From Junior to CPO – path to greatness in product

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If you want to start your career as product manager or/and product owner it means that you are open for a great journey. Journey with a lot of twists and turns, but with a very clear career path. This path will be vital also for those who want to develop their employees and already know the distinction between Project Manager, Delivery Manager, Product Owner and Project Manager.

Junior, Mid, Senior – Road to excellence

To put it very simply. When you have junior product manager on board there is great possibility that typical career path for such manager will look like this:

We all need to start somewhere. With time, experience, and projects we become capable of taking on more roles. Although each of the above deals with the product, each looks at it from a different perspective.

Junior PMProduct ManagerSenior PMDirectorVPCPO
Knows and follows principles of product development but sometimes needs assistance from more experienced colleagues.Fully independent in the product development process. Working with at least one development team. Making decisions based on data.Experienced professional, who not only brings top-quality expertise, but also guides less experienced colleagues.An Expert who works closely with the client to optimize and redefine the vision and business goals of the product, based on hard data.Develop a strong team of product managers and designers. Defining and driving the product strategy. Execution of developed solutions.Oversees all of a company’s product-related matters. Leading the PMs. Creating a vision and strategy. Evangelizing products from concept to launch. Research that leads to informed decision-making across the organization.

Above table is a very brief and simple description of each role in the product development cycle. But as always the devil’s in the details. And those details decide how each of these roles can cooperate and complement each other.

Let’s start with juniors. If they are working in an agile environment they should know and follow the principles of agile development. But also:

  • They gather product requirements from you, the client, and assure – sometimes with assistance – that the team is doing “the right thing” at all times
  • They need to understand the vision for the product that you want to build but still need to learn how to most effectively adapt it.
  • Most likely – because you can have juniors with UX background – they don’t yet have to follow good UX practice.
  • Under solid mentorship from more experienced professionals and with their support in building Product they will evolve into regular mid.

So now we go deeper. What about a regular product manager? You are investing in someone who eventually doesn’t need any assistance in carrying out tasks from start to finish. But also:

  • They know how to act in different situations, even those very stressful.
  • They know how to cooperate with various types of clients and with different specialities.
  • On that stage they can provide advice regarding the product requirements.
  • They know how to involve the stakeholders and/or end-users in the process, inviting them to actively take part in the development of the product.
  • Gathering constant feedback and based on that feedback bringing new ideas on the table.

With time, experience and project they will become considered seniors. For many occasions they will be your most valuable “asset” in the organization. Mostly because they are the most experienced professionals. They can be responsible not only for one team or project, but for multiple of them. You should rely on them also in areas where you need:

  • New useful tools and best practices.
  • They will mentor and guide less experienced specialists.
  • They are taking more the business point of view.
  • They can assess opportunities and risks on a wider scale.
  • Doing that they will take all necessary business metrics into consideration while building the product.
  • Depending on organization needs they can take manager roles and become team leaders for a couple product managers.

Another level

Above mentioned you can have in your structure Director or VP (Vice President) of Product. Sometimes your structure will be deeper with the Director/Directors of Product and VP above them. This situation will be more often in really big organizations where you have a lot of area dependencies. To put it simply, you have a very complicated product.

In other cases there is a possibility that the organization will only have VP or already Chief Product Officer. In all cases their responsibilities can be and most likely will be similar. But what do you want and need to expect from the most experienced roles responsible for product development? If you consider to have someone on that level you should consider candidate that fulfills those areas:

VisionExecutionTeam Building and culture
He can define and drive the product strategy created alongside with other specialists.Needs to complement the CEO when that CEO has his own vision about the company and product.He should be the driving force in creating the vision and the answer to the question of what the product the company is building should be and, more importantly, what it should not be.Vision without strong execution is shit. Sorry for the language but that’s the fact.Strong execution comes from strong leadership.Should be expert on different forms of product planning, customer discovery, product discovery, and product development process.Strong leadership comes and connects with knowledge on how to build teams and product culture.That means that the team understands how important continuous and rapid testing and learning is. VP/CPO support and drive that understanding.Last but not least he needs to be able to work well on a personal level with the other key execs.

Do you always need a VP or even a CPO? No. You don’t. In some cases – for example in small organizations – there is no point in having that role, mostly because founders can be leaders and driving force for creating and executing a vision for a product. With time, complexity, and money, you will start to consider hiring someone like that. Or maybe you will go in a different direction and put your bet on the Chief Product Technical Officer?

CPTO what?

If we take into account that the notion of a product has evolved beyond traditional measures like quality, service, and capabilities to become a well-rounded assessment view of the product, team performance and customer experience, then for product development you need someone other than CPO. Product and technology teams must collaborate deeply on the customer’s needs to deliver on what they think, feel and want.

We can observe a shift from traditional CPO and CTO (Chief Technical Officer) into an amalgam of those two roles into one. Chief Product Technical Officer. If we try to put this role in one sentence that can be that sentence:

The Chief Product Technical Officer is a strategic leader, visionary, team supervisor, and an advocate of an organization’s product and technology.

When we look at different organizations we can say that leadership values long-running and cross-functional teams that solve problems together in order to build knowledge and improve the understanding of problems to improve both product and team performance over time. But that understanding is not divided on product and technology. Those two parts function and intermingle with each other. Main role of CPTO is to treat those parts equally and while building a vision take into account not only how the product will realize the customer’s needs, but also how the technology will change to ensure delivery of the expected value.

You can go further and also add design to that equation. If that is the case then we can ask ourselves a question. If the CPTO is going to take on technology, product and design where does it stop? The answer is simple. It stops where the value stream stops. With a CPTO in post, the board can provide resources to a single individual to manage the total value stream removing the budget negotiation that, for so long, absorbed so much leadership time.

Is this the future of product development work? I don’t know. No one knows, and that’s probably the most beautiful thing about it.

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