From PM to independent consultant — the first 90 days honestly

I had been a product manager for nine years — three companies, a couple of launches I was proud of, one complete disaster I learned more from than everything else combined. I knew what I was doing. I was, by most measures, good at it. I also couldn't face another product review cycle or another roadmap negotiation where the answer was already decided before the room convened. So in January, I stopped.

What I'm describing here is the first 90 days of independent consulting — specifically what happened, what I got wrong, what the money looked like, and what I'd do differently if I was starting again. I'm writing it because I spent months looking for honest accounts of this transition and found mostly LinkedIn success theatre and vague advice to "build your network." Here's the version I wanted to find.

Before day one: what I thought I was walking into

My plan, such as it was: I had two former colleagues at other companies who had mentioned, in the past, that they'd love to have me involved in their product work. I had nine years of domain expertise in B2B SaaS. I had a LinkedIn profile with 4,000 connections. I assumed the consultancy would build itself from the overlap of those three things, with a lag of maybe four to six weeks.

This was optimistic in the specific way that people who have been well-compensated employees are often optimistic about consulting: I had never had to sell anything. I had never had to price a service I was providing. I had never had to write a statement of work, issue an invoice, or follow up on an unpaid one. I had a skill set that was genuinely valuable and essentially no idea how to convert it into a business.

The two former colleagues both came through — eventually. One took eleven weeks to commit to a paid engagement. The other had budget frozen in Q1 and pushed to Q3. If I had structured my expectations around those two conversations, I would have been in genuine financial difficulty by week eight. I didn't, which was lucky rather than strategic.

Weeks one through four: the structure problem

The first thing that surprised me was how disorienting the absence of structure is. Not the work — I had plenty to do. The disorientation was more fundamental: there was no external scaffold telling me what mattered, what was urgent, or whether I was making progress. After nine years of quarterly OKRs and sprint cycles and someone else's calendar filling mine, the openness was simultaneously freeing and actively anxiety-producing.

I spent the first two weeks being busy in ways that felt productive but weren't: reorganising my home office, reading about consulting methodologies, having coffee chats with former colleagues that I told myself were "networking." I was avoiding the thing that actually mattered, which was having direct conversations with potential clients about whether they had a specific problem I could solve for money and whether they wanted to pay me to solve it.

Income in weeks one through four: £0. (I'm UK-based; the numbers that follow are in pounds, but the patterns are the same in any currency.) This wasn't alarming yet — I had budgeted for a slow start — but it was clarifying. The conversations that felt comfortable weren't producing the outcomes I needed. The conversations that felt uncomfortable were the ones that would.

Weeks five through eight: the pricing reckoning

In week five I had a proper scoping conversation with a Series A startup whose CPO I knew from a previous job. They had a product strategy problem that was genuinely interesting — a classic case of building without a clear sense of who the product was actually for. I prepared. The conversation went well. They asked my rate.

I said £600 a day.

There was a pause on the call that I still think about. The CPO said something like "let me think about that structure" and the engagement never happened. Later — much later — a mutual connection told me that the company had gone with a boutique consultancy charging £1,400 a day. The lesson was not subtle.

The correct day rate for an experienced, senior independent PM consultant in the UK market in 2026 is between £800 and £1,600 depending on specialisation, the type of engagement, and the client's stage. In the US market, the equivalent is roughly $1,000 to $2,000 per day, or $150 to $250 per hour for retained or advisory work. These are not aspirational figures — they're what the market pays people with demonstrable expertise and the ability to deliver outcomes. I was charging at the bottom of the range for entry-level consultants because I'd benchmarked against what I thought was fair rather than what the work was actually worth.

I repriced at £950 a day in week six. The next two prospective clients didn't blink. One of them came back to me six weeks after the initial conversation and said the rate was "reasonable given the seniority." The lower rate had, if anything, made me look cheaper in the wrong sense rather than accessible in the right one.

The first actual engagement: what it looked like

My first paid engagement came in week seven through a former colleague who had moved to a Series B e-commerce company. They needed help restructuring their product organisation after a bad hire at the CPO level, and they needed someone who could hold the room with the executive team while being independent of internal politics. This is, I now understand, exactly the kind of work that suits an independent PM consultant — high-stakes, short-term, specific expertise required, no desire from the client to make a permanent hire.

The engagement was twelve days over six weeks, at £950 a day, for a total of £11,400. They paid a 50% deposit before I started — a term I'd included because I'd read that you should, without fully expecting it to work, and it did. The work itself was not radically different from what I'd done as an employee; the difference was that I was doing it for a company that had hired me specifically for the expertise, with a clear deliverable and a clear end date, with no internal politics to manage beyond the immediate engagement.

The income for the first two months before that engagement: £0. The income for the month that engagement ran: £11,400. The income volatility between those two states was the defining feature of the first quarter and the thing nobody who's been a salaried employee is emotionally prepared for.

Weeks nine through twelve: what the pipeline actually looks like

By week nine I had the following in various stages:

One active engagement. Three conversations that I classified, with deliberate realism, as "might convert in sixty days." Two conversations that felt warm but had no concrete ask behind them. One inquiry from a company that wanted three months of full-time embedded work at a day rate that worked out to below what I'd been making as an employee — which I declined after two days of seriously considering it.

What I was learning is that the PM consultancy pipeline works on a different timescale than employment. A company with a product problem today will not have a consultant engaged this week. The decision process involves internal alignment, budget sign-off, a statement of work negotiation, and a legal review. Even with a warm connection and a clear brief, the time from "we should talk" to "here is a signed agreement" is typically four to eight weeks. Structuring your financial planning around anything faster than that is a recipe for panic.

What nobody tells you about the PM skill set in consulting

Nine years as a product manager prepares you extremely well for some parts of consulting and almost not at all for others.

What transfers directly: stakeholder management, strategy framing, the ability to hold a complex product problem in your head across multiple conversations, facilitating rooms where people disagree, prioritisation frameworks. All of this is immediately deployable and is the core of why clients hire you.

What doesn't transfer at all: sales, pricing, contract negotiation, cash flow management, invoicing, tax planning, and the psychological discipline to spend three hours on business development when you have nothing imminent to show for it. None of these are part of the PM role. All of them become your full responsibility on day one of independence.

The second thing that doesn't transfer is the accountability structure. As a PM you're accountable to a product, a roadmap, a team, a set of OKRs. As a consultant you're accountable only to the outcomes you've committed to in a statement of work, and only for the duration of the engagement. This sounds like freedom — and it is — but it also means there's no external force that prevents you from spending your mornings on administrative tasks and your afternoons reading industry blogs. Discipline about what you're doing and why has to be entirely self-generated. Some people find this genuinely liberating. Some find it corrosive. I found it harder than I expected, and I'm a reasonably self-directed person.

What I'd change about the first 90 days

I would commit to having one proper commercial conversation every week — not a coffee chat or a catch-up, but a conversation with a specific ask: "Do you have a problem I could help with? Here's what I'm doing. Here's the kind of engagement I'm looking for. Is there a fit here?" This sounds straightforward. It is straightforward. I avoided it for six weeks because it felt presumptuous, and that avoidance cost me several weeks of income.

I would set a rate and hold it. The underpricing in the first engagement wasn't just a financial cost — it affected how I was perceived. Higher rates, counterintuitively, often increase perceived value rather than decreasing willingness to engage. You are not doing anyone a favour by charging less than your work is worth.

I would get a simple CRM — even a spreadsheet — tracking every conversation, the last touchpoint, the next action, and a realistic probability of conversion. Flying blind on a pipeline of eight conversations across different stages is an entirely avoidable source of anxiety.

And I would have contracted something before leaving employment. The difference between starting with zero confirmed revenue and starting with one engagement already signed is not financial — it's psychological. Starting from zero is a harder and lonelier experience than it needs to be, and a small amount of preparation before leaving makes it significantly more manageable.

The career pivot track on the Start Here page has more on the financial planning side of this transition — including the runway calculation that actually matters and what the first year of independent work typically looks like, with the parts most accounts leave out.