The Best Product Consultants in 2026
There is a meaningful difference between a coach and a consultant. A coach develops people. A consultant solves problems. The best product consultants bring a proprietary point of view — a tested framework, a structured methodology, a distinctive lens on how customers behave or how teams should work — and apply it to your specific situation. You bring the context. They bring the system.
The consultants on this list have each built a body of work substantial enough to be considered a reference point in the field. Some are authors whose frameworks have been adopted by thousands of product teams. Others are researchers and strategists whose client work has become the benchmark for how rigorous, commercially-grounded discovery should be done. All of them are actively practicing, and all have the documented client results to back up their reputations.
This list is organized into three categories: Framework & Methodology Consultants, who sell a defined, repeatable process you can implement; Research & Discovery Consultants, who help you understand your customers and validate your direction with rigor; and Strategy & Organizational Consultants, who help you restructure how product operates at the company level.
Want more from The CPO Club?
Sign up for a free membership to complete reading this article:
Have an account? Log In
Framework & Methodology Consultants
April Dunford
April Dunford is a positioning consultant and the author of two definitive B2B go-to-market books: Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It (2019) and
…April Dunford is a positioning consultant and the author of two definitive B2B go-to-market books: Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It (2019) and Sales Pitch (2023). She spent 25 years as VP of Marketing at a series of successful technology startups and launched 16 products to market across her executive career, before transitioning to full-time consulting. Her flagship service is a structured three-day positioning workshop for executive teams, working through each of the five components of her positioning methodology — competitive alternatives, unique attributes, value, target customers, and market category — and translating that positioning into a sales pitch that wins. She has now applied this process with more than 200 companies, from growth-stage SaaS startups to global enterprise technology firms. She is also a board member, investor, and advisor to dozens of high-growth businesses.
Known for:
The Five-Component Positioning Methodology — a structured, facilitated process for helping B2B technology companies get clear on why they win, who they win with, and how to communicate that in a way that makes their differentiated value immediately obvious to their best-fit buyers. Her work has become the reference standard for how B2B product and marketing leaders think about positioning.
Bob Moesta
Bob Moesta is the CEO and founder of The Re-Wired Group and one of the two principal architects of the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework, which he developed alongside the late Harvard Business School
…Bob Moesta is the CEO and founder of The Re-Wired Group and one of the two principal architects of the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework, which he developed alongside the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen in the mid-1990s. He has since worked on over 3,500 products and services — spanning consumer packaged goods, medical devices, defense, fintech, and technology — and has spent nearly 30 years advancing, applying, and teaching the JTBD methodology. His firm’s client work includes Intercom, where JTBD interviews identified four core jobs that prompted a full product and go-to-market redesign, and Basecamp, where the process uncovered five previously unknown customer jobs that reshaped the company’s entire business approach. He is an Adjunct Lecturer at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and the author of Demand-Side Sales 101 and Learning to Build.
Known for:
The Switch Interview — a structured customer research technique that surfaces the real forces that caused someone to hire (or fire) a product by reconstructing the timeline of their switching decision in detail. His firm is the gold standard for applying JTBD thinking to product design, go-to-market strategy, and sales process simultaneously.
Tony Ulwick
Tony Ulwick is the founder of Strategyn and the creator of Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI), a separate and distinct interpretation of Jobs-to-Be-Done theory that predates Bob Moesta’s version and takes a more quantitative,
…Tony Ulwick is the founder of Strategyn and the creator of Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI), a separate and distinct interpretation of Jobs-to-Be-Done theory that predates Bob Moesta’s version and takes a more quantitative, survey-driven approach. He holds multiple patents on the ODI process and is the author of What Customers Want (2005) and Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice (2016). ODI defines innovation as the process of helping customers accomplish jobs faster, more easily, and more cost-effectively, and uses large-sample surveys to statistically identify which outcomes are most underserved. His clients have included Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Bosch, and Abbott. He is one of the longest-tenured innovation consultants in the product world, with a practice spanning more than three decades.
Known for:
Outcome-Driven Innovation — a quantitative methodology that uses surveys of 180–3,000 customers to identify which of a product’s desired outcomes are both highly important and poorly satisfied, providing a statistically rigorous map of where innovation investment will generate the highest return. Distinct from Moesta’s narrative-interview approach, ODI is particularly well-suited to large enterprises making significant portfolio decisions.
Dan Olsen
Dan Olsen is a product management consultant, trainer, and the author of The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback (2015), one of the most
…Dan Olsen is a product management consultant, trainer, and the author of The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback (2015), one of the most widely recommended practical guides to achieving product-market fit. His background spans product management, UX design, software engineering, analytics, and marketing across both enterprises and startups. As a hands-on consultant, he developed and refined the Lean Product Process through direct client work, and his client roster includes Meta, Amazon, Walmart, Uber, Box, and Medallia. He is also the founder of the Lean Product Meetup community, which has grown to over 11,000 members globally. His workshops are known for being immediately applicable — focused on the specific decisions teams need to make at each stage of product development.
Known for:
The Lean Product Process — a six-step methodology for achieving product-market fit, covering target customer identification, underserved needs discovery, value proposition definition, MVP feature selection, UX prototyping, and rapid testing. His Product-Market Fit Pyramid is a widely adopted diagnostic framework for understanding why a product is or isn’t resonating with its target market.
Ash Maurya
Ash Maurya is the creator of the Lean Canvas — an adaptation of Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas optimized for startups and early-stage product development — and the author of Running Lean
…Ash Maurya is the creator of the Lean Canvas — an adaptation of Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas optimized for startups and early-stage product development — and the author of Running Lean (2012) and Scaling Lean (2016), both published through O’Reilly. He is the founder of LEANSTACK, a consulting and SaaS platform offering frameworks, workshops, and tools for continuous innovation management. His Continuous Innovation Framework, built around the Lean Canvas, has been used by startup founders, product teams, and enterprise innovation programs globally to stress-test assumptions before committing resources to building. LEANSTACK has trained thousands of teams across six continents through its workshops and online programs.
Known for:
The Lean Canvas — a one-page business model template that helps founders and product teams identify and rank their riskiest assumptions before writing a line of code. His Continuous Innovation Framework extends this into an ongoing practice of traction modeling and experiment design, making systematic product validation accessible to teams without dedicated research functions.
Alex Osterwalder
Alex Osterwalder is the co-creator of the Business Model Canvas and co-founder of Strategyzer, a consulting and software firm. He is the lead author of Business Model Generation (2010), Value Proposition Design
…Alex Osterwalder is the co-creator of the Business Model Canvas and co-founder of Strategyzer, a consulting and software firm. He is the lead author of Business Model Generation (2010), Value Proposition Design (2014), and Testing Business Ideas (2019, co-authored with David Bland), all published by Wiley and translated into dozens of languages. The Business Model Canvas is arguably the most widely adopted strategic planning tool in the world, used in virtually every MBA program and startup accelerator globally and by organizations including Nestlé, Mastercard, and the European Commission. Strategyzer offers consulting, workshops, and an online platform for business model and value proposition design. Osterwalder is based in Switzerland and speaks at major strategy and innovation conferences worldwide.
Known for:
The Business Model Canvas — a nine-block visual template for describing, designing, and analyzing business models, and its companion the Value Proposition Canvas, which maps customer jobs, pains, and gains against product features and benefits. These tools have fundamentally changed how product and strategy teams frame the relationship between what they build and how they create value.
Ryan Singer
Ryan Singer spent 17 years as Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp, where he developed the Shape Up methodology — an alternative to sprint-based agile that organizes work into fixed six-week cycles
…Ryan Singer spent 17 years as Head of Product Strategy at Basecamp, where he developed the Shape Up methodology — an alternative to sprint-based agile that organizes work into fixed six-week cycles with variable scope, structured around shaped pitches rather than user stories or backlogs. He published Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters (2019) as a free book through Basecamp, and it has since become one of the most downloaded product development books in the industry. He now operates as an independent consultant and advisor, helping product teams implement Shape Up and think more clearly about how they scope and sequence work. His approach draws on design thinking, systems thinking, and practice theory to make product development more deliberate and less reactive.
Known for:
The Shape Up methodology — a fixed-time, variable-scope approach to product development that replaces the sprint cycle with six-week cycles built around shaped work, appetite-based scoping, and betting tables. It has become the reference framework for teams seeking a structured alternative to Scrum that restores creative problem-solving to product development without abandoning discipline.
Research & Discovery Consultants
Nir Eyal
Nir Eyal is a behavioral design consultant, former Stanford lecturer, and the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (2014) and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
…Nir Eyal is a behavioral design consultant, former Stanford lecturer, and the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (2014) and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life (2019), which together have sold over one million copies in more than 30 languages. MIT Technology Review dubbed him “The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology.” He spent the early part of his career in video gaming and advertising, co-founded and sold two technology companies, and began consulting with Silicon Valley companies in 2011 — working with startups through Fortune 500 enterprises. His consulting practice, operated through Nir and Far, focuses on workshops and advisory engagements designed to help product teams apply behavioral science to create habit-forming products ethically. He has also lectured at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.
Known for:
The Hook Model — a four-phase behavioral design framework (trigger, action, variable reward, investment) that explains why certain products become part of users’ daily lives while others are quickly abandoned. His work is the most widely cited practical resource for applying consumer psychology to product design in a way that is both effective and ethically grounded.
David Bland
David Bland is the founder of Precoil, a product discovery and business experimentation consultancy, and the co-author (with Alex Osterwalder) of Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation (2019). His
…David Bland is the founder of Precoil, a product discovery and business experimentation consultancy, and the co-author (with Alex Osterwalder) of Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation (2019). His consulting practice specializes in helping companies design and run structured experiments to validate or invalidate product and business assumptions before committing to full development — a practice he calls systematic de-risking. He is a former design sprint facilitator and has worked with clients including Microsoft, General Electric, and Intuit on building internal experimentation capabilities. His approach is notable for being both theoretically rigorous (grounded in lean startup, Osterwalder’s business model frameworks, and design thinking) and operationally practical, with a heavy emphasis on making experimentation repeatable inside large organizations.
Known for:
The Experiment Library — a structured catalog of over 40 product and business experiments organized by stage of validation and type of assumption, providing teams with a systematic approach to deciding not just whether to experiment, but which experiment to run and why. His work has become a reference for enterprise teams building continuous discovery capabilities.
Jeff Gothelf
Jeff Gothelf is a consultant, speaker, and the author of Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams (2013, with Josh Seiden) and Sense & Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers
…Jeff Gothelf is a consultant, speaker, and the author of Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams (2013, with Josh Seiden) and Sense & Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously (2017). He runs an active consulting practice helping companies integrate Lean UX principles, OKR-based product management, and outcomes-focused delivery into their operating models. His work sits at the intersection of design practice, agile methodology, and product strategy — helping teams move from output-focused to outcome-focused ways of working. His clients have spanned SaaS, fintech, healthcare, and enterprise technology. He writes and speaks frequently on how organizations can build the habit of continuous learning, and his writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Fast Company.
Known for:
The Lean UX methodology — an approach to product design that treats every UI decision as a hypothesis to be tested, integrating research and iteration directly into the development cycle rather than treating them as phases. His OKR-based consulting work has helped dozens of companies shift from roadmap-driven to outcome-driven product cultures.
Laura Klein
Laura Klein is a UX researcher, product consultant, and the author of UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design (2013) and Build Better Products: A Modern Approach to
…Laura Klein is a UX researcher, product consultant, and the author of UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design (2013) and Build Better Products: A Modern Approach to Building Successful User-Centered Products (2016), both published by O’Reilly. She runs Passionate Alligator, a UX and product research consultancy serving startups and growth-stage companies that lack dedicated research functions. Her work focuses on helping product teams integrate user research into fast-moving development cycles — with a particular emphasis on making research cheap, fast, and actionable rather than comprehensive and slow. She is known for her direct, pragmatic voice and her ability to translate qualitative insights into product decisions that teams can actually act on.
Known for:
Her no-nonsense framework for right-sizing user research to team stage and decision risk — the idea that the goal of research is not completeness but confidence, and that the right amount of research is whatever is needed to reduce uncertainty enough to make a better decision. Her books are the most widely recommended entry points for product managers learning to do their own user research.
Jared Spool
Jared Spool is the founder of UIE (User Interface Engineering), the longest-running UX research and training organization in the field, and Center Centre, a UX design school based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He
…Jared Spool is the founder of UIE (User Interface Engineering), the longest-running UX research and training organization in the field, and Center Centre, a UX design school based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He has been practicing, researching, and writing about UX and product design for over 40 years, making him one of the most experienced practitioners alive. His consulting firm has worked with organizations including Google, Bloomberg, Fidelity, and Aetna on user research, usability strategy, and product design quality. He is particularly well regarded for his work on translating UX research into business outcomes — making the commercial case for design investment in terms that product and executive leadership can act on. He writes and speaks extensively on experience quality, design team maturity, and what separates organizations that consistently deliver great products from those that do not.
Known for:
His research on the relationship between design maturity and business outcomes — including the widely cited finding that organizations where everyone on the product team spends at least two hours per month directly observing customers produce dramatically stronger products than those that don’t. His work on experience quality as a business discipline, rather than a craft concern, has influenced how a generation of product and design leaders make the case for research investment.
Thomas Stokes
Thomas Stokes is a UX research consultant, digital strategy advisor, and Principal and co-founder of Drill Bit Labs, a research and consulting firm whose mission is to advance the practice of user
…Thomas Stokes is a UX research consultant, digital strategy advisor, and Principal and co-founder of Drill Bit Labs, a research and consulting firm whose mission is to advance the practice of user experience research and its impact on organizations. He holds a PhD in human factors, and his prior experience includes UX and digital strategy consulting at UserTesting, UserZoom, and WillowTree, as well as product research engagements with RedHat, Fulcrum Labs, and Gilero. Drill Bit Labs offers end-to-end research services — from usability studies and user interviews to market segmentation, pricing studies, and competitive analysis — alongside expert-led training and digital strategy consulting for product, UX, and technology leaders. The firm draws on its grounding in cognitive science and human factors to bring scientific rigor to research that most agencies treat as informal. Stokes also publishes Depth by Drill Bit Labs, a Substack newsletter on user research and product strategy with over 5,600 subscribers.
Known for:
Bringing the rigor of human factors and cognitive science to commercial UX research — treating product discovery as a discipline with established principles rather than a flexible, ad hoc activity. Drill Bit Labs’ training programs, which include courses on UX measurement and benchmarking, feature prioritization, and ROI analyses for digital product investments, reflect a commitment to making research outcomes legible and actionable to product and business leadership.
Strategy & Organizational Consultants
Tendayi Viki
Tendayi Viki is an Associate Partner at Strategyzer and the author of The Corporate Startup: How Established Companies Can Develop Successful Innovation Ecosystems (2017) and Pirates In The Navy: How Innovators Lead
…Tendayi Viki is an Associate Partner at Strategyzer and the author of The Corporate Startup: How Established Companies Can Develop Successful Innovation Ecosystems (2017) and Pirates In The Navy: How Innovators Lead Transformation (2020). He specializes in helping large enterprises build internal innovation capacity using lean startup methodology and business design — addressing the structural challenge of innovation inside established organizations, where governance structures, incentive systems, and cultural norms systematically suppress the experimentation that product transformation requires. His client work has spanned companies including Pearson, AB InBev, and Chanel. He is a frequent speaker at innovation and product strategy conferences and writes about corporate innovation, leadership, and the organizational conditions necessary for sustained product success.
Known for:
His framework for building corporate innovation ecosystems — covering portfolio management, governance design, team structure, and the cultural conditions that allow innovators to operate effectively within large organizations. His Pirates In The Navy concept addresses the tension between disruptive thinking and institutional constraint that most corporate innovation initiatives fail to resolve.
Denise Tilles
Denise Tilles is a product operations consultant and the co-author (with Melissa Perri) of Product Operations: How Successful Companies Build Better Products at Scale (2023), the first major book to define product
…Denise Tilles is a product operations consultant and the co-author (with Melissa Perri) of Product Operations: How Successful Companies Build Better Products at Scale (2023), the first major book to define product operations as a distinct and essential discipline within the product organization. Her consulting practice helps companies build the infrastructure that connects product strategy to execution — including data and insight systems, meeting and communication cadences, tool stacks, and the feedback loops that allow product teams to learn from what they ship. She is one of the leading voices in a growing field that addresses a fundamental problem in scaling product organizations: strategy and execution routinely drift apart because the systems connecting them are either absent or broken.
Known for:
Defining product operations as a discipline — the set of systems, processes, and tools that help product organizations move from strategy to execution reliably, at scale. Her work with Melissa Perri helped establish product operations as a recognized function in the product org chart, and her consulting engagements help companies build the connective tissue between vision, roadmap, and delivery that most organizations are missing.
Hiten Shah
Hiten Shah is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and product advisor who has co-founded KISSmetrics (one of the earliest product analytics platforms), Crazy Egg, and FYI (acquired). He has advised or invested
…Hiten Shah is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and product advisor who has co-founded KISSmetrics (one of the earliest product analytics platforms), Crazy Egg, and FYI (acquired). He has advised or invested in over 120 companies, with a particular focus on SaaS product strategy, growth loops, and the product analytics infrastructure that enables teams to make faster, more confident decisions. He publishes Product Habits, a widely followed newsletter featuring deep-dive product teardowns of category-leading SaaS products, and has contributed extensively to the body of knowledge around what great SaaS products do differently at the strategy, growth, and operational levels. His consulting and advisory work is sought particularly by SaaS founders and product leaders working through growth plateaus, competitive repositioning, and the strategic decisions that arise as product-market fit scales.
Known for:
Product teardowns — rigorous, first-principles analyses of how high-performing SaaS products are designed, priced, positioned, and grown, which have become a reference format for how the product community thinks about competitive intelligence. His deep familiarity with product analytics, having built two analytics companies from the ground up, gives his strategic advisory work a data fluency that most strategy consultants lack.
About This List
This list focuses on consultants who bring a defined, documented point of view to their client work — people whose frameworks, methodologies, and research approaches are specific enough to be evaluated, learned from, and applied beyond any single engagement. It is not a comprehensive directory of product consulting practitioners; the field is broad and many excellent consultants operate without a public profile. Readers should verify current service availability, scope, and engagement models directly, as these evolve over time.
