Hi friends!

Since I parted ways with Workstep 2 months ago, I’ve spent time following my own advice on career building and rethinking “the product of me.”

As with any real product, your personal product exists in a dynamic environment: the product itself evolves (hopefully for the better!), your understanding of it changes and the market is under constant change.

I came to this junction with two key considerations at the top of my mind:

1. Both of my last 2 tours-of-duty (Workstep and Teachable) took exactly 2 years and 7 months. In hindsight, the transformations we achieved should’ve taken at most 12 months to complete.

2. In a very tight market where buyers have the power, bulk commodity products lose. In the post-ZIRP tech job market meltdown, the people I saw finding jobs successfully were narrow specialists.

My hypothesis on #1’s biggest challenge is that the nature of permanent W2-based employment incentivizes long arcs over urgent rapid transformations.

As I’m defining myself as a transformation leader, getting hired into the permanent payroll sets things up wrong from the jump. I needed to switch from a house cat to a feral alley cat.

On #2, I was confident in where I had been going directionally for years already. The world was full of struggling scaleups, especially given the wartime environment of the current economic climate.

But I needed to further refine my core thesis and messaging as a B2B SaaS executive focusing on the turbulent times of “the adolescence”.

So, I started 2 concurrent processes:

1. I Interviewed! Worked my network to get in front of as many consultants, fractionals and hustlers in the tech space as possible to understand their alley cat lifestyle.

2. I Wrote! Started this newsletter. Surprise, you’ve been used! The key purpose of this newsletter has been structuring my experiences into written-out theses that other people can chime in on—for me to iterate and improve.

The result: Tommi Forsstrom Consulting

I’ll cut to the chase: I am no longer available for permanent positions.
(Unless you want to hire me to work at Disney Parks, but that’s a whole other topic)

www.tommiforsstrom.com

After meeting with a few dozen people who’ve lived the feral life for a while, the decision was easy.

Most of the folks I met with had had their ups and downs: struggles with creating a pipeline of business, botched projects, terrible customers, periods of no active gigs etc. But even the ones with the most dramatic challenges, when posed with the question “would you go back to full-time jobs?”, the answer was uniformly and unequivocally “hell-to-the-NOPE!”

So, starting today, I’m shutting the house door behind me and entering the alley.

I’m now an independent consultant, available for different types of engagements:

• Fractional Chief Product Officer—for when your need to expedite transformation exceeds your ability to spend on a full-time permanent leader.
  (read this excellent blog post on the merits of using fractional executives)

• Executive Advisor—for when you’ve got the right people, but they lack experience.

• Interim Chief Product Officer—for when you’re bringing on the right long-term leader and the process will take 3-6 months, but you need someone at the wheel right now and for the new leader’s onramp to be 3 weeks instead of 3 months.

• Product Team and Operations Audit—for when you’ve got the team, but they aren’t structured or operating in the most efficient way.

• Product Team Evaluation—for when you need to figure out how strong your bench actually is.

• Leader Coaching and Advisory—for when you need an unbiased 3rd party to gut-check your strategic decisions as a leadership team.

• Strategy Tightening—for when you need someone to cut through the noise and tell you to sunset half your product and tighten your ICP to a fraction of what it was.

This is my roster of services as I envision it in October 2024. But as with any product, I’m starting very much from square 1 and these are my hypotheses. Every engagement with customers and prospects is an opportunity for me to iterate on what my product does well and how it’s brought to the world most effectively.

What now?

Well, the good news is that I have all the incentive in the world to continue writing this newsletter, dropping intentionally controversial hot takes on LinkedIn and generally being an active participant in the Product and Scaleup communities. You might even run into me at conferences again now.

I’ve also hopped in to help with the Product Leader Summit on their excellent virtual Speaker Series webinars. Keep an eye out on some excellent sessions happening in the near future and our social channels popping into action! This session on Fractional CPOs they held a month ago was hugely influential for me on this decision.

I’m also starting a few small contracts to get my feet wet, but I’ve got plenty of bandwidth to help other companies too, so please feel free to keep forwarding this newsletter or my website to people you know—founders and VCs especially.

Ok, that’s it for my little selfish side track from this newsletter. Next week I’ll be back with a more hard-hitting and universally valuable topic!

Just so I play the hits to the fans, let me close with some relevant memes.

🙏 Some asks for you!

Thank you for reading—hope you found this chapter valuable. If you feel like you’d like to help me out a bit, please consider doing one or more of the following:

💌 Drop me a line via email or give me feedback with this form so I can make this newsletter better for you—happy to take requests on topics or answer more specific questions in the privacy of a 1:1 conversation.

📩 Forward this email to someone you feel would get value from it—or direct them to newsletter.tommiforsstrom.com to get them in the secret gang 🤫!

📆 Get on my schedule if you really want to chat. I love spending my free time sparring with peers, emerging talent and awesome people.

🤝 Intro me to your favorite startup CEO that is looking to scale or VC/PE fund operator that has parts of their portfolio needing a spruce-up.

📺️ Check out The Experiment with Tommi & Giff on Youtube

Until next week!

Tommi
tommiforsstrom.com