Chief Product Officer: What They Do and How to Become One

If you’re reading this article on the Chief Product Officer role, there’s a good chance you’re in one of three situations right now. 

Maybe it’s a dreary afternoon and you’ve found yourself thinking about a change of career. Or maybe you need to put together a job listing for Chief Product Officer (CPO), and need a bit of help filling out that spec? Or maybe, just maybe, you’ve got a job interview coming up for the role of CPO and you’re trying not to panic.

Whatever the case, it’s important to know that the position of CPO is one of the most sought-after in Product Management, yet it’s a challenging role and a considerable step up from mid-level and even Senior product positions. If you want to become a Chief Product Officer there are a lot of new skills you need to bring to the table and a hell of a lot of new responsibilities that go beyond the longlist of Product Manager tasks.

Feeling up to it? Keen to climb that career ladder? Here’s everything you need to know about what a Chief Product Officer is and what you need to do to become one.

What is a Chief Product Officer?

The role of Chief Product Officer (CPO) is the name given to the person who leads everything to do with the commercial commodity at the heart of a product-led company. They sit above Product Management, Analysis, UX, and Development Teams, managing the whole group with a strategic focus on improving the product and providing mentorship to the people in each of those departments.

If you’re obsessed with the strategy that goes into making and releasing great products, and you also feel like you’ve got enough strings to your bow to be able to lead people across a range of disciplines, then being Chief Product Officer could be right up your street.

A good Chief Product Officer is hands-on without micromanaging and knows the product inside out. While it’s a C-suite role, many Chief Product Officers will work closely with the Product Management Team to provide guidance to take products from inception, to launch, and all the way through the entire product lifecycle.

The Director of Product Management and the Director of UX, for example, will both report to the Chief Product Officer with regular updates, with the CPO’s job being to spot any potential blockers, solve issues, and dovetail these sometimes disparate team updates into the overall product strategy.

The CPO sits on the same level as the rest of the C-suite executives, like the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), and Chief Operations Officer (COO). These roles sit below the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) – the big dog. Now, that’s a whole lot of Cs, but the main point is that a CPO is pretty high up in any product-led company.

What does a Chief Product Officer do? 

The main goal of a CPO is to effectively take the company’s product and strap a rocket to it, all without sacrificing the capacity (and sanity) of the people working on it. Of course, there’s a lot that goes into building a rocket and setting it off well – just ask NASA.

In real-world terms, that aim means that a Chief Product Officer’s key objectives include…

Growth and revenue expansion 

The Chief Product Officer needs to be able to balance prioritizing the things that make the product great with a need to expand and grow the business. It’s not exactly an operational or financial role, but others in the C-suite will be looking to the CPO for areas to grow the business through the product.

Your job, then, is to enable your team to find pockets of opportunity through implementing a product discovery process and then build out a strategy for capitalizing on them.

Retention and churn management 

Some customers won’t renew their subscriptions. That’s a shame, but it’s inevitable. But when those customer churn figures start to rise, all eyes will be on the Chief Product Officer to understand why and know how to fix it.

Churn is like a leaky pipe. As the CPO, you’re the plumber, and the people you have at your disposal are (without sounding flippant) your tools. It’ll be up to you to not only ensure that churn stays low, but that you have a long-term plan in place to grow retention.

Product adoption and customer onboarding 

A great CPO is at home in a data analytics suite, and they know how to spot patterns that point to areas for improvement. Improving your adoption rate and finding trends in your product adoption curve will be a key responsibility, alongside making sure that no new customers drop off before they’ve reached the wow moment of your product. Again, your success is the sum of your team’s parts here.

You’ll piece together the strategy that can improve the metrics, you’ll track the OKRs, and your Product Managers will work within their teams to deliver timely updates and new releases. 

Scale and operational efficiency 

Some CPOs are brought in specifically to build or grow a product team, while some sit over the top of an existing group. Either way, as you achieve growth in your product’s user base, you’ll end up with a Product Team that grows alongside it. Ultimately, it’ll be your job to make that growth sustainable.

Your responsibility will be managing ballooning teams so that things stay stable and operational, and that nobody comes out the other end of a scaling-up phase feeling burned out or lost. Perhaps most importantly: changes in the Product Team’s size absolutely cannot negatively affect the product.

Stakeholder management

 The CPO reports to the rest of the C-suite, specifically to the CEO. But they also need to be able to filter everything they’re being told by their cross-discipline team, run it through the product strategy mangle, and turn it into stakeholder-friendly messaging. You’ll likely find yourself presenting to external investors, and they’ll want you to know what they’ll find important to hear, and what’s extraneous.

As luck would have it, we actually have a great, free template for the perfect product roadmap presentation – one that’s designed to keep stakeholders engaged, and everyone informed. Check it out below ⏬:

Team structure and process management

One key responsibility of a CPO is to build an environment where your team will thrive and create exceptional products. You need to foster the right workstyle to suit your team and make sure that everyone operates in the same sort of operating system. 

Now the goal of CPO is NOT to micromanage what everyone needs to be doing all the time. Instead, you need to set guardrails that give co-workers rules on how to get their own work done with a certain level of autonomy. This stops workers from coming to you for support constantly, instead, you set parameters and if things go either side of it, then they can flag it. 

By building the principles for which your team works, you can empower your team and help them tackle challenges. For example, if you’re building for a two-sided marketplace and you’ve got to prioritize one type of user experience over the other, if your principle is that speed wins all, that will dictate the solution. However, If the principle is about delivering the happiest user experience, then the team will find a more aligned solution. It’s your job to come up with the best principles. 

Should I become a Chief Product Officer? 

The role of Chief Product Officer has been the dream for ambitious Product Managers. It’s the end goal, the last rung to climb on the career ladder. But it’s important to ask yourself, is it really the right role for you? 

The benefits of the position are well known. Based on anonymous data from Builtin.com, the average wage for a CPO in the U.S. is $230,747 🤑. Of course, the pay range is pretty vast depending on the company you work for, as that average sits between $85,000 and $625,000, but these figures still show that it can be a pretty lucrative job role, especially when you factor in that you could also get additional compensation of up to $85,000 per year. 

But money shouldn’t be the driving factor. You should always work towards a role that you love, and that’s the question you need to ask. Do you love the product side of Product Management or the management side? 

See, the role of CPO sits firmly in the management track. When in this position, you’re going to distance yourself from the nitty-gritty of building products and making features. Instead, you’re managing people, processes, finances, and strategy. If you find the most joy in creating and being involved in product, it may not be the right option for you. 

If you find yourself dreading the idea of managing people and instead want to stay in the thick of it, you can instead consider the IC track of the career ladder. Here, you can work on becoming a product expert, keeping you firmly glued to product development without hindering your career progression. The IC track is catching up on the management career ladder, and there are more and more roles that are on the same level as CPO, giving you more options than ever to grow your career without sacrificing your personal development.

You can learn more about the duel track career ladder through Susana Lopes’s insightful talk on Mind the Product in 2023. She’s one of the best voices in Product Management and features in our list of the top PMs you should be following. Check out who also made the list below ⤵️:

Along with these two tracks you can follow, you may also be in a position where you’re questioning if a specific CPO role is right for you. If you’re reading a job description and are umming and ahhing about if it’s the right fit for you, ask yourself the right questions about the role and the task at hand.

What skills do you need to become a Chief Product Officer? 

1. Leadership

CPOs are right near the tippy top of the company structure, so people will naturally turn to them for sage advice and strong leadership. It’s on a Chief Product Officer to have a plan ready for any product-related situation that arises, but also to be on hand to guide members of the wider team through their careers in a more general sense. Everyone, from UX and UI designers to data analysts, will knock on the CPO’s door looking for mentorship, so polish up your leadership skills to be sure you’re ready to deliver on that front. You can learn more about product leadership in the blog below: 

2. Strategic thinking

The luxury a CPO has over Product Managers is that they’re not quite so in the weeds of the day-to-day sprints. Instead, they have a top-level view to think with Sun Tzu-level tactical prowess about how to drive the product forward. That not only calls for you to understand data and analytical insight but you also need to know what to do with it. CPOs think over the long term so that people with their boots on the ground don’t have to.

3. Customer and data-mindedness

A massive part of that strategic thinking is being able to see the wood for the trees. Is the product you’re currently molding into shape one that customers actually want or need? Does the data support the decisions being made on a UX front? And, if not, how can you nudge things towards more customer-centric outcomes? Being a CPO means being able to kill other people’s darlings if they don’t suit either the overarching vision or the current market, providing that you have the evidence to show that.

4. Communication

The gift of the gab is going to be a beneficial skill for CPOs. In this role, you’re communicating a lot, both up and down the company hierarchy, as well as laterally to other positions of the same seniority as you. You need to be confident and capable of communicating the values of your approach in every which way, using evidence and other tactics to get buy-in and support. 

Do you need qualifications and training to become a Chief Product Officer? 

The minimum requirement to become a CPO is to have a bachelor’s degree, but more education in related areas of study is going to benefit you in the pursuit of this role. Training in business management and, of course, Product Management are going to be a plus, but the most important thing to become a CPO is experience. 

You need to have been around the block in the product world and have the expertise and knowledge to forge a path in your company and manage the challenges that you’re being brought in to address. 

Of course, you’ll gain the experience the longer you’re in Product Management, but there are ways to fast-track that. If climbing the ladder naturally sounds like a long road, you could try the CPO Accelerator, an online school developed by Melissa Perri that specializes in growing product leaders into Chief Product Officers over the course of a few months.

If you’re keen to learn more, we spoke with Melissa all about the different roles in Product Ops. Check out the full conversation below 🔽:

Best advice for an aspiring Chief Product Officer 

Looking to step into the shoes of a Chief Product Officer? New to the role and keen to hit the ground running? Here’s some advice to give you the best chance to nail the role and make an impact. With thoughts from some of the best Product Leaders and Senior Product professionals, here are our tips to make you a better fit. 

You don’t have to have all the answers

You may feel that you need to be a Product Management oracle when in a CPO role, but that’s far from the truth. The sooner you realize that you don’t need to have all the answers, the better you’ll perform. Your goal as a Chief Product Officer is to get the most out of the people around you; the staff you manage. Leverage their knowledge and skills to achieve the outcomes you need.

Show that you’ve been here before

When carving your path as a CPO, especially when you’re interviewing for the position, you want to make sure that you showcase that you’ve walked this road before. That you know how to tackle the challenges you’re being brought in to face, and that you have the tools to tackle them. 

This will improve the confidence your team has in you, and will also make you feel assured that you meet the requirements of the role. This is something that ProdPad webinar guest, Giff Constable, spoke about when discussing the CPO role.

Want to know what other advice Giff had to say? Check out the on-demand webinar below to get a detailed overview of what you need to do to become a CPO 👇:

You’re creating a system, not a product 

The role of CPO is a step removed from Product Management and product development. No longer will you be building solutions, but instead you’re creating the system and process that your team will follow to build that product. 

It’s your responsibility to create the principles that are to be followed that dictate how your product is being crafted. You’re building the road that the team below you will drive on, not the car they’ll use to travel on it. 

Work on your product team structure

In the CPO role, you’re the guiding light for your team, so you need to understand how these teams operate and build a structure that they can excel within. The best way to do this is to craft a killer Product Team structure that brings the best out of your staff and co-workers. You’re all pulling towards the same goal, and it’s your main focus to ensure that the goal is understood and aligned in every team or squad. 

Trust your gut

When you become a CPO, now is not the time to have doubt and a crisis in confidence. You need to be assured in your abilities and process when you become a Chief Product Officer. Of course, that’s easier said than done. 

You’re trying to get buy-in from other roles, so you need convictions in your work and what you do. If that voice in the back of your head starts sounding negative, you can work on shutting it up by doing research and finding data to back up your decisions. You could also seek to find a mentor or consulate to provide guidance and a soundboard to bounce ideas and concerns against. 

Always remember that you’re dealing with people 

You need people skills to do well as a CPO. Never forget that you’re managing human beings. You need to approach your work with empathy and with a focus on how to make everyone excel and produce their best work. You’re not there to solve problems for your team, but give them the tools to avoid the problems in the first place. It’s like that proverb, give someone a fish, and they’re fed for a day. Teach them to fish, and they’re fed for a lifetime.

Climbing the ladder

Becoming a CPO is an attractive option for many Product Managers, and can be the pinnacle of your career, the driving force behind all the hard work. Becoming a Chief Product Officer is no small feat – it requires leadership, strategy, and a keen understanding of both product and people. As a CPO, you’re no longer just building a product, you’re building the system that helps your team thrive. It’s a role that demands you balance vision with practicality, empowering your team to innovate while keeping the company’s goals at the forefront.

A key responsibility of a Chief Product Officer is to create the structure and process that your team works to. This includes selecting the best tools to drive progress. ProdPad is a tool that can make your team more effective and help you become a better Product professional. Try it out for free and see how it can improve your process.