Product manager as a service. Would you pay $250/month to have someone manage your project?

If you are doing this , make sure you charge the customer more. Otherwise, it ends up being unprofitable for whoever is doing it. Just a rough calculation - If say, a PM makes 100K (for example) ... its only worth the time, if you could get 20K out of 5 customers, or if you have 100 customer, then you do 1K / year. So, ensure you price yourself well to be profitable, as u will doing considerable work.

If you are imagining this as a Uber for X or AirBnB for X "mind-model" - please double check your assumptions ... we learnt it the hard way :) .. but it was a funny / useful exercise in the hindsight !

We at workapp tried this (without realizing it) .... we ended up realizing that the model we used we were charging very less for the effort we were putting in, and customers always expected more ~ especially given that it was a core responsibility of managing project.

Another thing we found, this was a tricky situation to be in for both us and the founding team ~ as for them, they can't let go and trust us like autopilot, for us we found ourselves constantly being second guessed by the customer... a very hard place to be in.

Is this still going?

Depends how good they are and, crucially, how much work I'd have to upfront to get them started. You'd have to have a killer sales page describing the type of work they'd do. But $250/month is peanuts.

For any idea, the best way to see if it's viable is to talk to people who need it, get people to pay for it and see if it gains some traction.

That being said, personally, I think this idea isn't quite ready for prime time for a couple reasons.

• Most of what you'll be doing for clients could be seen as simply "running a small business." IMO, you can't just create a custom step-by-step plan with an audit of the business and expect that will lead to success (unless you've run dozens of successful startups and and have that 6th sense). An audit and plan can get you maybe 10% of the way there; the rest is user feedback, lean startup execution, finding your way in the dark through doing, etc. This is something the founder(s) need to do and isn't really something you can (or should) outsource.
• The training I also don't see being all that valuable if you don't have a ton of experience and knowledge in your clients' specific industry. I agree with @Vinrob and @Indieflow here - this won't be that valuable unless you're training them to be successful in their specific areas, and you can't become an industry expert for every customer you work with if they're all in different niches (especially not at $250/mo).

I'd consider something like the Productize course and community from @briancasel. Def one of the best places to hone this :)

Or Robin's FB community for productized services!

Sounds like a monthly package for a VA...

I think you need to identify a niche to start with.

If you helped 10 other "design-as-a-service" companies achieve X and Y results, then I would be interested to talk to you but it might be too vague at the beginning to be interesting.

Let me know how it goes!

How do you go about knowing what direction the product should take? Sounds like a lot of background, domain knowledge, access to customers, access to prospects and groundwork is required?