Hiring consultants should not be about filling a temporary gap — it should be a strategic move to strengthen product development, your teams, and your organization’s ability to deliver value. Yet many engagements fail already at the briefing stage. This guide provides concrete steps, checklists, and perspectives to ensure the right match between the need, the consultant, and the expected delivery.
Most failed consulting engagements could have been avoided.
Often, the problem isn’t that the con but that expectations and competencies were never aligned adequately from the start. Today’s product organizations face a constant shift: new roadmap priorities every quarter, rapidly changing competence needs, and a talent market that’s both fragmented and broad. When matched right, consultants become strategic assets. When matched wrong, they create friction, rework, and loss of momentum.
1. Start with the problem, not the role
A common mistake is defining the need based on a title:
- “We need a Senior Product Manager”
- “We need a UX Designer 50% for three months”
But a title says nothing about what actually needs to be delivered. Before writing a brief, ask internally:
- What problem should be solved? Backlog issues? Technical debt? Release bottlenecks?
- What outcome do we need? Increased experimentation capacity? Better retention? Faster time-to-value?
- What constraints do we have? Time, budget, tech stack, stakeholders?
- What competencies or traits are missing in our team to reach our goals over the next 3–6–12 months?
This creates clarity in both the competence profile and what the assignment must lead to.
2. Specify both technical skills and personal qualities
In tech and product work, skills are often only half the story. A consultant can be brilliant with Figma, React, or OKRs, but still not work well in your specific environment.
Think about the requirement profile in three dimensions:
Technical competence
What actually needs to be produced:
- Product strategy, roadmapping, prioritization
- UX research, information architecture, prototyping
- DevOps, cloud infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code
- Backend/frontend in relevant tech stack
- Data & analytics (e.g., dbt, Snowflake, Amplitude)
Collaboration skills
Crucial for the consultant to make an impact:
- Stakeholder management
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Communication with both tech and business
- Ability to create structure in chaos
- Self-leadership and accountability
Cultural fit
Does the consultant align with the team’s and organization’s way of working?
- Are you product-led or stakeholder-driven?
- Is the environment startup-like or heavy on compliance?
- Is it discovery- or delivery-intensive?
- Is on-site presence expected?
Often this is what determines whether the engagement succeeds or creates friction.
3. Write a brief that allows you to find the right person
A good brief enables the consulting company to find the right consultant, not just an available one. Include:
- Context: team, product, roadmap, organizational ways of working
- Goal: what should be achieved by the end of the assignment
- Scope and responsibility: ownership, stakeholders, expected maturity level
- Output: artifacts, processes, systems, deliverables
- Practical framework: scope, on-site policy, hybrid, seniority level
- Competence requirements: must-have vs desirable
- Risks and dependencies: e.g., lack of product-market fit, low discovery discipline
- Onboarding: access, team intro, expectations
The clearer this is, the better the match — and the sooner the consultant can contribute.
4. Set up clear onboarding
Consultants perform significantly better when the organization has a well-thought-out onboarding process:
- Access and environments on day one
- Intro meeting with product/tech leadership
- Roadmap walkthrough
- Stakeholder mapping
- Clear definition of responsibilities and decision authority
A common issue is expecting the consultant to own the work while giving them only a junior-level mandate, leading to alignment meetings instead of deliveries.
5. Work with continuous check-ins
Create a 30-60-90 plan together not just a kickoff. Define:
- What good delivery looks like
- Which KPIs or leading indicators you’ll track
- What risks and blockers you see
This builds a shared language and makes the work measurable.
6. Measure both output and outcome
You need two levels to understand if the engagement is successful:
Output (produced work):
- Design artifacts, user journeys
- Infra pipelines, test coverage
- Prototypes, backlog improvements
- Refactorings
Outcome (value created):
- Faster release cadence
- Increased user adoption
- Better retention
- Fewer incidents
- Better alignment
- Faster onboarding of new staff
It’s the outcome that creates real value for the business.
7. Close gracefully and retain knowledge
Consultants should leave your organization stronger than when they arrived. The wrap-up phase should include:
- Documentation and knowledge transfer
- Code handover and process manuals
- Risk logs and recommendations for next steps
- Stakeholder debrief
Think: “The consultant should accelerate the team even after they’ve left.”
Summary
Successful matching between product organizations and consultants is not about availability or hourly rate. It’s about:
- Clearly defined problem
- Right context and cultural fit
- Right competence, both technical and personal
- Fast and structured onboarding
- Continuous alignment
- Measurable delivery, output and outcome
- Smart offboarding that preserves knowledge
Start with the next brief and make it better than the previous.
