An increasing part of my strategic advisory work is to fill the role of Acting Chief Product Officer (CPO) for startups both large and small.
What does a Chief Product Officer do? They...
Business Priorities: Collaborate with all fellow execs (CEO, CRO, COO, CMO etc) to determine the business priorities
Define what product is: Establish and clearly communicate to all people and functions in the company what product is. Often product is a misunderstood concept. Many people who have not worked at product--lead companies tend to assume that if a feature or technology exists, then the product is ready for a given customer, market or user-case. This is not true and is a subject for another post.
Develop a product strategy: Work with all stakeholders (including sales, marketing, bizdev, CEO, product managers, engineers, support, customers, partners etc) to develop and articulate a clear, focused, ambitious, and pragmatic product strategy. Note that this strategy is distinct and different from the high-level business vision. It often acts as the connective tissue between the high-level business vision and the day-to-day tacts of the team.
Develop product principles: Establish and clearly communicate the core principles of the product to all stakeholders. In particular, to the product management team who need to make day-to-day decisions about priorities and features through the lens of these principles.
Set KPIs: Determine the high-level KPIs for the product that will ultimately drive the business priorities.
Develop a roadmap: Work with all stakeholders to craft a well-prioritized roadmap that ensures that each product cycle ladders up to meaningful new value for a large and growing number of customers. This might include a) de-emphasizing or pruning of the product so that the surface area being worked on is right-sized for the size and shape of the R&D team and/or b) inject more ambition into the kinds of features and polish that the team is aiming for.
Maintain alignment over time: Work with PMs, Engineers, Sales, Marketing, BizDev, Support etc to help them digest and execute on the roadmap without unintended strategy drift.
Maintain accountability: Hold PMs (and other functions) accountable for their effective execution
Escalation: Act as a point of escalation and conflict resolution when PMs are not getting what they need from other functions
Rinse and repeat
Along the way, there are a lot of landmines and complexities to navigate.
These might include a number of character archetypes that risk distracting or derailing the focused product strategy. Productboard has published a cute infographic to highlight some of these characters. I've included it below.
Much of the day-to-day work of product leadership is helping these "animals" to make more productive contributions to the product process. As mentioned above, this often starts by ensuring there’s a strong and principled product strategy that acts as a tool for company-wide alignment. A strategy is not enough, though. The product team must engage in a continuous and disciplined alignment process. Disciplined means that they stick to the strategy and principles despite the distractions inherent in the behavior of the archetypes listed below
