How do you ensure success as a freelance product manager on a short engagement?
This is one of the questions I was asked during a recent interview with Liam Smith about my experiences working as a freelance product manager.
In contrast with permanent employment, the game changes a great deal when you know you’re only going to be in role for a relatively short period of time. That means you should think about two specific things: how you can deliver value as quickly as possible, and how to ensure you do at least the one main thing they brought you in to do.
Deliver value as quickly as possible #
Whenever you start an engagement as a freelancer, obviously you’re thinking about doing the job that you’re there to do as a product person. You’re also thinking one level up in terms of how you operate as a business. How do you make sure that you deliver the best possible service to your client, over and above the actual product work you happen to be doing for them? You want to deliver as much value to your client as quickly as possible to justify their expectations in hiring you.
You don’t have the luxury of taking your time to get up to speed. You have to do your homework, you have to understand their market, you have to get up to speed with what’s going on in their teams, what’s going on with their products, what’s going on with their customers, where the fires are and so on, as quickly as you can.
In contrast, when you go into a permanent role as an employee, it might take you 30, 60, 90 days to settle in, just as you see in all those guides about what do you do in your first 90 days as a product manager. As a freelancer, you’re doing that, but effectively you’re doing that in the first week or so. It needs to be very compressed.
That means gathering as much information as quickly as you can by talking to people and doing your homework and reading in. The goal is to get up to speed and to start delivering value to your client as quickly as possible from an informed standpoint.
Limited time to make an impact #
The second thing is that you have a limited amount of time in which you can make an impact. And by ‘impact’, I mean a tangible (ideally measurable) improvement on the success of the product and the team you’re working with. If you only have a few months there, then focus on the one major thing they wanted you to do by the time you finished.
If that isn’t clear, make absolutely sure you clarify that at the outset of the engagement. Ideally you should have sorted that out before anyone signed any contracts. The worst thing in the world is to be in a contractual relationship with someone where nobody’s entirely clear what finished looks like.
Make absolutely certain that this is prioritised above all else. If you can bring additional value while you’re there, fantastic, that’s an added bonus.
Cheers,
Jock
Read more from Jock
The Practitioner's Guide To Product Management
by Jock Busuttil
“I wish this book was published when I started out in product management. It gives a really wonderful overview of what product management is and involves on a day to day basis.”
— Keji Adedeji, product leader & coach
Jock Busuttil is a product management and leadership coach, product leader and author. He has spent over two decades working with technology companies to improve their product management practices, from startups to multinationals. In 2012 Jock founded Product People Limited, which provides product management consultancy, coaching and training. Its clients include BBC, University of Cambridge, Ometria, Prolific and the UK’s Ministry of Justice and Government Digital Service (GDS). Jock holds a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the popular book The Practitioner’s Guide To Product Management, which was published in January 2015 by Grand Central Publishing in the US and Piatkus in the UK. He writes the blog I Manage Products and weekly product management newsletter PRODUCTHEAD. You can find him on Mastodon, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.
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