We recruit Product people. Just Product people.
The role is changing. We know what it’s changing into.
Product people only
Not engineers, not designers, not “tech talent broadly.” Every search we run is a PM search. This focus is what makes us better at it.
Practitioner-led
Founded by a PM who has done the job. We assess candidates the way a hiring manager would — testing for real capability, not matching keywords to titles.
Three to five candidates. Max.
Every submission comes with a written brief explaining fit. You walk into every interview prepared, not sorting through a stack of resumes.
Why we exist
Product Management has always been hard to hire for. The role sits at the intersection of user insight, commercial thinking, technical understanding, and organisational navigation and no two companies define it the same way.
Now it’s harder.
Over the last few years, the PM role has shifted under everyone’s feet. AI tools have changed how product teams work, how fast they move, and what’s expected of the people leading the product. PMs are being asked to evaluate AI-generated outputs, integrate new tools into their workflows, and make decisions about what to build when the technical landscape shifts every six months. The soft-skills-plus-roadmap PM of a few years ago is no longer sufficient for most teams serious about their product work.
And yet, most recruiters are still running the same process they were running in 2019. They screen for job titles. They match keywords. They send you five resumes and call it a shortlist.
We built Backlog Agency because there’s a better way to do this, one grounded in actually understanding the role, what it’s becoming, and what separates the PMs who will grow with it from the ones who won’t.
Our focus
We recruit Product people. That’s it.
Not engineers. Not designers. Not “tech talent broadly.” Product people from individual contributors to CPOs, across industries and company stages.
This focus isn’t a limitation. It’s what makes us better at it. Our network is deep because we’re not spreading it across every role type. Our assessment is sharper because we’ve spent years understanding what makes a PM genuinely excellent at this job and how to tell the difference in an interview, not just on a resume.
We work with product-led companies across the spectrum: early-stage startups making their first PM hire, scale-ups building out a product function, established businesses going through product transformation, and everything in between. The common thread is that our clients take product seriously and need someone who takes hiring seriously to match.
How we work: for hiring teams
We don’t start with your job description. We start with the question behind it.
What problem do you need a PM to solve? What’s the shape of your engineering team, and what does good PM-engineering collaboration look like in your environment? Where have past hires underdelivered and why? What does the first 90 days actually need to produce?
The brief we build from that conversation is what separates a Backlog shortlist from a stack of filtered resumes. We source from our network of practitioners who match the level, domain, and working style you need and we don’t send anyone we haven’t assessed against the actual brief.
You receive three to five candidates. Maximum. Each one comes with a written summary explaining their fit: what they’ve built, how they think, where they’ll challenge your team in the right ways, and what you should explore in the interview. You walk into every conversation prepared, not sorting.
Start to shortlist in under two weeks. No retainer, no exclusivity, no upfront fees. We earn when you make the right hire.
For product people
If you’ve worked with a recruiter who couldn’t tell the difference between a growth PM and a platform PM, you know what we’re fixing.
The PM job market is full of mismatched outreach. Roles that don’t fit your level. Companies that describe themselves as “product-led” in the job spec and then assign the PM to take notes in engineering standups. Recruiters who send your resume to six places without telling you and then disappear.
We work with fewer candidates than most agencies because we’re not running a volume model. When we bring you a role, it’s because we’ve read the brief properly, we’ve talked to the hiring team, and we believe this is worth your time. We’ll tell you honestly if the culture doesn’t match the pitch, or if the role has grown beyond what they’ve described.
We give you a full briefing before any conversation: what the company is actually building, what the team dynamic looks like, what the hiring manager is really testing for, and what we’d recommend you explore in return. You walk into interviews prepared, not performing.
If you’re actively looking, we’ll work on your timeline. If you’re passively open, we’ll stay in touch and reach out when something genuinely fits, not every time we need to fill a quota.
We place PMs at companies with real product ambition. That’s the only kind of role we take on.
Meet some of the team
Jordan has spent nearly a decade building products across early-stage startups, high-growth SaaS, and enterprise software. He’s worked the full arc of the role: from discovery and delivery as an APM, to scaling workflow automation inside growth-stage products, to leading AI product development today. That time in the role shaped how he thinks about what great product work looks like and what it takes to hire for it well. He started Backlog Agency to put that understanding to work: building shortlists the way a hiring manager thinks, not the way a keyword filter does.
Bailey has spent over five years inside product-led e-commerce teams, leading merchandising and product operations across high-growth retail and DTC environments. She’s built and managed digital storefronts on Shopify, executed promotional campaigns end to end, and partnered cross-functionally with PMs, marketing, operations, and data teams to ship customer-facing experiences. That work gave her a clear view of what great product teams look like from the inside and what kinds of PMs actually move the work forward. At Backlog, she runs candidate sourcing and operations, finding the people who don’t show up in standard recruiter searches.