Chief Product Officer

“From what I've seen, it makes sense to do that maybe when you're, like, series C or something, when you have maybe a dozen PMs.”

“If you put growth outside a product, You kind of set up a potential conflict between the two. Really at the end of the day, growth is often effectively a product team. They have product people, engineers, data scientists. They work more with like the code that…”

“The first week of October, we have You know, kind of V-two of that launching which I think will keep P-ninety delivery time stable, but will improve our ability to bin and batch by, I think, you know, pretty close to double digits. So not only you know, that, …”

“The mistakes that I see happen is that the CEO founder goes to hire for a skill set that Is either at odds with what they really need, or they're not actually honest with themselves around the role that they want to continue to play within product. And so if y…”

“At Segment we had a bunch of really technical founders, right? So we had four very talented, very product-focused, and very technical founders. We also brought in product-focused engineering leaders early on. We never really had a CPO in the traditional sense.”

“And so I think the biggest consideration is where is your founding team at? What are the biggest gaps that you need to fill? And really thinking about a CPO as somebody who can play the role of up-leveling the product organization, but needs to be complementar…”

“If you want to be a badass PM, I don't think you really need it. You can learn the skills that you need to learn through product-focused training, through being in the right situation, through learning from Jedi Masters at your company. If you want to be a CPO…”

“And strategy, to make it really concrete for people, is you should be able to articulate your strategy in a two-page document, not six pages, not, you know, like, not, like, huge thing, but, like, A two-page concise document where one person holds the pen, and…”

“Really depends on the founder but probably very, very late. I wouldn't do it too soon. I think that the best CEOs are very product minded and should stay involved in product for as long as possible.”

“The three roles that I see that get fired over and over are CPO, CMO and head of talent. They typically have like one and a half to two year stints, and then they like move on to their next thing, you know, sort of like quietly and discreetly.”

“I honestly think you don't need a CPO until maybe like as a founder, you're starting to think about transitioning into the chairman role.”

“The only thing that matters with a CPO is whether they have the trust of the CEO.”