Is Your Chief Product Officer an Expert at the Wrong Thing?

Hiring a scale-up Chief Product Officer (CPO) before you have a scalable business model is a startup-killing mistake.  You’re interviewing candidates from Google, Meta or Tesla, but their playbooks are for optimizing a billion-dollar business, not finding your first million in revenue.  This burns time, money and patience on unnecessary processes while essential work like ideation and rapid customer feedback falls to the wayside.

There’s a reason why this problem is so clear to me: my own product journey is marked by making some of these same mistakes.  What you actually need is a hands-on builder and strategist who lives in the details of software and market validation.  That is why I offer a fractional CPO service designed to help founders cross the chasm from early-stage ideas to a profitable, scalable business.

Are Your Teams Busy, but Lack Momentum?

Founders often feel this strain as a series of persistent symptoms.  Progress feels slow, the roadmap is a rigid list of features and development teams are focused on the wrong capabilities.  For founders who made a strategic hire in product, these signs are incredibly frustrating.

However, these are indicators that you were right about the need for a product leader, but you selected the wrong person.  When your CPO focuses on scaling instead of discovery, it creates these points of friction:

• Premature process: executive time is spent developing and reviewing robust systems for an unvalidated business model, while customer-focused experiments are deprioritized.
• Misaligned metrics: success is defined by internal efficiencies like team velocity instead of market-based results like activation rates, funnel performance and revenue growth.
• Strategic stagnation: your focus shifts inward to protect and harden the original idea.  As your startup becomes anchored to its initial vision, you are unable to pivot or adapt to what the market is telling you.

Pragmatic Product Leadership for Startups

The way out is to engage a fractional product leader with the right skills for your current stage of growth.  My fractional CPO service gives your startup the hands-on, strategic expertise you need to guide your product without the full-time cost.

With more than twenty years of experience as a programmer, product manager, and consultant, I don’t just offer advice; I deliver outcomes.

• Executive & builder experience: as the SVP of Product at a management consulting firm, I didn’t just manage a P&L; I built a portfolio of online training products that went from zero to one million in revenue in three years.  I have direct experience building products, managing partnerships and making the tough calls that drive growth.
• Focus on tangible outcomes: if there’s work to be done, I do it. Whether it’s validating your ideal customer profile, modeling a price change or overhauling your roadmap, I deliver finished work, not just slide decks.  Together, we’ll install a system of continuous customer discovery and rapid experimentation to uncover what works.
• Player-coach mentality: having been a programmer and a product manager, I know how to unite technical and business teams to create high-performing organizations.  I’ll work directly with your developers, using Agile practices not for ceremony, but to ship the right product faster and create a team that wins.

Build the Right Product, Faster

Stop wondering if your team is working on the right things.  Let’s build the product that proves your business model and gets you to your next funding round, faster.  I’ll work with you and your team to build repeatable product development processes that will secure your company’s future long after our engagement ends.

Think you might have the wrong CPO? Let’s spend thirty minutes dissecting your product strategy.  No charge, no obligation.  Book a call today.