So, You’re the CPO

The CPO is both the chief of product and a company officer. She has a more strategic perspective on the entire product line and thinks in the language of business*. The CPO requires a mastery of product management good enough to lead — not merely manage — an entire product organization.

Strategic Responsibilities

Since a company is defined by its products, the CPO is often the tip of the spear among the leadership team. Uniquely among leadership, the CPO maintains product air cover with a multidimensional — sales, marketing, finance, legal and compliance, training, user journey, support, partners, community, and above all, customer — perspective across product lines and atop major products attended to by multiple teams. With her broader market knowledge, the CPO’s brief exceeds the confines of the product; she can advise on M&A and partnerships, be competent to engage in product evangelism, conduct external relations, and other activities consistent with her one goal: advancing the business.

Executive Collaboration

The CEO and board are partners in creating strategy, and the CPO is accountable to them. She must call out a plan that, in good conscience, she can’t support. To develop a strategy for the company’s future, let alone handle day-to-day demands, the CPO needs that same cross-functional understanding of the business, but there’s a change in emphasis; the CPO needs to understand how her colleagues in different functions think and how to formulate a strategy that the leadership team can buy into. Hint: it’s all about the numbers. Sales wants wins, finance wants regular positive cash flow, the board cares that investments are optimal, marketing wants work that’s “on brand,” and no one wants to hear product-speak. Everyone wants to know how you’re going to monetize further.

The CPO generally handles higher functional conflicts because the troops don’t have the political power to do so.

Organizational Leadership

While the product teams are the executors of company strategy, they are more than that. The CPO can turn to them for strategy help and refinement, as they have the resources, exposure, and smarts to lend a hand. As the strategy — further devolved into themes or intents — is executed by the teams, the CPO must constantly solicit ground truth from them, relying on a style of polite questioning that helps people think things through and draws out deeper understanding.

Upward reporting must be set up to monitor each activity’s progress toward company strategy. OKRs are famously used for this purpose, but there are other ways, such as tagging each activity with a strategic theme. Regardless of the approach, the CPO should move the teams to address the indicators that lead. So, if you’re using OKRs, ensure they’re oriented towards achieving future results.

Like a bonsai that requires careful and periodic attention to its growth habit, the CPO also makes mostly gradual adjustments to the product org so that its focus and structure are continuously aligned with the company’s strategy. There will never be enough people, and resources must be allocated to their highest purpose. Extra points go for pruning proactively rather than reactively.

The CPO establishes the product organization’s “hardware” and “software.” A foundational hardware decision is the release cadence and process for various teams and the products’ multidimensional quality level. The CPO should also collaborate on which tools, protocols, and shared staff are required to empower the product teams; this is now often called “product ops.” If you have a CTO, all this will be a shared responsibility. But humans are not hardware; they need leadership.

People Leadership

Advice on leadership fills a library and should be consulted, but let’s focus on what helps execution. Are people indoctrinated into the company’s mission, vision, and values? Are they given the “ambrosia of inspiration” by genuinely connecting staff with the mission, for example, through generous sharing of customer interactions? Are teams empowered to make as many decisions as they can on their own? Are they permitted to test and learn? To the greatest extent, give your teams the objectives and discuss milestones and deadlines for getting there, but let them find the paths; give them the “what” but not the “how.”

A CPO who empowers their team to learn is unafraid to not check their work phone on vacation.

At the same time, the teams need safety. For example, if a launch goes bad, the CPO takes the blame, as they have the necessary political capital to do so. (This creates an extra incentive for the CPO to nurture competent staff.)

There’s much more to the leadership of a product organization: how do you celebrate, share between yourselves, recognize people, work with customers, and how do your people embody the brand identity? Well-led organizations tend to have a great culture. In the forward to his revision of The Nordstrom Way, author Robert Spector writes about the Three Immutable rules he found after visiting many more organizations:

1. “Most people want to do a good job.
2. Most people want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
3. It’s up to management to make sure that people feel valued and appreciated so that they come to work every day with a desire to do a good job and to be part of something bigger than themselves.”

To make good decisions, people also need to be fully informed. Let’s start with “Why are we going in this direction?” The entire product organization should understand the basis for the strategy. Strategy is choices made; go further and discuss the choices not made. Discuss the underlying rationale for the strategic themes or intents people are being asked to perform against. Teams need to see the ground to find their path, so make as much data as possible freely available, along with resources that help people derive value from it. Push the teams to learn by engaging with customers and returning their learning to the group.

Soft skills and to-do’s

A CPO needs all the soft skills required for product managers. These include negotiation, presentation, questioning, building what matters, design and elegance, and awareness of personality types. More CPO-level skills are sales, marketing, long-term innovation, design systems, discovery, hiring, and multiple team management, along with these musts:

• The CPO ought to understand they’re not the smartest person in the room and that they succeed to the extent they hire people who are different from them and also smarter.
• The CPO should project stability and not say different things on different days. They also should unambiguously say the same things to different people. Transparency is a way of life.
• The CPO ought to minimize others’ overhead. For example, direct reports should provide periodic status using a simple and unambiguous template.
• The CPO needs to be painfully aware that they’re the Hippo when they offer advice or suggestions.
• The CPO ought to ask for contributions to their work, such as presentations or proposals, but the reverse does not apply; the CPO should not get involved in direct reports’ work.
• The CPO must (yes, must) judge others’ work product, and when quality is found lacking, the CPO should seek improvement. Improving someone’s work product may be a simple matter of adjusting expectations.
• The CPO should be a mentor or coach to those who want it. Humility is crucial for effective coaching. Your methods may not always be the best, so you can learn from your mentee. Practice empathic listening, manage your thoughts and judgments, and show genuine curiosity to create a supportive environment for your student to thrive.
• The CPO does best by enabling her organization’s self-learning by implementing show-and-tells, high-level retrospectives, and collaboratively produced templates.
• The CPO should empower her organization with as much “CPO level” decision-making as possible, possibly including how the organization is structured. Failures should be considered no-fault learning opportunities.
• The CPO should take care not to make people uncomfortable with how they speak or what they’ve asked people to do. The first step for the CPO is not trusting that they aren’t tone-deaf. Find informants and give them safety.
• The CPO shouldn’t micromanage strategic projects, even though they’re under greater scrutiny. Assign these projects to competent people.
• The CPO should be proactive. They should think a few moves out while encouraging the team to be the canaries.
• The CPO should be careful not to favor a deputy when that deputy’s direct reports suffer under the latter’s poor management.
• The CPO should use structured hiring techniques to find the right person, regardless of youth or age, engineer or poet, MBA or self-taught.
• The CPO has to be a diplomat. This includes patience and restraint, mediation skills, managing her emotions, reading the room, clearly communicating, being aware of people’s differences, showing verbal and nonverbal respect, adaptability to situations and circumstances, staying calm in emergencies, and active listening.
• The CPO should exemplify the twin pillars of personal humility and communication.

If you get to be a CPO one day, I hope you thank me for the above advice. If you’ve got a CPO right now, you may have more empathy for them. How do they compare to the above?

*The leadership team often uses “business speak.” These common KPIs provide a flavor for it:

Financial Performance

• Gross and net profit
• Profit margin
• Cash flow
• ROI (Return on Investment)
• Return on equity
• Debt to equity
• Working capital
• Current ratio

Operational Efficiency

• Utilization “efficiency ratio”
• Average order value
• Cost per lead

Sales and Marketing Performance

• Sales growth
• Conversion/retention rates
• Churn rate
• Customer lifetime value
• Return on marketing investment
• NPS (Net Promoter Score)

Accounts Management

• Accounts receivable
• A/R turnover rate