I've spent 20 years turning ambiguous problems into shipped products — the last six as a fractional PM. Outside of client work, I apply the same instinct for close observation to 57 tomato varieties, the trail network in my backyard, and whatever I'm currently overthinking on Substack.
Client work, community projects, and a few things that started as a hobby and refused to stay one.
Fractional product management for teams that need senior PM thinking without a full-time hire. Recent work spans regulated-industry software, e-commerce, and consumer products — usually somewhere in the messy middle between strategy and shipping.
Visit ballastadvisory.com →A product person's take on everything else. Short essays on how the discipline of building things well shows up in places that have nothing to do with software.
Read recent posts →57+ heirloom varieties, documented with the same rigor I'd bring to a product roadmap — plus a running experiment in AI-augmented growing and selling.
See the garden →A directory of the trails I actually walk, built because the good ones are scattered across a dozen town websites and nobody had stitched them together yet.
Explore the trails →In their words, not mine.
A rare ability to stay calm and clear in complex, high-stakes situations — bringing structure, momentum, and thoughtful decision-making when it mattered most. Any company engaging Jennifer for fractional product leadership will benefit from her experience, judgment, and ability to deliver real progress.
Joanne DomeniconiCo-Founder, The Grommet
She helped us identify and correct several long-standing organizational inefficiencies within the product team and improved the collaboration between product and engineering. I would bring her back in an instant.
Diego ConchaConsulting CTO
As an engineer working with Jen, I always had clear direction for specific tasks as well as a sense of the overall product direction. Stakeholders always had a clear picture of deliverables, timeline, and progress. I would work with Jen again in a heartbeat.
Will MahoneySenior Engineer, The Gnar
I've worked product at companies where "ship it" meant a warehouse full of furniture (Wayfair) and companies where it meant a baby registry someone's entire extended family would use (Babylist). Six years ago I went fractional, and haven't looked back — there's something I like about walking into a new team's mess, understanding it fast, and leaving it better than I found it.
That instinct doesn't turn off at 5pm. It's why I've catalogued 57 tomato varieties with more discipline than some product backlogs I've inherited, why I sit on my town's Conservation Commission, and why I can't resist mapping every good trail within twenty minutes of my house. I'm also a longtime food and travel writer, a 30-year South Shore transit rider, and — depending who you ask — either deeply curious or a little too online about all of it.
If you're looking for a fractional PM, start at Ballast Advisory. If you're just curious what a product person does with the rest of their attention, you're already in the right place.