Overview of Services

Product Strategy & Roadmaps

One of the keys to having a fast-moving, effective product team is to provide them with a documented product strategy. Providing the clarity of “decisions that have already been made” allows the product team to focus on target customers and markets and know how to make priority decisions. We help our clients to pressure test assumptions, tie together financial and market data, and ultimately tell a compelling story that unites the company behind a single plan.

Roadmaps are a loaded topic, however having an artifact that you can use to communicate what you are doing, why, for whom, and roughly in what order is critical to keeping everyone on the same page. With a solid strategy in place, you can make the choices of sequence and priority to lay out a high-level, multi-month plan focused on outcomes, not deliverables. We can help you with the conversations and choices to come up with the content as well as the appropriate format to ensure you and your team stay focused on the right things.


Discovery, Design, & Build Practices

Most companies aren’t doing enough continuous discovery, to stay close to their customers and ahead of their needs. Many product managers struggle with how to take a big complicated project and break it down into many small releases that each deliver value using a technique like user story mapping. It’s frustratingly common to see companies doing something that is agile-adjacent but not delivering on the value, speed, and predictability that should come with it. Petersen Product can help your product teams perform better by jumping in hands on to introduce new techniques where they may help, show how to apply them in real time, and provide on-going coaching as necessary.


Product Organizational Planning

If you are reading this you probably need to hire another product manager, and it doesn’t matter how many you currently have. It’s very common in growth companies to focus on hiring development resources first, or faster, ahead of product and UX resources. Figuring out and validating high value work takes time, so you need to make sure the product resources are there first, and then you hire the developers to execute. Otherwise you may find yourself wondering why the team is doing either doing the wrong thing or executing on a bunch of bug fixes and tool chain updates.

We can help you to work backwards from your strategy, roadmap, and financial plan to come up with a hiring plan that ensures precious development resources arrive with plenty of shovel-ready work to take on. Depending on existing team size and growth trajectory we will also help you navigate org design issues including target levels for each role, how to divide work among PMs as the team scales, and when to bring in more senior leadership.


Product Manager Hiring, Coaching & Development

Bringing on even one effective Product Manager is transformative for your company. Finding one on the other hand, is extremely challenging in today’s environment. The best PMs are often very retained at a top company and there is too much variability in quality and job description between companies to simply focus on whether a candidate “has done product before.” Petersen Product has developed product manager screening process and interview questions designed to bring in more qualified candidates and have a higher success rate.

Once you have a new hire, you need to onboard them the right way to get them to peak performance as quickly as possible. Beyond that, the job of coaching and developing product managers never ends. No one is ready for their first product job, as there are too many skills and behaviors to master. Developed over a decade in operational roles, Petersen Product has a framework to help baseline product managers and then develop custom coaching plans to help each PM on the team achieve their best.


Advisor / Direct Contributor

Sometimes you don’t need a one-time outside assessment as much as you need someone in the day-to-day, helping to advise on key decisions and situations as they come up. Where necessary Petersen Product can act as an unbiased product advisor on an ongoing basis, and even augment existing IC product managers as necessary to get a specific project or deliverable more quickly.


Engagement Types

Introductory Packages

  • 1 Hour Q&A Session - Perfect for getting quick perspective on a burning topic and a great way to test the working relationship 

  • Full Day / Half Day Workshops - Go deep on a predetermined topic, come away with an outside perspective and prioritized action list

    • Product Strategy & Vision

    • Product Development Processes & Execution

    • Product Development Org / Planning

Ongoing Engagements

  • If you need someone to jump in and deal with whatever comes up:

  • Retainer - You pay a fixed price per week for a block of hours, and faster and off-hours responses

  • If there is a defined deliverable you need completed:

  • Project Based - You pay a fixed price for a predefined set of deliverables and project timeline

  • If you’re not sure how much help you need:

  • Hourly + Minimum Commitment - Best for recruiting engagements and some coaching engagements where estimation of required hours is difficult