Phoenix: Product Strategy Director

The feature backlog has 147 items. Eleven of them were added this week — three from a sales call, two from the CEO's LinkedIn, one from a customer support ticket, and five from the engineering team's "nice to have" list. Nobody has scored any of them against a consistent prioritization framework. The roadmap deck was built in Figma by someone who doesn't work there anymore, shows Q2 features as "coming soon," and is the thing that gets shown to enterprise prospects even though Q2 ended seven months ago. The sprint planning meeting runs 90 minutes and results in a sprint that contains 14 story points more work than the team has completed in any of the last six sprints. The last PRD was written by the founder in a Google Doc, has 14 inline comments from engineering pointing out unresolved questions, and was handed off to development without any of those questions being answered because the sprint started before the PRD review was finished. The user interviews happened in January — six of them, with the same six early customers — and the insights from those interviews are somewhere in a notes document that was never synthesized into anything the roadmap team can act on.

Phoenix is a Product Strategy and Roadmap Director persona for product teams operating without a dedicated product leader — where the founder is making product decisions in between sales calls, the roadmap is a stakeholder-management document rather than a strategic one, and the gap between what users say they need and what ships is measured in quarters rather than sprints. On day one, Phoenix reads ROADMAP.md, FEATURES.md, USER_RESEARCH.md, and METRICS.md to map the complete product state before recommending any priorities. The first output is a product strategy assessment: what the product currently does, who it currently serves best, what the data in METRICS.md says about where the product is working, and where the roadmap shows work that is disconnected from either user evidence or strategic priority.

Unlike a project management tool that tracks tasks, Phoenix manages the decisions upstream of tasks — what to build, in what order, for whom, and why. The roadmap is the output of those decisions. The PRD is the documentation that makes those decisions executable by engineering without a meeting for every ambiguity.

What you get: SOUL.md — operating principles with 7 named anti-patterns (among them: never add a feature to the backlog without a documented user problem it solves, never ship a sprint that contains user stories without acceptance criteria). IDENTITY.md — first-day protocol, feature prioritization decision patterns, stakeholder communication standards. LISTING.md — this document. MANIFEST.json — product metadata. Memory files to populate: ROADMAP.md (product roadmap by quarter with feature descriptions, strategic rationale, and status), FEATURES.md (feature backlog with user problem, priority score, status, and owner), USER_RESEARCH.md (user interview notes, synthesis, key insights, open questions), METRICS.md (product metrics by feature and cohort, retention, activation, usage patterns). No external API keys required. Install time under 30 minutes in OpenClaw.

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Pricing Rationale

A Principal Product Manager in a growth-stage company earns $150,000–$200,000/year — $12,500–$17,000/month. A fractional Head of Product engagement runs $5,000–$10,000/month. At $69, Phoenix provides the strategic decision-making layer that a product leader spends the majority of their time on — prioritization, PRD writing, user feedback synthesis, and stakeholder alignment. One sprint that ships the right features instead of the backlog's loudest voices pays for Phoenix at a return that compounds with every sprint that follows.

Works Great With

• Meridian CMO — Phoenix drives the product; Meridian translates product capabilities into market messaging; the handoff is the customer insight that Phoenix surfaces from USER_RESEARCH.md and Meridian converts