CPO Scorecard
This hiring scorecard has been designed to help you map out your requirements for your key CPO hire. Avoid costly hiring mistakes and make the right hire first time!
What is the role of a Chief Product Officer?
The role of a Chief Product Officer (CPO) is to manage a company’s product roadmap and strategy, customer insights and product analytics.
For larger or more product-led organisations, the CPO would also be responsible for managing product marketing, design and user research.
What qualifications are required to be a CPO?
A CPO typically requires a strong educational background, often holding a Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field, such as Business or Computer Science. Many product leaders also possess advanced degrees including MBAs.
An ideal candidate would also have significant experience building and leading Product teams, with a track record of working on multiple key projects at an organisation.
What skills make a great CPO?
Some core skills that make a great CPO include:
1. Translating what a customer says they want into what they actually want: The CPO can take sales feedback directly from customers, or analyse usage trends to identify what customers are looking for and executing on the creation or amendment of those products accordingly.
2. A track record in setting the vision for product strategy: Proven experience when it comes to ownership of product roadmaps is crucial.
3. Pricing and packaging development: The best CPO will understand the features which are critical to move customers to higher tier products and will understand how small product changes and tweaks will affect the company as a whole. In addition, they will be able to identify how to bundle sets of new features/products to enter into new target markets, in an attempt to drive revenue.
4. Proficiency in cross-functional collaboration: The CPO is a must get other leaders on board with their vision in order to be successful. They need to establish strong credibility as they will usually be taking on roles previously managed by the founder. The best CPO will manage, prioritise and allocate resources effectively, liaising across functions to earn organisation-wide support to achieve launch dates. It is not uncommon for the CPO to work with Sales, Customer Success, Technology and Data functions all at once.
When to hire a CPO?
Often times, this is a senior hire that is made early on in an organisation’s life, and it is not uncommon for one of the Co-Founders of a company to be a CPO, especially where Product and Technology need to be separated. This can be as early as Seed or even Pre-Seed stage.
However, for later stage companies, there are certain key indicators that will tell you that it might be time to hire a CPO:
1. If you’re expanding from a single product to multiple product lines: You will need a high quality leader who can balance the distribution of resources on existing revenue streams with the new endeavour.
2. If your company is scaling quickly and is presented with a multitude of new opportunities and/or problems: A disciplined and strategic CPO will be necessary to maintain balance.
3. If your company is expanding into new territories: You will need different Go-to-Market strategies, developing and approach to compliance mandates, localising product strategies and pricing tactics.
4. If customer experiences are disjointed across your products and life cycle: In these circumstances, your engineering teams will be stuck processing one-off requests. Hiring a CPO to bring customer centric thinking and product vision in an attempt to unify the end-to-end customer experience.
5. If you identify a disconnect between sales and engineering teams: Engineering teams could be building unneccesary features or become stuck processing one off-requests and are not strategically working towards a cohesive product vision. This is a common problem for founders chasing large complex deals which come with many niche requests. This is exactly when you need to bring in a strong CPO to implement a strategic framework and identify opportunities worth pursuing.
What is the career path for becoming a CPO?
Given the varied nature of the role, there is no true set career path to becoming a CPO. You would normally rise through the ranks starting in a position related to junior level product management or perhaps even UX/UI Design. Many CPOs also have a background in software engineering.
Once establishing yourself as a Product Manager, you would then have to take the initiative to manage and lead projects and teams, on the path to becoming a CPOs.
What Salary and Benefits should I offer a CPO?
Similarly to most positions, this is entirely dependent on the size and stage of your business. With that being said, it is hire you have to get right as the CPO will be the main driving force behind the company’s product strategy and performance.
In terms of benefits, most companies have a bonus scheme in place linked to the function’s performance (in terms of meeting product release dates/performance) or company performance. This is typically between 10-25% of the candidate’s base salary.
In terms of base salary, the table below gives an indication of VP of Product salaries depending on the stage of the company’s growth (this is an average and results may vary):
| Growth Stage | Basic Salary |
|---|---|
| Seed | £90 – £110k |
| Series A | £100 – £130k |
| Series B | £150 – £200k |
| Series C | £175 – £220k |
| Series D | £220k + |
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