It can be particularly difficult to give up the right level of control when bringing in a new product leader.
You need to give up enough to empower them to identify what you should build, when you should build it, and why you should build it, and then work with everyone else in the company to execute on that roadmap.
At the same time, as the company’s leader, you have to continue to set the quality bar and be the standard-bearer for the product vision, especially when it comes to innovative features and product experiences that your customers wouldn’t necessarily think to ask for.
Samer and I got into this and came up with 5 key parts:
👉 You’re expanding from a single product to multiple product lines.
👉 You’re scaling quickly.
👉 You’re expanding into new territories.
👉 Your customer experiences are disjointed across your products and life cycle.
👉 There’s a disconnect between sales and engineering.
One of the biggest failure modes when hiring a CPO is hiring someone from a company that builds great products, but who wasn’t personally responsible for making the product great.
📹 Full episode in the comments.
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