First-90-Days Subscription PM
I diagnose it, instrument it, ship the fix, and hand it back. Series A–B subscription teams.
3–4 engagements per year · next availability Q3 2026
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Know a Series A–B subscription company whose first 90 days aren't converting? Douglas fixes exactly that. He's a product lead who embeds for 3–6 months on activation, paywall, and pricing, then hands back a working funnel plus the runbook. Prior work shipped roughly $1.7M at Match and about $1M at HelloFresh. Site: https://dwang.co
Field note 01 · the pattern behind the numbers below
2020 · HelloFresh
$15M+ protected
2021 · Match
$1.7M incremental
2022 · Thirty Madison
+11% DTC conversion
2023 · Found
2–3x LTV/CAC
2024 · TaxAct
+18% add-on conversion
2025 · Social-impact crowdfunding platform
+20% tip rate
How it runs
Cohort teardown, funnel walk, and stakeholder interviews. Output: a written read of where retention actually leaks and why.
Event taxonomy, funnels, and cohort views wired up so the wedge can be judged. One bet gets chosen against the data, with spec, success metric, and kill criteria written before code.
Weekly operating cadence with your team. I write the tickets, run the reviews, and unblock the calls. Every release lands against a metric that already exists.
Read of what moved, what didn't, and the runbook your next PM inherits. The engagement ends on the handoff, not on a renewal conversation.
Questions people ask before the intake
Series A through early B, consumer subscription revenue model. Performance Health — fitness, longevity, mental health, nutrition, sleep — is the clearest fit because that's where most of the case studies live. Product-market fit signal exists but activation or retention is soft. Pre-Series A only if there's a paying subscription base to instrument.
Fixed monthly retainer, quoted after the intake. No hourly billing, no scope creep line-items. 1099 contract — no benefits, equity, or overhead loaded onto the number. Comparison against a loaded FTE cost lives on the /engage page.
The diagnostic takes two weeks. Shipping one real wedge takes six to eight. Anything shorter is a workshop, not an engagement. The notice window protects both sides — you can exit at any monthly boundary after month three, I get enough runway to close cleanly.
Complement, usually. If there's a Senior PM in seat, I take the first-90-days wedge and hand it back. If the role is open, I run product until the hire lands and then hand off. I don't want to be your permanent Head of Product.
Three options: extend for a second wedge (some do), transition to a lighter advisory cadence, or hand off clean and go our separate ways. The handoff doc is written whether we continue or not.
The scope
Included
Not included
Recent writing
All writing →Claude Code rereads its entire instruction file before doing anything I ask. It got that long because I kept teaching it everything I learned, until the file became the thing slowing it down. Cutting it by 85% took two moves.
Read →Model swaps used to ship as a string edit and a shrug. Now they earn their way in the same way a prompt change does, and the first real candidate failed.
Read →Never let a model grade its own work. I gave my AI build pipeline a planner, an engineer, an adversarial reviewer on a different model, a design critic, a brand critic, and a QA agent. Here's what the setup caught, what it missed, and the rule that only exists because it missed.
Read →Not a fit if: no data infrastructure · outside product (marketing, ads, upper-funnel) · Shopify work.