Reviewed by Dr. Dmytro Nasyrov, Founder and CTO • Last updated April 24, 2026
Digital Product Management
Pharos Production offers Digital Product Management services that bridge the gap between business strategy and technical execution.
- 90+ engineers
- 18 industries
- 13+ years in business
Reviewed by Dmytro Nasyrov
Founder and CTO
23+ years in custom software development. Led 70+ projects across FinTech, healthcare, Web3 and enterprise. ISO 27001 certified team.
What is digital product management as a service?
Authoritative citations 12 sources
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OpenView SaaS Benchmarks
The OpenView annual SaaS benchmarks report compiles KPI medians across ARR growth, net revenue retention, CAC payback and gross margin for early-stage through public SaaS companies, which we use to calibrate architecture investment versus growth stage.
openviewpartners.com
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SaaS Capital Index
SaaS Capital publishes quarterly valuation multiples and growth benchmarks for private SaaS companies, useful reference material when translating engineering investment into valuation impact conversations with founders and CFOs.
saas-capital.com
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ChartMogul SaaS Metrics Reference
ChartMogul maintains a definitive taxonomy of SaaS metrics including MRR movement, cohort retention and expansion revenue, which directly shapes the billing and analytics schemas we ship inside every multi-tenant platform build.
chartmogul.com
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Stripe Atlas Guides
Stripe Atlas publishes engineering-grade guides on SaaS billing, subscription lifecycle, tax and global payments that we treat as reference material for founders building the revenue infrastructure under their product.
stripe.com
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AWS Well-Architected SaaS Lens
The AWS Well-Architected SaaS Lens formalises multi-tenant isolation patterns, tenant onboarding, metering and noisy-neighbour control that we apply to every client engagement building on AWS regardless of SaaS scale.
docs.aws.amazon.com
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Google Cloud Architecture Framework
The Google Cloud Architecture Framework covers operational excellence, security, reliability and cost optimization pillars that inform the reference architectures we use for GCP-resident SaaS builds including BigQuery-backed analytics tenants.
cloud.google.com
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Azure Well-Architected SaaS Guidance
Microsoft publishes multi-tenant SaaS guidance for Azure covering deployment stamps, tenant routing and per-tenant cost attribution, which we reference for Microsoft-centric clients and Dynamics 365 adjacent products.
learn.microsoft.com
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OWASP SaaS Security Checklist
OWASP maintains application security guidance that we adapt into per-tenant threat models including tenant data isolation failures, authorization bypass and cross-tenant injection risks every multi-tenant platform must treat as first-class concerns.
owasp.org
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SOC 2 Trust Services Criteria (AICPA)
The AICPA Trust Services Criteria define the controls measured in SOC 2 engagements across security, availability, confidentiality, processing integrity and privacy, which we design into the platform baseline for every SaaS client pursuing enterprise contracts.
aicpa-cima.com
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Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application PaaS
Gartner Magic Quadrant reports on application PaaS, API management and iPaaS identify leading platforms and completeness-of-vision trends, which we use to validate vendor selection at discovery before committing a SaaS build to a long-term infrastructure partner.
gartner.com 2016
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Auth0 Identity Best Practices
Auth0 engineering publishes reference guidance on SaaS identity including multi-tenant user pools, social and enterprise SSO, MFA rollout and RBAC modelling, which shapes our default identity architecture for new multi-tenant builds.
auth0.com
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ProductLed Growth Playbook
The ProductLed playbook documents onboarding, activation and expansion patterns that the most efficient modern SaaS companies rely on, shaping the free-trial, self-serve and in-product upgrade flows we build into SaaS engagement front ends.
productled.com
- Engagements without engineering leadership to work alongside
- Projects where the client wants advice but not execution
- PM engagements in domains requiring specialized regulatory expertise
- Roles where a full-time PM hire would be better
Digital product management at Pharos Production at a glance
- PM engagements: 10+ embedded product management engagements since 2019 across SaaS, FinTech, healthcare-adjacent and enterprise
- PM level: Senior and principal PMs with 10-20+ years experience; matched to client domain and stage
- Engagement model: Part-time embed (10-20 hours/week) or surge capacity for launches; minimum engagement 3 months
- Pricing: Part-time embed from $12,000/month; surge engagements time-and-materials; full-time handoff after 6-9 months
- Timeline: Onboarding 1-2 weeks; typical engagement 3-9 months; handoff with 30-day overlap
- Specializations: Pre-PMF discovery, roadmap stabilization, launch execution, continuous discovery coaching, PM process introduction
- Honest scope: We recommend full-time hires over embeds when engagement would run longer than 9 months
Embedded PM engagements in practice
Embedded PM engagements run as a lightweight commitment: discovery defines the product surface and success criteria; the embedded PM joins client ceremonies from day one; regular check-ins with Pharos engagement manager; handoff when a permanent PM is hired or the engagement scope closes.
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Phase 01 / 04 Paid Discovery
2-4 weeks- Technical validation
- Architecture proposal
- Scope refined estimate
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Phase 02 / 04 Iterative Build
2-week sprints- Working demos every sprint
- CTO review at milestones
- ADRs documented
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Phase 03 / 04 Production Readiness
- Monitoring and alerting
- Security audit Pen test
- Runbooks and rollback
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Phase 04 / 04 Support
Ongoing- Security patches
- Performance tuning
- 4h SLA response
Pharos Verified Delivery applied to 70+ production applications since 2013
Product leadership engagements we ran
Three engagements where Pharos embedded product managers helped startups and mid-market teams ship more deliberately.
Founder-led product with no PM. Roadmap changing weekly based on customer calls. Engineering burned out on constant context switches.
Pharos PM embedded at 15 hours per week for 7 months. Roadmap stabilized around 3 outcome-driven bets. Engineering velocity recovered; team morale improved measurably.
The PM did not do anything fancy — she just made the "no" calls the founder was too close to make. By month 3, the roadmap was a single page with 3 bets and explicit "not now" items. Engineering knew what they were building and why.
Internal PM team needed surge capacity for a major launch. Hiring a full-time PM would have taken 4 months; launch was in 3.
Pharos PM embedded for the 3-month launch window. Launch shipped on time with all 4 core features. Internal PM team stayed focused on post-launch iteration.
Surge PM engagements work well with clear scope. We defined exactly what the embedded PM owned (feature spec + cross-functional coordination for 4 features) and what the internal team owned (strategy, roadmap beyond launch). No ambiguity meant no friction.
Engineering team strong but no formal product discovery process. Features shipped, some landed, some did not.
Pharos PM embedded for 6 months, introducing continuous discovery, user research cadence and outcome-based roadmap planning. Feature success rate up from 40% to 78%.
We brought Teresa Torres's continuous discovery framework and applied it to the client's context. The framework is not secret — the value was actually running it weekly until the team internalized the habits.
Client names anonymized under NDA. Full case studies at /cases/.
When embedded PM is not the answer
We decline roughly 30% of RFPs we receive. Forcing a bad fit costs both sides 3-6 months and damages outcomes. Here is how we think about scope:
- Engagements where the client wants advice but not execution
- Projects without engineering leadership to work alongside
- Domains requiring specialized regulatory expertise (healthcare, defense) where Pharos lacks depth
- Roles where a full-time PM hire would be better (skip the embed, hire directly)
- PM engagements with no clear success criteria
Embedded PM is the right call for pre-PMF startups, surge capacity during launches, and organizations that want to introduce PM practices without committing to a full-time hire yet. When the engagement would naturally run longer than 9 months, a full-time hire is usually better — the embed makes sense as a bridge, not a permanent solution.
Pharos product management portfolio
Pharos product management delivery portfolio observations, 2020-2026
Observations from 12 product management engagements 2020-2026 across B2B SaaS, FinTech, healthcare SaaS and vertical SaaS portfolios.
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9 of 12
Missing PQL definition
9 of 12 products we inherited had no shipped PQL definition. Adding one surfaced 2-3x expansion pipeline the revenue team had not seen.[12]
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7% to 28%
Feature kill rate uplift
Feature kill rate averaged 7% on inherited roadmaps. Instrumenting adoption per cohort moved it to 28% by quarter two, which freed engineering capacity for high-lift work.
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+18 pts
Activation uplift
Activation uplift on engagements that rebuilt onboarding against a named first-value event averaged 18 percentage points month over month.
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8 of 12
Privacy artefact debt
Privacy and security artefact debt (DPIA, data map, SOC 2 mapping) was missing on 8 of 12 products. Shipping it in PM surface rather than legal silo cut time-to-enterprise-contract 4-6 weeks.[9]
Digital product management outlook 2026-2027
Digital product management outlook 2026-2027 pivots from roadmap-driven cadence toward outcome-tied discovery with embedded analytics and per-tenant experimentation in every SaaS surface.
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Outcome-tied PM contracts
Outcome-tied PM contracts (NRR, activation rate, feature adoption as primary KPIs) replaced feature-count roadmaps in scaled SaaS teams.[1]
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Product-led growth instrumentation
Product-led growth instrumentation (activation, expansion, PQL scoring) became the default discovery layer rather than a premium add-on.[12]
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Per-tenant experimentation
Per-tenant experimentation with feature flags plus cohort analytics replaced site-wide A/B tests in B2B SaaS because tenant variance broke global significance thresholds.[3]
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SOC 2 plus privacy-by-design PM artefacts
SOC 2 plus privacy-by-design PM artefacts (DPIAs, data maps, retention policies) moved into the PM surface rather than staying in legal silos.[9]
Product management 90-day evaluation template
Evaluate a product management function at the 90-day mark using this 8-point check before you scale team or roadmap commitments.
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1
North-star metric
North-star metric defined with numeric baseline, target and cadence of review.
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2
Cohort funnels
Activation, retention and expansion funnels instrumented per tenant cohort.[3]
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3
PQL definition
PQL definition shipped and validated against a live cohort within 60 days.
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4
Experimentation platform
Feature flag and experimentation platform live with at least 3 active per-tenant experiments.
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5
Discovery cadence
Named user interviews per week, insights logged and triaged.
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6
Privacy artefacts
DPIA per major surface, data map, SOC 2 control mapping.[8]
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7
PM and engineering RACI
PM and engineering RACI documented; escalation pathway for scope debt.
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8
Outcome review
Quarterly outcome review with revenue leader, not only internal PM review.
Production post-mortem
Lesson from a 2024 B2B SaaS engagement
The engagement covered a vertical HR tech product with 410 tenants and 38k seats. The original roadmap optimized feature count per quarter. Month 4 NRR was 98% and activation held at 41%. We re-anchored the PM function to two north-star metrics (activation on first value event, expansion on second paid seat) and rebuilt the roadmap around the 3 features with measured lift on those cohorts.[12] We killed 6 shipped features that had zero impact on either metric and redirected engineering to onboarding, notifications and the in-product upgrade path. The rule that now ships with every engagement: if a feature cannot map to a named cohort metric, it does not get built.
Activation moved from 41% to 63% in 2 quarters and NRR passed 112% in quarter three.
Published record
Published Pharos research
Technical articles, comparison guides and methodology deep-dives we write from our own delivery experience.
Platforms We Work With
Trusted by Coinbase, Consensys, Core Scientific, MicroStrategy, Gate.io and 10+ more Web3 and enterprise platforms
16+ partnersOur 16 technology partners include:
- Consensys
- Gate Io
- Coinbase
- Ludo
- Core Scientific
- Debut Infotech
- Axoni
- Alchemy
- Starkware
- Mara Holdings
- Microstrategy
- Nubank
- Okx
- Uniswap
- Riot
- Leeway Hertz
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Consensys
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Gate Io
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Coinbase
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Ludo
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Core Scientific
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Debut Infotech
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Axoni
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Alchemy
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Starkware
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Mara Holdings
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Microstrategy
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Nubank
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Okx
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Uniswap
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Riot
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Leeway Hertz
About Founder and CTO
I design and build reliable software solutions — from lightweight apps to high-load distributed systems and blockchain platforms.
PhD in Artificial Intelligence, MSc in Computer Science (with honors), MSc in Electronics & Precision Mechanics.
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12 years in architecture of great software solutions tailored to customer needs for startups and enterprises
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23 years of practical enterprise customized software production experience
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Lecturer at the National Kyiv Polytechnic University
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Doctor of Philosophy in Artificial Intelligence
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Master’s degree in Computer Science, completed with excellence
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Master’s degree in Electronics and precision mechanics engineering
Choose your cooperation model
Current-state audit, use-case validation and strategic roadmap for your leadership team.
Deep-dive assessment, technology selection, architecture blueprint and phased implementation plan.
Full advisory retainer covering strategy, delivery oversight, governance and change management.
Prices vary based on project scope, complexity, timeline and requirements. Contact us for a personalized estimate.
Or select the appropriate interaction model
Request staff augmentation
Need extra hands on your software project? Our developers can jump in at any stage – from architecture to auditing – and integrate seamlessly with your team to fill any technical gaps.
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Whether you’re building from scratch or scaling fast, our engineers are ready to step in. You stay in control, and we handle the code.
Outsource your project
From first line to final audit, we handle the entire development process. We will deliver secure, production-ready software, while you can focus on your business.
Technologies, tools and frameworks we use
Our engineers work with 187+ technologies across blockchain, backend, frontend, mobile and DevOps - chosen for production reliability and performance.
AI and Machine Learning
LLM Providers 8
AI Frameworks 15
Vector Databases 7
MLOps and Infrastructure 11
AI Agent Tools 4
Blockchains
Private and Public Blockchains 33
Cloud Blockchain Solutions 4
DevOps
DevOps Tools 15
Clouds
Clouds 6
Databases
Databases 15
Brokers
Event and Message Brokers 7
Tests
Test Automation Tools 6
UI/UX
UI/UX Design Tools 12
Partnerships & Awards
Recognized on Clutch, GoodFirms and The Manifest for software engineering excellence
An approach to the development cycle
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Team Assembly
Our company starts and assembles an entire project specialists with the perfect blend of skills and experience to start the work.
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MVP
We’ll design, build, and launch your MVP, ensuring it meets the core requirements of your software solution.
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Production
We’ll create a complete software solution that is custom-made to meet your exact specifications.
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Ongoing
Continuous Support
Our company will be right there with you, keeping your software solution running smoothly, fixing issues, and rolling out updates.
FAQ
Quick answers to common questions about custom software development, pricing, process and technology.
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Coaching is giving advice. Embedded PM is doing the work.
Our PMs sit in client standups, write specs, run user research sessions, make trade-off calls and own outcomes alongside the client team. If the client wants advice without execution, a fractional CTO or strategy consultant is a better fit.
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Part-time embed (10-20 hours/week) from $12,000/month. Surge engagements are time-and-materials.
Typical engagement 3-9 months. Full-time hire transition fee applies if the client wants to convert the PM to a full-time employee.
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Hire full-time when you know the engagement would naturally run longer than 9 months, when the PM needs to build long-term relationships with customers and stakeholders, or when you have the budget for a senior PM ($180K-$280K base). Embedded PM is a bridge; full-time is the permanent solution.
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We decline advisory-only engagements, projects without engineering leadership to work alongside, domains requiring specialized regulatory expertise we lack, and engagements where a full-time hire would obviously be better.
The Pharos takeaway on product management
Product management earns its multiple only when it ties engineering investment to measured business outcomes per cohort, not when it ships on time against a roadmap nobody funded with discovery data. Pharos runs PM engagements with instrumented funnels, per-tenant experimentation, PQL definitions and SOC 2-grade privacy artefacts wired into the product surface from week one.[1]
Book a 30-minute product management audit call
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Our offices
Headquarters in Las Vegas, Nevada. Engineering office in Kyiv, Ukraine.