Some CPOs are more CPOs than others

Why a product (& tech) leader's real authority is your problem too 

At Product People, we see many of our clients returning either while still at the company we’ve worked with initially or when they change jobs. So while we’re technically working with the same person in the same role, everything else may be completely different. We want to be successful and make our clients successful too. 

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The founder who never let go of the product decisions

A newly hired CPO was struggling at a B2B company whose founder drove sales and product from 0 to 1. The founder was not letting go of the product decisions to become more strategic in his advice. So the current product team was suffering from the founder second-guessing them and not even letting the product managers finish their pitch in staff meetings. The founder also came up with various pet projects that weren't always supported by data, or if they were, that wasn’t very transparent to the team. 

So there was this unhappiness on both sides. The founder felt the CPO and PMs were ineffective, and the Founder had to come up with all the great ideas. The CPO felt like they were just there by title, and then had to manage the unhappy product managers and unhappy Founder. And then the PMs were working without much agency or had mentally checked out and were just doing things.

Like Jerry Maguire, we had to tell the client, "Help me help you” which in this case was even harder since the CPO didn’t have formal authority, so we worked on influencing the Founder.  

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Promised a transformation, given 20% of the revenue

In another engagement, a new CPO was brought in to help transform the product and tech organization. 

The organization had no product per se, so there was no platform, and everything was kind of choppy in between. They also had no proper product role. Therefore, the transformation work needed was big.

The CPO was told: you come in, and you take all the product functions from wherever they’re tucked in. Then, after he came in, he only got a small segment of the business that was like 20% of the revenue. In other words, this whole transformation was only for 20% of the revenue. 

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What does 20% of the revenue do to the work itself?

We got brought in to help the organization decide what to build and how to execute. After a bit, we realized people weren't showing up to our meetings, or that they were committing to do some things and not delivering them, so we obviously started wondering why.

When we took a step back, we understood it. This was not considered important in the organization. The person who was asked to do something massive was then given 20% of the resources to do it. And everything that they did had to align with the part of the organization that was bringing 80% of the revenue. That part of the organization was not run by someone who cared about the product; they had been doing sales in the old wine-and-dine way. So why change something that they've been doing for so long and apparently worked?

So even though they assumed this lack of forward movement might be a bad idea in the long term, they still did not want to change anything, because they didn’t want to have that conflict at that moment.

And that’s the setup that we ended up with. We doubled down on persistence and pulled some things through, and also connected with people that were interested in moving things forward. But we did way less than we would have been capable of just because a large part of the organization didn't report to the person who brought us in.

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Getting it baked into the contract

Both examples have something in common: a title arrived without any real control over headcount, resources, or decisions behind it.

In my last article, Power is not always formal, I said that you don’t need formal authority to do things, you need to be able to convince people. The CPO example shows where that has its limits. We did pull some things through by convincing people, but we did way less than we would have been capable of. Convincing people can take you part of the way, but how far you get depends on the mandate behind you.

So I think something crucial to do, before you join any organization as a product leader, is understanding where they’re at and if you’re going to get the authority and leeway that you get promised.

Get the conditions baked into the contract. Get in writing that there’s going to be a switch in the organization, how much headcount is in each part of the team, and the expected timeline. Maybe even include a path to compensation and various incentives to stay longer with the company. I’ve heard some amazing product colleagues do it, and it has worked for some of them. 

A title without a mandate is a remote control without batteries, and the contract is how you make sure the batteries are in.