At Convex, we didn’t start out offering Product Management services. Our initial offering was focused on engineering leadership.

We would frequently get called in by clients to help them “fix” their engineering teams. The CEO might tell us, “We have no idea how good our engineering team is, or how ready our stack is to scale.”

One VP said, “Our engineering team has lost the confidence of the organization. They can’t seem to get anything out on a schedule, and when they do it’s riddled with bugs. The rest of the company is clamoring for work to be done on their projects, but the engineering team seems to be unable to make any progress or take on new things.”

We were more than happy to jump in. We would meet with the teams and lots of other people in the organization, get a feel for the engineering team and the personalities involved, and quickly start overhauling the team and working with them on their process.

In short order we would have a highly efficient engineering team pumping out high-quality features on a reliable schedule.

We would quickly realize, however, that the organization had other problems: their prospects and customers weren’t interested in buying the company’s product(s).

Given our decades of product management experience, we quickly realized that a significant number of our customers had product problems: they had little to no customer traction and they were not sure how to get there.

As a result we began offering product management leadership services in addition to our fractional CTO services. We started to help customers configure their discovery process so that it was ongoing and a constant source of information about the market and the problems of their prospective customers.

We worked with them to structure tight feedback loops so the product team was constantly plugged in to what was happening with prospects, customers, and the market at large.

We helped them put into place systems to prioritize features and projects, and to test them quickly and cheaply to avoid investing in invalid assumptions.

Today, Convex helps customers accelerate their product and engineering efforts to get to customer traction and scale more quickly and effectively.

Focusing on engineering alone is counterproductive if customer traction is weak. Get strong traction and product/market fit first, then deal with engineering and scale.