When to hire a Head of AI instead of us
A Head of AI runs about $500,000 a year once equity is counted. Sometimes that's the right hire, and we sell the alternative, so we'll tell you when.
Engagement structure · Run
Fractional Product & AI Leadership
Quarterly retainer · pricing on the discovery call
Product, growth and AI all need an executive owner, and they're hard to split up: the AI work only pays off inside the product and growth roadmap. You can't yet justify about $500,000 a year for a Head of AI when you don't know what the role should be, and a Head of Product search takes months. So you rent the seat. A senior operator holds it on a quarterly retainer and owns the roadmap, the vendor calls, the hiring criteria and the board narrative. The seat gets filled now, and you skip the search.
Patrick takes the seat himself. He has led products at PopCap, NaturalMotion and Wooga, so the seat covers the whole roadmap, not only the AI line. We own it end to end: what gets built, which workflows get automated, what gets bought and what gets killed. We sit in your executive cadence, run working sessions with your team, write the board narrative and set the hiring bar for whoever takes the seat full-time, a Head of Product, a Head of AI, or both. When you're ready, we hand over to someone we helped you scorecard.
How it runs
- Roadmap
- Growth
- AI
- Hiring
- Handover
What you get
Inclusions
- Weekly executive cadence + monthly working sessions with your team
- Ownership of the product and growth roadmap, with the AI work inside it, planned quarterly against your commercial cycle
- Product and growth priorities set from your own data: retention, monetization, liveops cadence and UA
- Vendor selection, build/buy/partner decisions, tooling consolidation
- Hiring scorecards and interview loops for your future full-time product or AI leader
- Board-ready reporting on product, growth and AI investment, outcomes and risk
- Workflows automated on Alexandria where the roadmap calls for it, with Patrick hands-on for specific initiatives
Commercial terms
Quarterly retainer, billed monthly. Minimum two quarters. Day rate and scope reviewed each quarter; either side may end the engagement with 30 days' notice after the minimum.
Fit
When this engagement is the right call
- You need one executive owning product, growth and AI, but aren't ready for a full-time hire
- Your AI work is fragmented across departments and nobody owns the whole
- Your product roadmap and your AI work are run by different people and rarely meet
- You want someone defending the roadmap to the board, not only in engineering reviews
- You want to get to a full-time Head of Product or CAIO on purpose, with the scorecard ready when you hire
Next step
A 30-minute call with Patrick
If you're deciding whether to hire a Head of Product, a Head of AI or rent the seat, that's the call. Patrick is the operator who'd take it.
Further reading
The definition is the price
A vendor offering to be paid only if the number moves sounds like the fix for paying for hours. Whether it is depends on a definition most proposals leave out.