Fractional Product Owner · London

A product owner who ships the thing, not just the ticket for the thing.

For seed and Series A founders with engineers but no product function — I own the roadmap, write specs precise enough to be executed, and take responsibility for what ships.

I run product for HERE, a members' club built around curated dinners: five live surfaces, four markets, one platform. Before that I led a 16-person product, engineering and design team for six years. I take a small number of fractional engagements alongside it.

Book an intro call Read the work first

Two days a week, from October

5production surfaces, live

209API endpoints owned

74cities, 28 timezones

6.5:1CLTV:CAC at Koiji

16person team led, 6 years

Position

I've built at this scope on both sides of the shift.

Before

Six years venture-backed, concept to launched consumer app, 16 people across product, engineering and design. Every misread requirement cost four people a sprint. That is why I write specifications the way I do.

Now

Five surfaces built by writing specs precise enough for coding agents to execute directly — then reviewing, testing and shipping the result. A well-specified idea can be built, seen and killed in a day.

Why it matters to you

You don't get a Notion board and a backlog. You get working software, a validated pricing model, and the operating documents your team runs on. Most fractional product people have one of those two models. I have both.

Evidence

Three decisions, and what they were worth.

Monetisation

App · CRM · Stripe

Took pricing from one currency to ten, without ten pricing systems

A single GBP price was quietly capping expansion — members in Warsaw and New York met a foreign number at the moment of highest intent. I specified a country→currency mapping across the Eurozone, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, Czechia and Hungary, with a defined fallback chain so no member could reach a broken checkout.

The sharper call was the retention discount: instead of a discount table per currency, I re-cut the save offer from a fixed £10 off to 50% off — one Stripe coupon that works in every market, forever.

10 currencies live · 1 coupon to maintain · 0 broken checkouts

Retention

App · CRM · Billing

Designed the win-back offer as a state machine, not a discount button

Save offers fail in predictable ways: a member claims the same benefit twice, or a failed card locks them out of ever receiving another. I specified the offer as a seven-state lifecycle, with the transition table as the single source of truth for the database constraint, the API types and the labels ops reads in the CRM.

Two decisions carried it: accepted is terminal, so a consumed benefit can never be re-granted; and a retryable failure can still expire at period end, so an un-retried payment doesn't block a member from future offers forever. Shipped dark, reconciled against Stripe, then cut over.

7 states · 0 double-grants · churn reasons the team actually opens

Supply side

Restaurant portal

Built the supply side of a two-sided marketplace, then wrote the manual for it

Curated dinners only work if restaurants stay in the loop. I designed the booking lifecycle end to end and shipped it across London, New York, Rome and Florence: either party can propose, four clear statuses, a single-pending-proposal rule so neither side loses track.

The details that made it usable were operational. Attendance locks at midnight in the restaurant's own city, so the data can be trusted. Restaurants onboard by magic link, not a password form they'd abandon. And a no-show league table turned a recurring partner complaint into something the team could act on.

4 markets live · 31 endpoints · ops guide shipped with it

Engagements

Three ways to use me.

2–3 days / week

Embedded product owner

Own the roadmap, write the specs, run the release cycle. For teams with engineers and no product function.

Monthly retainer

4–6 weeks, fixed scope

Zero to first version

Your idea to a working, instrumented product in real users' hands — built and shipped, not mocked.

Fixed fee, quoted up front

Ad hoc

Monetisation & retention review

Pricing, packaging, checkout, churn and win-back. Findings, a prioritised plan, and the specs to execute it.

Day rate

Sectors I know best: consumer subscription, marketplaces and two-sided supply, membership and community, hospitality operations.

About

Founder-adjacent by default. I've raised the round and had the restaurant conversation, not just the backlog.

Founder, CEO and product owner at Koiji from 2019 to 2025 — venture-backed, concept to launched consumer app, a 16-person team, and a 6.5:1 CLTV:CAC ratio that decided the roadmap rather than decorating a slide. I raised the angel and institutional rounds and ran investor relations throughout.

Before product, three years a corporate lawyer at Simpson Thacher and Goodwin Procter — cross-border private equity, fund formation, due diligence. It reads as a different career. It isn't: it's why I read a payment integration the way I'd read an indemnity clause, on the assumption that the edge case nobody modelled is the one that costs you.

Education: Postgraduate Data Science, University of Cambridge · MSc Business Innovation, Birkbeck · LLB Law, BPP
Platform: TypeScript, React, React Native, Node, PostgreSQL, OpenAPI-first API design, Stripe
Current: Founder & Product Lead, HERE

Tell me what's stuck. Thirty minutes, no pitch.

Two lines about the team and the problem is enough. If I'm not the right person, I'll say so on the call and tell you what I'd do instead.

Book an intro call alexanderfm93@gmail.com +44 7834 402550