Case Study: Empowering Family Promise Through Fractional Leadership

Jonathan Irwin partners with mission-led organizations as a fractional product leader—building new products and scaling impact through focused, high-leverage leadership. With 25+ years leading software teams across SaaS, startups, and nonprofits, he brings both practical experience and a calm hand to fast-moving missions.‍

Family Promise, a national nonprofit with over 180 Affiliates, is on a bold path to triple its impact in five years. To help drive this growth, they needed senior product leadership to develop Family Link—a case management and data platform designed to transform how Affiliates support families in crisis.

As a Fractional Head of Product (10–15h/week), I lead the vision, strategy, and delivery of Family Link. That includes building the team, managing the roadmap and budget, selecting vendors, and guiding technology decisions—all to ensure the platform drives affiliate adoption, enables national insights, and improves outcomes for families.

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Why Fractional? A Smarter Way to Scale

Nonprofits need senior leadership—but they also need to stay lean. A full-time product executive wasn’t going to be the right fit for them, because it would just be too costly. My fractional leadership gave Family Promise access to deep expertise, focused execution, and the ability to scale me up or down as needed—without the overhead.

With this approach, we moved faster, spent smarter, and kept the focus on what matters: helping families find stability and hope.

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The Right Fit for the Job

My background—scaling teams and tech across sectors—meant I could jump in quickly. At Family Promise, that experience helped us re-architect Family Link on Google Cloud, build a fully remote, fractional product team, and roll out a tool that Affiliates can actually use. Fast.

This wasn’t just a tech challenge—it was a mission challenge. And that’s where I thrive.

What We Achieved…‍

• Scaled the platform nationally in under 6 months
• ‍Built a fractional, remote product team (PM, dev, data, support)‍
• Created an onboarding and support model that drives adoption‍
• Designed a unified data warehouse to deliver real-time impact insights‍
• Laid the groundwork for a future profit center, offsetting OpEx and providing value back to Affiliates

…in 10 - 15 hrs / week.

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More Impact, Less Overhead

Hiring a full-time Head of Product could have cost $250K+. With fractional leadership, Family Promise gained the same level of leadership—without the long-term cost. It’s not just efficient—it’s sustainable.

And by making Family Link a scalable, shared resource, we’ve positioned it as a future profit center: enabling data sharing, reducing duplication, and creating operational leverage across the network.

"Working with Jonathan as a fractional leader has been transformative... he delivered the tool within six months and continues to manage the product, team, budget, change management, and onboarding to enable our Affiliates." — Sandra Miniutti, Chief Networking Officer, Family Promise

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Jonathan is currently available for retainer or special projects with mission-led organizations. His best clients are visionary leaders who need help going from point A to point B—and want to do it smarter.

Learn more about Jonathan at his website, or on LinkedIn.

And if you’re looking for a different kind of fractional leader, that’s where Fractional Jobs can help (the site you’re reading this on). Fractional Jobs helps startups, SMBs, and nonprofits hire fractional talent across about 10+ different function areas. You can book a call with Fractional Jobs founder Taylor Crane right here to learn more.