Product & operations consulting
Frick Forward is my independent practice. I’m Jess Frick, and I bring senior product and operations leadership to organizations that need a clear read on the situation, momentum behind a decision, and someone willing to do the work rather than advise from the sidelines.
Sometimes that’s a focused six-week question. Sometimes it’s holding a product leadership seat while you figure out the permanent one. Either way, I stick around long enough to know whether it worked.
Where I’m useful
If one of these sounds like your week, we’ll have a productive first conversation.
Everyone technically agreed to it, nobody believes in it, and the work keeps getting relitigated in side channels. Somebody has to make the actual calls and explain them.
Dashboards, survey results, a folder of customer interviews. What's missing is the read: what customers are telling you, what it means for the product, and what you should do on Monday.
Acquisition, onboarding, pricing, retention, support load. Usually the problem sits between two of those, which is exactly why it hasn't been fixed.
Handoffs that need a human babysitter. Escalations that arrive the same way every week. The team is working hard and the machine is still leaking.
A search is underway, or the role is bigger than the budget. Meanwhile decisions pile up and the team drifts. I can hold the seat and leave it in better shape.
It shipped, the metrics are ambiguous, and the org moved on. Someone should find out whether it worked and act on the answer.
Ways to work together
Engagements range from a scoped project with a defined question to embedded senior leadership for a team in the middle of something big. Scope gets set after we talk, not from a menu.
Deciding what to build, what to charge for it, and how it reaches people.
Getting to a clear read on the situation before anyone spends a quarter on it.
Turning the decision into work that ships, with the seams closed.
How I work
Plenty of consultants can describe your problem back to you. What tends to be missing is someone who will make a call and then help carry it.
Not with a framework. The first weeks are spent talking to people, reading the data, and watching how work actually moves. The real constraint is rarely the one named in the kickoff.
Warmly, and with the reasoning attached. You are paying for judgment, not for a summary of the opinions already in the room. If I think the plan is wrong, you'll hear it early.
Recommendations are the cheap part. I'd rather help run the interviews, write the plan, sit in the standups, and be there when the thing ships and the numbers come in.
Product, ops, support, marketing, engineering. Most stubborn problems live between two teams, which means fixing them takes someone with standing in both.
Selected experience
I’ve held roles including Head of Product, Director of Product, EVP and VP of Operations, and General Manager, mostly in SaaS, web technology, hosting, and ecommerce. Current and recent work includes product consulting with Mozilla’s New Products organization, growth and operational strategy for small businesses, and digital strategy for hospitality and nonprofit clients.
Those engagements are mine, not endorsements. I mention them because the range is the point: the same questions show up whether the org has twelve people or twelve hundred.
Elsewhere: a 20% lift in average order value, and a 200% increase in units sold after repositioning a product and rebuilding how it was sold.
About
“What happens after launch is the interesting part.”
I’ve spent my career moving between product and operations, usually landing at the seams between teams, where the actual problem doesn’t fit neatly inside one department. That’s where the interesting work is. It’s also where things quietly go wrong for years.
I care a lot about what happens after launch. Did it work? What did we miss? What should change next, and who’s going to change it? Those questions get asked less often than you’d hope, partly because the people who made the plan have usually moved on to the next one. I like sticking around long enough to answer them and then act on the answers.
I’m direct, I’m curious about your customers, and I’m comfortable being the person who names the thing everyone has been working around. I’d rather be useful than impressive.
Contact
No pitch deck required. A short note about the situation is enough to figure out whether I’m the right help, and I’ll tell you plainly if I’m not.
Good first conversations usually cover what changed recently, what you’ve already tried, and what “better” would look like in three months.
Prefer LinkedIn? Message Jess there