Senior product thinking in your team, without a full-time hire
A product lead who decides what gets built and why — embedded in your team two or three days a week, not advising from outside it.
What this person actually does
Fractional does not mean occasional. It means senior, embedded, and accountable for a defined set of decisions.
Decides what gets built next
Roadmap and priority calls made with reasons written down, so the team stops relitigating them every sprint.
Talks to your users
Regular customer conversations, and the discipline of turning them into decisions rather than a backlog of requests.
Writes the specs the team builds from
Problem statements, scope, acceptance criteria. Enough detail that engineers are not guessing.
Owns the metric
One number the product is trying to move, and honesty about whether it is moving.
A rhythm, not a retainer you forget you are paying
Length and hours are set per engagement, and reviewed as the work changes. That is flexibility, not vagueness — you should be able to scale the days up when a decision is live and down when it is not.
A typical week
- Monday: priority and blockers with engineering
- Midweek: two user conversations, written up
- Ongoing: specs for the next two weeks of work
- Friday: what shipped, what it changed, what is next
Fractional against a full-time senior hire
The honest case for fractional is cost, speed and seniority. The honest case against it is that you do not get someone five days a week.
| Full-time senior hire | Fractional with BIT Garage | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | Full senior salary, plus benefits and equity | A fraction of it — you pay for the days you use |
| Time to start | Two to five months to hire | Within weeks |
| Ramp-up | Weeks before decisions get made | Decisions from the second week |
| Risk if it is not working | A difficult termination | End the engagement |
| Seniority you can afford | Often a level below what the role needs | Senior, because you are not buying full-time |
| Coverage | One person, five days | One senior person, agreed days, backed by our team |
This table is the strongest selling device on the page and it is currently qualitative. Real salary benchmarks and engagement ranges — even as ranges — would make it materially more persuasive.
Not sure which fractional role you need?
Describe the problem on a call and we will tell you which one it is — or that it is neither.
Where this works, and where it doesn’t
A good fit when
- You have engineers building, but nobody deciding what.
- The roadmap is a list of requests from the loudest customers.
- You are the founder doing product between everything else.
- You need the decisions written down, not just made.
Not the right fit when
- You want an extra pair of hands to write tickets.
- Nobody internally will act on product decisions.
- You need someone in the office five days a week.
- The product has no users to learn from yet and no plan to get them.
The other two roles
Different decisions, same model. Most teams need one of the three, not all of them.
Fractional Project Management
A project manager who runs the plan, the dependencies and the difficult conversations — part-time, embedded, and accountable for the date.
Read moreFractional Solution Architecture
A senior architect for the decisions that are expensive to reverse — system design, integration, data model, and the choices your team will live with for years.
Read more
Asked by founders
Set per engagement. Two or three days is the common shape, enough to hold decisions between sessions without paying for a full-time hire.
Usually a few months at minimum, because product decisions need time to show whether they were right. Some engagements continue until an internal hire is ready.
That is often the goal. We write decisions down as we go, which is what makes a handover possible at all.
Priced per engagement based on days and duration. Tell us the shape you need and we will scope it.
Tell us what you are trying to do. We will scope it.
Priced per project or per engagement, no public rates. A 30-minute call is enough to tell whether we are the right fit.