Product leadership
for early-stage SaaS
When building fast starts to break down
Let's Talk
✉️ hello@arborproductsolutions.com
How Arbor Works
Most of Arbor’s work is hands-on, stepping directly into product gaps during high-stakes moments — leading teams, shaping direction, and owning decisions alongside founders. Advisory and coaching work exists to support that goal: helping founders and teams build the muscle to do this work themselves over time.
In these moments, Arbor helps teams get oriented quickly, align on what matters, and put just enough structure in place to reduce drag, cut through noise, and keep shipping as the company scales.
Arbor engagements are designed around three layers:
  1. Product judgment — Framing the right problems, making tradeoffs explicit, and helping leaders decide what matters most.
  1. Product execution — Discovery, interviews, analysis, shipping MVP code, roadmap shaping, and hands-on support.
  1. Product systems — Feedback loops, tooling, rituals, and lightweight operating models that help teams move faster with less friction.
Arbor Product Solutions is a product practice led by Evan Michner, a product leader with 20 years of experience building and evolving SaaS products.
Evan has worked as a Product leader with founders and engineering-led teams at companies like FullStory, Atlassian, LaunchNotes, and H-E-B, often during moments where ambition outpaced product structure.
Engagement options
EMBEDDED PRODUCT LEADERSHIP
Retained Fractional Product Work
Arbor partners closely with companies where there is no existing product function to do the work — strengthen decision-making, align priorities, and execute. This work often spans strategy, discovery, roadmap shaping, operating cadence, and team enablement.
Retained fractional engagements are execution-heavy.
PRODUCT ADVISORY - LIMITED
Product Advisory (Leadership & Hiring)
Lightweight advising/coaching for leaders who need a senior product perspective for a season, without a hands-on engagement. Advisory engagements focus on judgment and direction, not day-to-day execution.
Examples include:
  • Product hiring & team setup — Designing the first product role, interview process, and success criteria; partnering with recruiters as needed.
  • Engineering empowerment — Showing engineering teams how to work the product and discovery side to own outcomes end-to-end.
  • Exec clarity sessions — Leading exec teams through tough calls and growth plans.
COMING SOON
Product Operations Infrastructure
As teams grow, product friction often shows up as scattered signals and coordination cost: customer feedback spread across tools, unclear ownership, and teams shipping without shared context. Setting up customer feedback and insight loops, establishing customer research rhythms, defining product rituals, building dashboards, and putting tools together to operate well.
Every engagement begins with a short conversation to understand your team, your product, and where better product decisions will matter most next.
If there’s mutual fit, Arbor designs a focused way to move forward and brings the right support in at the right time.
Proof
"Evan has an uncanny ability to understand people and guide them toward clarity. Evan didn’t just push his perspective — he made me believe it. A masterclass in product development. Whatever your problem, let Evan help you figure it out."
Emil Ivov, Founder
"Evan has a remarkable ability to distill complexity into clarity, consistently zeroing in on what truly matters…He balances strategic vision with practical execution, setting our product direction through customer-centric thinking and pragmatic decision-making. His calm demeanor and deescalating approach were invaluable in difficult situations."
Salvatore Sodano, Engineering Leader
"Evan is that rare product management unicorn at the crossroads of engineering, product, and marketing, blending all three to turn complexity into clarity and vision into reality. His crisp communication style, exceptional drive, and insatiable curiosity make him an unstoppable force in delivering products that matter."
Jake Brereton, Founder