02 — FRACTIONAL CPO
Your product needs senior leadership before it needs a full-time hire.
Embedded product leadership for founders building agentic AI products — strategy, roadmap, hiring, and go-to-market, without the cost or risk of a premature full-time CPO hire.
Who this is for
AIAUTOMIC works with funded startups building agentic AI products that need senior product judgment now — not in six months, once they can afford a full-time hire.
Good fit
- Funded (pre-seed to Series B) and building an agentic AI product
- Technical founders who need product rigor without giving up a co-founder seat
- Need to hire a first PM but aren't sure what "good" looks like yet
Not a fit
- Looking for a permanent replacement for a full-time product leader
- Pre-product, idea-stage, without a working prototype yet
The problem
Technical founders building agentic AI products are usually excellent at the hard engineering problem and under-equipped for the product decisions around it: what to build first, how to sequence a roadmap investors will believe, and when to hire the first real product person. Bringing on a full-time CPO too early is expensive and often wrong for the stage. Bringing one on too late means the roadmap drifts and the fundraising narrative gets fuzzy right when it matters most.
What the engagement includes
Product Audit (Week 1–2)
A fast, honest read on your current product, roadmap, and team — including where the biggest risks to product-market fit actually sit.
Embedded Product Leadership
An ongoing weekly cadence owning roadmap prioritization, writing specs, and working directly with engineering and design as if I were on your team.
Hiring & Handoff
Defining the profile for your first full-time product hire, running the interview loop, and handing off a roadmap and team ready to run without me.
Go-to-Market Support
Positioning, pricing input, and launch sequencing that holds up in front of investors and early customers.
Why AIAUTOMIC
"I've been the founder in the room, not just the advisor outside it."
I founded and ran Healthouts, pivoting to a B2B white-label model and securing partnerships with Boston Children's Hospital and the Joslin Diabetes Center — architecting the AWS infrastructure myself and building the go-to-market from zero. Before that, as VP at Way2SMS, I took a cross-platform messaging app from whiteboard to launch and mentored seed-stage startups on product-market fit inside its accelerator. Since then, I've taken Luma, an AI chatbot platform at Serviceaide, from idea to a Forrester-recognized product — driving nearly $2M in new ARR across 20+ enterprise brands — and led an AIOps platform from spec to a Microsoft Azure Marketplace launch at GAVS. That's the combination a fractional CPO engagement needs: founder empathy plus enterprise-grade product execution.
Engagement model
Typically a part-time weekly retainer, structured around a 90-day initial engagement with a clear plan to reduce my involvement as your team and roadmap mature — or to hand off cleanly to your first full-time product hire. Book a call and we'll scope the cadence to what your stage actually needs.
Common questions
Is this a full-time commitment?
No — this is fractional, typically a few structured hours a week plus async availability. It's built to give you senior leadership without a full-time hire's cost or equity.
What happens after the engagement ends?
Every engagement is built toward a clean handoff — either to your first full-time product hire (which I'll help you find) or to your own team, with a roadmap and process that doesn't depend on me staying.
Do you take equity?
That's decided case by case depending on stage and scope — bring it up on the call.
Building an agentic AI product and missing a product co-pilot?
One call — bring your current roadmap and we'll tell you plainly where the gaps are, founder to founder.
Opens our scheduler in a new tab — mention “Fractional CPO” when asked what you’d like to discuss.