The Two Jobs of a CPO

One of the hardest things I’ve found about being a Head of Product / Chief Product Officer is that you really have two jobs:

The first is setting up a strong product culture, establishing strong design/roadmapping practices, mapping out product processes, managing cross-functional partners, etc. Basically, being an executive that runs a strategic cross-functional team. I’m aware that “cross-functional” is one of those buzzwords that might seem to mean nothing, but I think it’s important to emphasize that PM teams tend to touch almost every project that an organization takes on, in at least some form. As a result they need to run efficient, high-quality organizations.

The second job of a CPO is aligning tightly with your CEO to set the right product strategy. Every CEO-CPO pairing falls in a different place on the continuous spectrum from “CEO sets all product vision” to “CPO sets effectively the entire product vision.” Regardless of where you fall, it’s essential that you and your CEO are on the same page. This is basically an Individual Contributor job, and is only barely delegate-able. It’s like raising your kids – you can delegate a few aspects of it but you are solely accountable and the spirit of the job must be done completely by you.

Job #1, setting the right product culture, is essential for your team to work well. Without this you won’t have enough impact. But if you don’t do job #2 well and align with company strategy immediately and forever, you will not remain head of product for long. And the two jobs are surprisingly different.

Balancing Culture and Strategy

There’s no perfect way to balance setting up the systems that build the product and setting the direction of the product itself. But you can dramatically increase the odds of success by looking for efficient ways to balance both jobs.

First off – realize that the job of setting direction is the more important of the two roles. If you aren’t perfect at setting product culture, but you’re pointing your imperfect ship in the right direction, then you’ll have time to iterate and continuously improve. But if you are great at setting product culture and point your well-oiled product building machine in the wrong direction, you’re going to get replaced. CEOs and boards of directors are rightfully uncompromising about alignment between your product strategy and the company’s direction. You can sometimes be a bit early or a bit late to pivot towards a strategy that aligns to your CEO, but going in a different direction is unacceptable.

Worth defining: Strategic alignment doesn’t mean that you just do whatever your CEO says, and that all of their ideas are your ideas. It just means that you 1. Incorporate their ideas into your product strategy appropriately, and 2. That you elevate and support your team’s best ideas. Unwillingness to admit that others have good ideas and inability to inspire others are non-starters for a head of product.

Second, it’s valuable to efficiently set up a strong, stage-appropriate operational muscle on your product team. Get the right templates in place; set up the right rituals; set the right expectations; establish the right interview plans. Because of how product teams operate (typically 1 PM per team), a team of PMs has a huge amount of room for drift; much more than other vocations. 10 engineers might all be on the same team. 10 designers will work on different products, but they’ll need to establish shared design systems and protocols for customers’ sanity (and their own). But 10 PMs can legitimately end up running 10 different products, some of which have different pricing, technology stacks, business models, and even customer profiles.

Scaling Product Culture

One of the best ways to find balance is by delegating or establishing key product operational tasks once it’s clear that your team will be scaling up significantly. Be warned, however, that it can be very counterproductive to delegate product culture or process-setting to someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time building products themselves. Shipping product is really nuanced and you can’t just slap some generic template on a lot of it – the systems you set up need to be configured for your business and for a high-quality culture of builders.

For a tiny example, on my product team we spend a lot of effort curating and managing early access periods for new products due to types of workloads that we run (medium-high business criticality, very high scale). We’ve also had to devote meaningful effort alongside engineering to making sure that there are firm limits on the product due to cost/scale concerns. This is something that a prosumer note-taking app simply wouldn’t care as much about; but I bet that they care more about interaction design than we need to. You need product experts to make these sorts of calls, and can’t just hire a generic ops person.

Scaling Strategic Alignment

Scaling strategy is much harder, especially for a complex product. But luckily it can be steered individually much more easily - think about how one person can turn a cruise ship but it takes dozens to operate the engines.

One of the most important ways to run strategy is to just be a dictator. How to run your team can be a debate and active discussion; the direction that you’re going should not be.

Hiring or training people who get “the plan” of how your product is going to win is one of the best ways to get strategic alignment. Businesses are complicated; having someone who can support the company’s strategic direction without being hand-held is invaluable. The litmus test – they should jump on new key opportunities in their area of responsibility before you realized that they exist. Training enough of these people will allow your department to maintain strategic alignment without the CPO having to audit every single decision.

Takeaways

The two jobs of a head of product are hard but tractable.

It’s not that the two different jobs are inherently incompatible. It’s simply that they are each distinct jobs, requiring large amounts of effort and expertise, and it’s hard to accomplish two hard tasks at the same time. The danger comes from the fact that many people don’t realize that their job is to set both product culture and strategy, and that one of them can be worked on iteratively (product culture), while strategy is a do-or-die requirement from day 1. Keep in mind that your manager will feel an asymmetry in these jobs as well; they are the god-emperor of your company’s strategy, but you are likely more of an expert at the tactical details of building a great product team.

I suspect that the dichotomy between these two roles is also why Chief Product Officers are one of the harder positions to fill once a company gets to scale. The skills that get you hired as a CPO are all about product culture and process setting. But the skills that keep you from getting fired are all about strategic alignment, and finding that alignment with a high-octane, highly confident CEO is an entirely different skill. A lot of companies hire product culture builders because the skillset is portable, and these hires then fail to lock-in on where the company should go.

If you’re a head of product, it’s critical to realize that you have two major directives that won’t directly reinforce one another. Communication with your CEO / manager is key – help them understand what you need to do, and how far along you are at accomplishing it. That way you can keep everyone on the same page and actually do the job you were hired for.

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