I think there are variations of this. Yes, your experts need to give an amount of time to the effort. Making them a PM, in any sense of the word, is a step beyo

I think there are variations of this. Yes, your experts need to give an amount of time to the effort. Making them a PM, in any sense of the word, is a step beyond contributing their expertise and can be avoided. What you need is someone with significant dev experience, but enough outside exposure to step into the PM role. Ideally, it'd be someone with interest in user experience research, or a personality that connect outside of a dev team. They should be able to perform this role in a mechanical fashion to avoid a dedicated PM. Doing this will be effective enough until things are at the point where a dedicated PM can be justified. If there is a struggle with the user experience aspects and getting knowledge out of the experts, you can get expertise from an agency on a short-term basis. Adding a pure PM is going to significantly slow you down unless are one of the rare switchers who flip between dev, PM, and dev manager roles. People don't know what to make of these people, but they exist, especially in the freelance contract world. People will only full-time experience tend to look down on them because they can't understand it.