Five ways in. One way of working.
I diagnose what's actually broken in your product and your delivery, recommend the fix in writing with my name on it, and stay in the seat until what I recommended is built and shipped.
How that shows up depends on what you need. A 60-minute paid scoping call (your First Read). A 5-day Diagnostic. A focused Sprint. Weekly embedded oversight. Or full-cycle delivery on a specific bet. One founder at a time. No agency. No handoff.
Most engagements start with the £500 First Read or the £4,000 Diagnostic. Each tier is a complete piece of work, not a step on a sales ladder.
- The metric that matters is flat and nobody can tell you why in one sentence
- The roadmap keeps growing but what's shipping isn't landing
- Your team is too close, your board is too far, and you're holding both views
- You need an honest read before the next board meeting, not after
Why this exists
Most teams aren't trying to mislead you. Delivery is just messy when nobody outside the team is paid to see it clearly. The team is inside the bet. The board is outside it. The founder is in the middle, holding both views and unable to put either down.
Without an independent read, every approval feels like a guess. Every "almost done" costs you another sprint. By the time something is clearly off, it's expensive to fix and the conversation is harder than it needed to be.
This is the layer between your team and your board.
Diagnose what's broken. Recommend the fix in writing. Stay in the seat until it's shipped.
"They have gone above and beyond my expectations: responsive, breaking down concepts so they're easy to grasp, and working well with third-party contractors."
Founder, Karanta KidsFive ways to work with me
Each tier is a complete piece of work with its own invoice. They're not cumulative. You buy what you need.
First Read
£500 · 45 min call + 1 hour pre-work
You send your product, the flat metric, and what you think is wrong. I spend an hour with it, then we walk through it live. Written read within 2 working days. Credited against a Tier 1 Diagnostic if booked within 30 days.
Diagnostic
£4,000 · 5 working days
The 4-lens read of your product, your data, and your delivery: walkthrough, heuristic evaluation, engagement and funnel data, and user validation when needed. Output is a written brief covering what's broken, what's working, what to do next, and in what order. One read-out call. No deck.
Sprint
£12,000 to £18,000 · 6 to 8 weeks
One specific outcome from the Diagnostic, shipped. Scoped and priced after the Diagnostic, never before. I lead the work end to end, in your team's standups and reviews, against a defined success measure agreed with you up front.
Embedded Oversight
£8,000 to £12,000 / month · 3 month minimum
I'm in your week. Standups, sprint reviews, the hard conversations with your team and your board. I read the PRs, the designs, the test plans. I'm the independent read on whether what's being built is what was promised. The role nobody on the inside is paid to play.
Full Cycle
3 to 6 months · From £40,000
Diagnose, recommend, and execute end to end on a defined product bet. Priced on scope, not on hours. For founders who already know the bet they need to make and want one operator accountable for the whole arc, from honest diagnosis through to shipped outcome.
How I diagnose
I don't start with user calls. I start with your product and your data. Four lenses, in this order.
Product walkthrough
I use your product the way your users do, end to end, on real devices. Not your power users, not your team. The quiet majority who try it, shrug, and leave. I write down every place I hesitated, got confused, or gave up.
Heuristic evaluation
Against the patterns I've seen ship and fail across 22 years and a 52,000-member operator network. Not a checklist. Pattern recognition you can't fake.
Engagement and funnel data
Where users drop, where they stall, where the metric you're reporting to the board diverges from the metric that actually predicts retention. I read your data the way an operator reads it, not the way a deck reads it.
User validation, when needed
When the first three lenses leave a question I can't answer and only the user can close it, I run focused validation. Not as a default deliverable. Only when the diagnosis demands it.
The build that was busy but going sideways.
A founder eight weeks into a build suspected something was off. The team was busy. Progress felt directionless. The diagnosis surfaced what the team couldn't say out loud: the feature being prioritised wasn't the one their target users actually needed. The remaining sprint was restructured around the one problem worth solving. The app launched on time, with a narrower and cleaner feature set users understood immediately.
What founders say
They have gone above and beyond my expectations: responsive, breaking down concepts so they're easy to grasp, and working well with third-party contractors.
Founder, Karanta KidsA fast, focused review that flagged critical issues. Thanks to Pearl's input, we went into testing with confidence and clarity.
Louise Orrell, Founder, Tradys for BusinessFrequently asked
Still weighing it up? These come up a lot.
Because the call has real value, not because I'm filtering for cash. You leave with a written 1-page summary of what I think is actually going on, what kind of engagement would fix it, and what it would cost. You can act on that whether we work together or not. The £500 also credits back against a Diagnostic if you book one within 30 days, so for founders who do go ahead it's effectively zero.
A fractional CPO owns your roadmap. A consultant advises on strategy and walks away. I do neither. Your CPO is inside the bet. I'm the read from outside it. Different job, complementary, not competing. Unlike a consultant I stay in the seat until what I recommended is built and shipped. Unlike a fractional CPO I don't carry the roadmap; I read it honestly.
No. Most founders enter at the First Read or the Diagnostic, but warm referrals from VCs and past clients sometimes go straight to a Sprint or Embedded Oversight. Nobody starts at Full Cycle. That's what a Diagnostic or Sprint grows into when the bet is bigger than a single shipped outcome.
No. Each tier is a complete piece of work with its own invoice. The only credit-back is the £500 First Read rolling into a Diagnostic. A Sprint isn't on top of a Diagnostic; it's the next standalone engagement, scoped after the Diagnostic told us what to do.
For the diagnosis, no. My focus is on what the product does when a real person uses it, on your engagement data, and on how delivery is running. I'll need access to the product, your key user journeys, your engagement and funnel data, and your honest read on what's been shipping. If the recommendation requires changes to the codebase, processes, or design, the execute phase covers that, sometimes with me leading directly and sometimes with specialist support brought in under my oversight.
The aim is fewer misunderstandings, not more. Clearer expectations, calmer conversations, less defensive back and forth. Most senior product and engineering leads respond well to structured independent clarity. It protects them too. The only people who push back are the ones who'd been hiding something. That's also useful information.