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Ask HN: How much do freelancing product managers charge for their services?

4 points by nowarninglabel ↗ HN
I've been working on a startup on the side of my main job for quite some time. I'm quite happy with my main job. But 2-3 times a month, without fail, I get cold-calls/e-mails from people seeking a developer for a project.

I don't want to freelance on projects anymore.

However, it made me wonder. Are there freelancing Product Managers? Surely, there must be? Couldn't I just have them handle all the interfacing with the customer, file tickets, and I do them. Problem with the output? File more tickets. I do them. Rinse, repeat. Meet on occasion to hash things out.

Has anyone had experience with such an arrangement?

It'd basically be delegating myself to commodity labor, but seems like lately there is enough market that I could charge my hourly, a product manager could charge their hourly, and the customer would still be happy cause they would finally have someone to do their project, which in this market, is seemingly difficult to find developers for. And I'm not talking about pie-in-the-sky take-a-cut-of-the-revenue people. I'm talking people who are willing to lay out hard cash upfront.

I should note, I'm in the U.S. and have googled some on this question, but it seems estimates vary wildly, and outside of structured companies I don't see this arrangement very often .

3 comments

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gexla
I assume the manager would need to charge something similar (hourly rate) to what you charge even though you may be doing the more highly skilled work. Pay based on skill might be more important for more traditional employment scenarios as opposed to freelancing because of the nature of freelancing (making a living from relatively uncertain circumstances.) A manager may even have to charge more (percentage) assuming the number of hours going into the management comes out to be far less that of the coding.

Perhaps the best way to do this, especially if you would need to meet with this person, would be to make some sort of arrangement with a local dev shop which does client work.

balajiviswanath
There are freelance product managers (check out oDesk and Elance), but it will take a lot of effort in getting the quality guy as there is a low signal-to-noise ration. Also, it must be understood that product managers need to be a core part of the team and freelancer might not fit into that.

If the skills demanded are fairly common (Wordpress development or basic level php knowledge) then it is not hard to get quality guys at low prices. I have myself done a few product management tasks in these sites for about $25-30/hr - mostly running marketing campaigns, taking care of product launches and building websites.

In summary, I would say you can get a decent product manager freelancer for $30-40/hr if you are not building a complex product and not require a lot of learning curve to understand the product.