Ideation to Launch
Fractional Chief Product Officer for 0→1
Building is cheap now. Being wrong still isn't. I own your roadmap, cut your v1 to the one job that matters, and stay for what comes next.
The Problem
One cost collapsed. The other didn't.
Building used to be expensive, so the cost chose for you — weak features died before anyone wrote them down. AI took that filter away. Building is nearly free and nothing chooses for you, so teams ship everything on the list. The cost of being wrong never moved.
Runway
Engineering months spent on features that never move a metric.
Focus
A team pulled in ten directions ships nothing sharply.
Timing
The window to win a market closes while you over-build.
You already know which half of your feature list will never get used. You are building it anyway. My job is to be the person paid to say no.
The Record
Two decades of product decisions, measured in dollars.
Matthieu's work has included
- AIG
- Microsoft
- Hilton
- PwC
- WebMD
Executive Roundtable
Fast is cheap now. Wrong is still expensive.
Seven founders. Sixty minutes. No pitch. We take the feature list you already have and find the one job your v1 has to do — then cut everything that isn't that.
Free. Small on purpose. If you leave with one sentence you can defend, it worked.
And when it's time to build
We define what to build. Then we build it.
A roadmap is only worth what gets shipped. When the MVP is scoped and you don't have a team to build it, mine will — web and mobile, fixed fee, and you own every line of it at handover.
About Matthieu
Twenty years in the room where companies decide what to build.
I founded the Product practice at PwC and grew it past $30M a year. I built the product studio at AIG. I shipped four security products at Google, and I ran customer experience for Hilton across three international markets.
Here's what I learned in all of it: most product decisions get made by whoever talks loudest in the meeting. Not by whoever understands the customer best.
So I stopped asking "can we build it?" — that question always has a yes, and that is the trap. The question that decides it is "who is worse off tomorrow if we don't?"
That's the job I do now. For founders who can't yet justify a full-time CPO — and can't afford to guess.
That is me.
I asked AI for a professional headshot. Four seconds later it handed me a confident, well-lit stranger — and never once asked whether it had got me right. Fast, cheap, and wrong. Which is exactly the job I get hired to prevent.
Straight answers
What founders ask before the first call.
What is a fractional CPO?
A senior product executive who owns your product strategy and roadmap part-time, on a monthly retainer, instead of as a full-time hire. You get the judgment without the salary, the equity, or the six-month search.
How much does a fractional CPO cost?
The US market runs roughly $8,000–$16,000 a month. My retainer starts at $9,500 a month for eight hours a week. Workshops, validation and MVP definition are fixed fees, quoted after we talk — and the MVP fee can be credited against the retainer.
Why not just hire a product manager?
Hire a PM when you know what to build and need someone to run it. Hire me when the roadmap keeps changing to match whoever spoke last, and a wrong guess costs you a quarter of runway.
How is this different from an agency?
An agency hands you a deck and leaves. I own the outcome — the roadmap, the MVP scope, and every decision in between — with weekly working sessions that carry on long after the deck would have been filed.
How many clients do you take?
Three. Eight hours a week each is the whole book, so there is no fourth seat. If I'm full I'll tell you, and I'll tell you when I'm not.
How fast can you start?
A first call is thirty minutes and I'll tell you on that call whether I'm the right person. Workshops usually run within two to three weeks. A retainer starts at the next month boundary.
Let's Build
Define the MVP. Ship the right product. Keep moving.
Thirty minutes. Tell me the product and where you're stuck. I'll tell you whether I'm the right person for it — and if I'm not, I'll say so.
- A scoped MVP, built around what customers actually need
- A sequenced roadmap — the next three releases, themed and prioritised
- A product owner who stays, with weekly working sessions