Interim Product Leadership
Interim Head of Product: full-time leadership, exactly as long as you need it
Your Head of Product left, or isn't hired yet. Decisions pile up, the roadmap drifts. I step in full-time, keep product moving, and hand over clean when your permanent hire lands.
The Situation
When Interim Cover Makes Sense
Your product lead resigned and the search will take six months you don't have.
Parental leave or sabbatical: the seat is empty, the roadmap isn't.
Post-funding growth outran your product org. You need structure now, not next year.
A make-or-break initiative needs a dedicated owner: a migration, a replatforming, a payments overhaul.
The Playbook
How an Interim Engagement Runs
Weeks 1-4
Stabilize
Listen, map the decision backlog, take the roadmap. Quick wins ship in the first month.
The middle
Deliver
Own delivery and the org around it: priorities, stakeholders, hiring, process where it earns its keep.
The end
Hand Over
Help hire the permanent lead, document the operating system, leave a clean desk. Success is not being missed.
Engagements
Three Ways to Work Together
Interim
Full-time · Fixed term, 3-9 months
End-to-end cover for a product leadership gap: from first-week triage to a clean handover.
Fractional
2-3 days a week · Typically 6-12 months
Embedded senior product leadership: roadmap, stakeholders, delivery. Part-time cadence, full accountability.
Advisory
A few hours a month · Open-ended
Sparring for founders and product leads: pressure-test strategy, unblock the hard calls.
Only need 2-3 days a week? That's a fractional CPO engagement.
Track Record
Proof, Not Promises
Payments & Infrastructure
Unifying Billing Across Three Legacy Systems
Led the strategic migration of the company's entire subscription base from three fragmented legacy systems into a single source of truth.
Revenue Operations
Recovering Lost Revenue Through Multi-Channel Collections
Rebuilt the failed-payment recovery strategy from a basic retry loop into a coordinated multi-channel, multi-provider collections system, recovering north of 50% of previously lost cash.
Reliability Engineering
Joining the Five Nines Club
Took infrastructure and APIs to 99.999% uptime in under a year, without a single customer-facing outage during the migration.
Companies I've worked with
FAQ
Questions, Answered
When does an interim Head of Product make sense?
When the seat is empty and the roadmap isn't: a resignation, parental leave, a hiring search that's dragging, or a critical initiative nobody owns. Interim cover keeps product moving while you solve the org question properly.
How fast can you start?
Days to weeks, not months. No notice period, no relocation, no onboarding theater. First week: listening and mapping. Second week: owning decisions.
Full-time or part-time?
Interim means full-time for a fixed term, typically 3 to 9 months. If part-time leadership fits better, that's a fractional engagement: 2-3 days a week, ongoing.
What do the first 30 days look like?
Listen first: team, stakeholders, customers, metrics. Then take ownership of the roadmap and the decision backlog. You'll see shipped improvements inside the first month, not a 90-day analysis phase.
Do you help hire your successor?
Yes, and I consider it part of the job: scorecard, interview loop, and a proper handover. Success means the org doesn't miss me when I leave.
Which industries do you cover?
SaaS, fintech and payments, eCommerce, and platform or infrastructure-heavy product orgs. 10+ years across Revolut, GitLab, Jimdo, and Hermes Germany.
The Gap Won't Close Itself
Tell me where product stands. You'll get an honest read on whether interim cover is the right move.