Our mission is to help companies discover and deliver great products faster. We empower our Product Management community to share knowledge generously whilst managing all the unglamorous hands-on work of a Product Manager, Product Leader, or Product Operations Manager on an interim basis (3+ months). We onboard fast, align teams and deliver outcomes.

We are most effective in these scenarios: scaling the Product Management team ASAP, parental leave covers, bridging a gap until a full-time hire joins, or temporary initiatives that are important and urgent.

You can hire us as an Interim/Freelance Product Manager or Product Owner

It takes, on average, three to nine months to find the right Product Manager to hire as a full-time employee. In the meantime, someone needs to fill in the void: drive cross-functional initiatives, decide what is worth building, and help the development team deliver the best outcomes.

<aside> ⭐ If you're looking for a great Product Manager / Product Owner to join your team ASAP, Product People is a good plug-and-play solution to bridge the gap.

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You might be thinking...

... a*n external Product Manager is more expensive than a full-time hire.*

To estimate the price of waiting for 6-9 months for a new hire, do a back-of-napkin calculation with the opportunity loss from not building or launching a critical initiative the right way and the sum of the salaries of the whole dev team during this time.

There are also harder-to-quantify things like the team morale going down and a communication breakdown which happens when a Product Manager is missing for too long.

... an external Product Manager will need a lot of time to onboard and understand the product and will not reach the break-even point within a short engagement.

Our experienced Interim Product Managers are likely to onboard faster, as they are accustomed to switching teams and projects. This makes them more agile and capable of handling onboarding easily while bringing a fresh perspective and new ideas.

Moreover, external and temporary team members skip all the politics and get straight to getting things done and delivering value.

Bonus point if you fill a leadership void just by stepping in.

Use Cases

Typically, we are most effective in the following scenarios:

  1. You got funding and need to grow your Product Team by 1-5 PMs.
  2. Your PM is going on parental leave for 3-12 months.
  3. The PM is leaving/left your company, and hiring will take 3-9 months.
  4. You have a temporary initiative that is important and urgent.
  5. You’d like someone to appraise or set up the product team and processes.

How the Contract Works

  1. Duration: 3-6 months recommended contract length. 6-12 months or higher is possible.
  2. Allocation: 20-80% (1-4 days/week) for each person. 4 days/week covers a full-time role thanks to the Product People Trio setup and less internal overhead than in-house employees.
  3. Sign a Framework Agreement with Product People GmbH. Our representatives are full-time with our company (“Arbeitsvertrag” in German). They are neither named nor involved in our contractual relationship. This aligns our representatives' incentives with Product People GmbH and mitigates false self-employment risks (“Scheinbeschäftigung”) for our clients.
  4. Product People GmbH will issue a monthly invoice (time & material) with timesheets.
  5. Cancel anytime in the first two weeks. After that, there’s a 4 weeks cancellation.

Case Studies & Client Testimonials

Client Case Studies