We recruit Product people. Just Product people.

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.

The PM role is changing. We stay ahead of it.

Every PM role we fill now involves, somewhere in the brief, a conversation about how the candidate relates to the way product work is evolving.

That doesn’t mean every client needs a specialist AI hire. It means that the best PMs today are the ones who are curious about new tools, honest about what they don’t yet know, and willing to evolve how they work as the landscape shifts around them. A PM who is rigid about how they run discovery, or dismissive of how AI tools are changing team dynamics, is a risk regardless of how impressive their track record looks on paper.

We’ve built our assessment process to probe for this. Not to screen for buzzwords, but to understand genuine adaptability: how a candidate has changed their approach in the last two years, what they’ve had to unlearn, how they think about the relationship between their product instincts and the tools now available to them.

This is part of what we assess in every candidate we represent. Not because every role requires it but because the best PMs are defined partly by their relationship with change.

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.

Who we are

Backlog was founded by a product manager who spent years building products before starting an agency.

The frustration that started it was simple: watching companies make expensive, time-consuming hiring mistakes that a better process could have prevented, and watching talented PMs accept roles that were wrong for them because nobody took the time to understand what they actually needed.

We’re a specialist practice, deliberately lean. We run a limited number of searches at any time so that every mandate gets the focus it needs. We also work with a network of trusted recruiters on split-fee placements, which means access to a wider candidate pool without the noise of a large generalist operation.

We don’t claim to be the biggest. We claim to know the PM role better than anyone else recruiting for it and to let that knowledge show in every shortlist we produce.