions and I'm asking them questions and we're brainstorming together around where they are today and what they'd like to do in the future with regards to growing their company and how the product is going to help fuel that growth. So sometimes I've done just very brief sort of road mapping deliverable items for these founders. I've communicated a ton with them. I've done some data analysis. And so these are a number of the different skills that we already use within our product management roles that are now really applicable to advisory work. And it's been stuff that I've really enjoyed doing. Other skills that I've also used has been my coaching skills. Sales business development really more so around selling yourself right I am selling a scope of work to a client which would be the CEO founder C suite executive at a startup. I am helping them understand what value I'm bringing to the table and it does require me to put on a bit of a different hat in terms of not just selling my product division but selling essentially my expertise as well. I've become better at negotiating things terms proposals rates that sort of thing with founders and I've also been using my executive presence skills in terms of the way I communicate what is most important for the founder CEO or C suite level to know. And also being able to handle ambiguity throughout the working process of working with startups who are very fluid in the startup world. Things happen really quickly and you might need to be able to shift and pivot and possibly even advise a founder as they're going through a number of other things that they might be dealing with in their day to day operations that have nothing to do with product. So for me in my current capacity I'm not only advising on products. I'm also coaching. I'm also advising on how to set up scalable and sustainable business processes so that as the company grows they don't need to reassess these processes later on. So I think there are a number of things that a product advisor does. I've touched on some of them. One key thing is that you are partnering with the founder and the C suite at these startups. I'm also asking a lot of questions gathering background knowledge really really quickly to not only put together a proposal or statement of work but I'm also asking a lot of questions to help me understand how it is that leadership at this startup conducts themselves how they make decisions. I'll get into that a little bit later but I think that as you're doing this work asking a number of questions up front can save you a bit of a headache because you will be able to determine the type of founder you want to work with and the type of founder that may not be the right match for you or the right fit for you or the type of culture at the startup that may not be the right fit for you. So I'm asking a lot of questions up front and we're having like really great conversations but I'm also documenting a lot of this conversation not only for myself but for my clients so that they know how you know we've been spending our time together and what they can expect in the future. And then I start applying my expertise once we've come to an agreement around what the proposal should be what the scope of work is and I'm very very prescriptive around what are the activities that I am going to be doing in that scope of work and in that proposal. The next is let's get started right. So some of the things I've done before has been analyzed and qualitative and quantitative data. I actually ended up taking a data analysis earlier this year for about 10 weeks so that I could become more well versed on data analysis as I haven't necessarily had to do data analysis as much working at LinkedIn we have data scientists so I got I got a little less let's say with my data analysis skills. So I took a data analysis course and was able to refresh myself on how to pull sequel reports if it is that a startup is going to need me to do that. I also refreshed on how to actually analyze data how to format data how to present data and make great presentations with the data that I have and how to kind of create a data plan. So I refreshed on that specific skill because I realized that in the startup world I may have access to data if the startup has already been collecting that data and I will probably need to be the person that analyzes that data and comes up with some insights. I'm also applying expertise by way of identifying and defining user problems creating the product strategy vision. Again many of these things are things that we do as a product manager already that are applicable in a product advisory role where I actually start to stop and do my handoff as a product advisor is that I'm writing them a product requirement stocks and while I am having conversations with the engineers but I'm not doing is necessarily sticking around for the implementation meaning I'm not joining daily standouts on behalf of my clients acting as a product manager in that capacity and joining all of these calls on a daily basis. What I might do is this product requirements documents and interface and interact with the engineers as I'm writing the documents and then give a handoff and then possibly come back in for like one week, one hour a week or so where the engineers can, you know, ask me questions or they might just shoot me an email and just say hey I had a question about this requirement or how would you like to handle this. So I keep the relationship. Not as in depth where I'm now working with this company like weeks and weeks and weeks at a time, you know, 10 hours a week or something like that but what I do is I set things up so that I've written everything rather clearly I've brought the engineers along with me as I'm writing these documents, and as I'm thinking through what the strategy is. And so, by the time I'm doing my hands off, they don't need as much direction from me. And that's just kind of how I've set things up for myself. But again, I think the product advisory role is what you make it and it can be very fluid. Last but not least, we're here to deliver immense value we're here to deliver that value really quickly. So I create success metrics. And then I create dashboards that allow for the CEO founder and others to track the progress of whatever I've outlined. And then I would check in after the project has been completed and ask them how things are going and see where they might need additional support. Perhaps now that we've gotten the product to a good place, they might need support with the business processes and the operations. I am not only delivering value really quickly by way of the written product but I'm also allowing for myself to have some touch points with the company after to just let them know that it's not a complete handoff or a one and done, and that I am here to support them as they implement any work that I do, or even bounce ideas off of as well. So why might you pursue product advisory. So you already have these products management skills and you know I realized that by having these skills, you know you may be thinking like how would I possibly get started or why would I want to do this. It is a way to monetize the skill set that you already created for yourself and create another stream of income if you're full time employed at a incorporate America right now. I would also say that if you're in between work, perhaps you've been laid off more recently, then doing your own product advisory is one way to at least have some other sort of income, and still keep your, your, your skills sharp, while also test driving startups before joining one full time, if that's even something you'd want to consider. There's a lot of benefits and challenges and risks, some of which I have outlined here that I'd like to share with you so there's definitely benefit around income potential you're not kept in terms of, you know, how much income you can generate but I also think that, you know, depending on if you're doing this full time or part time or you're kind of just trying to figure out what the right model for you is. There's a lot of flexibility in this role I'm very disciplined about how I spend my day, how I spend my week and in fact at the end of the week I start to check off like how much of my time that I spend on marketing, how much of my time that I spend on actually getting the work done, how much of my time that I spend on the networking aspect of things. There's a lot of flexibility with this role where sometimes I might take, you know, a couple hours off in the morning to go do some other stuff, and then get down into the weeds of the business. Later on in the day, or, you know, I can work from wherever I want to work from most of these clients don't necessarily feel like they need to see me in person to know that the work is getting done. There's a lot of flexibility with that too in terms of how I spend my time, just have to get the work done. I'm also solving a variety of problems across different industries. So I've been blessed to be able to work with founders across education, technology, FinTech, and I actually have a background in financial services so that was a really cool project for me to work on. I've also worked in like the life events space so what happens when someone unfortunately passes away and what are some of the products and services that serve that industry. So I'm solving problems and challenges across a variety of different industries. And I think that's actually one of the most exciting parts of doing this is that I'm not just solving one problem day in and day out. I am looking at how I can solve problems across a variety of different areas. And as a product manager with a really great skill set around how to build great products. I'm also very confident that I can't ask some questions and get into the weeds really really quickly, and then help myself to understand and orient what it means to solve problems across these different industries, and then apply my product management expertise to that. I'm doing a really wide tech tech network of founders and others as I've been doing this, and that's been really helpful, because sometimes the founders will ask me hey do you know someone that's at this or do you know someone that's at that. And because I've been building this network over time. I'm able to advise them on people that they can possibly hire have conversations with. And last but not least, you can also possibly transition to a startup that you've advised. I don't know how long I'll be doing this I'm really really enjoying this part of the journey and that's part of the ride right now. And perhaps success for me looks like doing this for our next year or two, and then I find a really great startup that I've not only been advising that I'd want to join, and I joined in some sort of full time capacity. And this is what you make it in terms of how you structure your advisory practice, the type of offerings and service offerings that you have, as well as, you know, what level of enjoyment you get out of some of this. Now in terms of the challenges and these are just inherent challenges of being an entrepreneur, I am constantly building a pipeline which means I am going to a lot of networking events. I might be prospecting on LinkedIn and finding different founders to reach out to. So business development and sales is somewhat of not necessarily a challenge I realized what it is and what it takes in order to do this. And I noted it as a challenge because I realized like not all of us have that skill set of doing business development and sales, I've been developing the skill set over time. And now I feel really confident about doing business development and sales on behalf of myself. And it's actually something that I really enjoy doing because really a lot of it is just talking and asking questions and getting to know people and what are some of their biggest pain points in their business. And then figuring out if you're the right person to support them as they're doing this. Another challenge can be accurately pricing your services. You know, you might want to get into doing an hourly rate or doing a package rate or something of that nature, and you need to be able to not only accurately price your services but then also understand, you know, how many hours it's going to take you to to complete a scope of work. And so you need to have a really good sense of what that looks like, so that you're not pricing, you're not underbidding yourself, essentially, which could happen if you're not really thoughtful around how long it would take you to get a scope of work done. And then assessing founders and startups potential. You know, not every founder is going to be someone that you gel with just given personalities what their working style might look like the culture at the startup might be, you know, not necessarily what you'd want to sign up for. So with that, I when I'm meeting founders I have kind of an intake with them and I have a conversation with them around. How well do they make decisions, are they able to make decisions quickly or are they trying to drag things out. Right. You know, how is it that they want to be communicated with, are they going to be calling me every hour, or are they going to allow me to do my work, and then allow me to come back to them and say, Hey, here's what I have in terms of recommendations or here's what the scope of work is that I'm, this is where I'm at right now. Let's meet so that you understand how I'm maneuvering through working on the scope of work for you. So there's a lot to consider when you are working with founders or sweet, sweet executives in this capacity. And then some considerations and some risks. So if you are full time at your corporate job, you may have signed an employment agreement. And with that, that this may be in conflict with that so that's something that you might want to know. The income could be variable depending on how you're building the pipeline and how well you're doing the business development and the sales. So that's obviously something to keep in mind as well. You need to be able to manage your time effectively and understand how much time it will take for you to do specific tasks. You also need to be able to recognize when it feels like there's project scope creep. Let's say you've agreed to a certain scope of work and now the CEO is saying hey but I'd also like this. Well, you might want to revisit the payment and the amount of hours that you're giving to that founder to get the scope of work done. So just understanding what that looks like. I'd also say another thing to consider would be that, you know, as you're doing this work, especially if the startup is very, very early stage, perhaps you do you have an advisory capacity and then they want to offer you a board seat a little bit later on. So that could always be a really great thing where you're now advising in a different sort of capacity as being part of the board of a startup that you feel has potential. Pricing and proposals. So the monetization aspect of things. So the way in which I've started to work with my clients has been around hourly rate pricing, but understanding the full scope of work of the project. So if someone gives me a scope of work and I have documented it in the proposal that I'm sending out, what I will do is say like hey, here's my hourly rate, considering the 15 plus years in business that I've been working and experience that I have. Specifically what it is that you're asking me to do and what we're agreeing upon. And here are the number estimated number of hours that I believe it will take to get this project done. So I mentioned earlier that I would do data analysis. Well, I'm very upfront with the founder of the company and my proposal like hey, if you're giving me data and kind of like broken format, meaning like data from all over that I have to now piece together that I have to format that I have to now make sure is formatted correctly, you are paying me now to format this data, right, but if you're giving me data in a format that doesn't require me to do so much reformatting, then I can just get straight to work so I am actually including assumptions with in my proposal around what state what the state of business might look like so that as I get into the data analysis piece I'm not spending three hours of my time trying to reformat data or trying to find the data because they don't have like the best access to it. And the rate and pricing is more so around, you know, my experience what my time costs on an hourly basis. And then I am also giving a scope of work and saying like, here are the four key activities and deliverables that I am going to be doing. And here are the number of hours for each of these four deliverables and give them sort of an estimate around how much this scope of work will cost them. So we're coming to an agreement based upon that. There's also just like flat rate project based pricing where you can just say hey for this project. This is what I charge. And with that, there are some risks right because perhaps you realize that you may have underbid yourself. So there's opportunity here to create the pricing structure that you want. I've also encountered founders who want to offer me equity, perhaps because the cash flow and the burn rate is of major concern to them in that moment. So with the equity offering, there are a number of other risks there right because now you really have to evaluate not only the leadership of that startup, but the actual opportunity that is ahead of them in terms of what is their problem statement what are they trying to solve. You are in some ways acting like a VC right like what is the product that they are launching like you're evaluating them kind of on the same terms that a VC might evaluate them to determine if they want to invest in their company. To determine if this is in your best interest right because startups come and go. And so if you're taking an equity offering for a startup that you don't have full and complete confidence and is a good idea you don't have full and complete confidence in the leadership. Then this may not be worth much and you may have given up cash to get an equity offering. When you're doing this work instead. So there are opportunities here but you have to weigh how much cash versus equity you'd want. And depending on where the company is and what stage they're at, they may or may not offer you an equity stake they may just want to be able to pay you in cash instead. When I'm doing these proposals. I'm creating really descriptive proposals and documenting the conversations that we've had what we've learned what I believe the problems are that are within the business, and not just within the product area, again because I'm also selling the solutions, process, process improvement, experience and expertise as well. So my proposals are always geared towards, what is this founder going to get, how should they feel when I'm done, right, what sort of transformative are they going to walk away with having, once I've completed my scope of work with them. So I'm constantly describing to them how I'm creating value for them and what the end result should look like in order to help them envision what working with me looks like and what sort of state and outcome they can expect when they're done. Get started. How do we get started right how do you sell your skill set, how do you build a client pipeline, you can assess all of your skills whatever is on your resume today. Assess that right think more thoroughly around what sort of value have you created in your current product management role, or just in terms of your entire career because maybe you shifted from product management from like business operations. To all other wonderful skill set that you can use to monetize. So understand what your unique value proposition is, and have a short pitch that you can share with founders and VCs as you're possibly getting into this work and create collateral for your business so your LinkedIn, your resume website, what people can find you and get a better understanding as to the type of work that you do. I'm constantly talking to people founders funders whomever, honestly, and networking with people and going to different events. But that's just my nature that's how I enjoy doing some of this work. And then obviously determining competitive pricing based upon your experience. But how do you build a client pipeline. Obviously networking with founders is one really great way to do this. This may or may not be for you you may not actually like advising right and maybe you're like hey this isn't my lane let me stay in my lane and continue doing product management in corporate and that's fine too. One way to get started is actually how I got started volunteering with startups. I never thought that I would be doing this that's not even why I set out to volunteer to begin with. It was just I kept meeting more and more founders that were like, I could use your help do you have time for 45 minute call and I'm like, absolutely. But here I am now working for myself doing some of the same things that I started out doing as a volunteer. So, if you're able to set aside a couple of hours when you meet founders, speak with them, ask them a couple of questions and then volunteer. They never turn you down, especially if you have product management experience because it's very likely. They are not only the product manager that the CEO, they are the sales executive, they are the person creating the operations at their company. And so they could definitely use a different viewpoint on how to create great products within. You know, their startups so that it attracts investment so that they're able to grow their company. So schedule short advisory calls with founders and just see how it goes. You can also complete a freelance project with a defined scope of work. Just to kind of test the waters of it and see if this is something that you would even enjoy and want to do, but I'd say the easiest lowest hanging fruit that you can do would literally be to volunteer with startups. And then depending on how you want to build this out, if this is something you want to pursue, you can also then go to pitching to VCs as a PM in residence, let's say, or you can talk to VCs and say, hey, I'd love to volunteer with your portfolio company. So you have a couple of founders that are pretty early stage that you think might benefit from having someone with my skills at an expertise. That's actually how I started as well. So I started initially volunteering one on one with founders and then I got the bright idea to start talking to VCs instead. And those VCs introduced me to their portfolio companies. So there's just a lot of ways that you can go about building out your own advisory practice and putting your expertise to good use outside of maybe your full time job. Or again, if you've been impacted by a layoff recently, it's really there's no overhead here. There's just time. There's just time that's, you know, that's being used here. So there's opportunity for all of us, I think as product managers to share this expertise that we do have more broadly with founders so that they are now able to get the value and all of this goodness that you already inherently possess. So with that, I'd like to thank you for coming to my presentation today. Thank you for joining me to learn more about how you can monetize your own product management skill set. If you'd like to follow my journey, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I am posting more about what I'm doing how I'm doing it. With the hope of inspiring others to create another stream of income for yourself or possibly make a transition if you feel comfortable doing that. And I can be found on LinkedIn. Thanks once more. Hope everything was to your liking. And yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn.