Episode 164: Positioning Yourself for a Chief Product Officer Role with the CEO & Co-Founder at Artico Search
In this episode of Product Thinking, Mercedes Chatfield-Taylor, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Artico Search, joins Melissa Perri. Together, they discuss navigating the hiring landscape for Chief Product Officers, the importance of technical expertise and commercial acumen in today's market, and what the difference is between a Head of Product and a Chief Product Officer.
You’ll hear them talk about:
[02:44] - The effects of COVID have impacted the macro environment for Chief Product Officers (CPOs). Silicon Valley has the tendency to be reactive, but Mercedes says if you want to stay in business, you don't fire your CPO, who’s doing a great job. Like many industries, there is less funding to go around after COVID. In this environment, there is a real focus on doing more with less. Combining roles is more common, for example, if you're coming from an engineering background and now tackling a product, there’s no shortage of opportunities.
10:17] - Hiring a CPTO isn’t as simple as giving a CTO a go at product or vice versa. The role of CPTO marries the technical with the commercial acumen and understanding of the customer. Firstly, to be a great CPTO, you often come from a great product company. Secondly, you’re going to need to know the product landscape. Technical individuals typically struggle with the landscape or macro environments.
[19:42] - A Head of Product and Chief Product Officer have key differences. Mercedes clarifies that a CPO has an executive perspective, they think about the macro and the product's role in an ecosystem. Whereas the Head of Product starts with the product line within the company and therefore has a narrower perspective than a CPO. The CPO also requires a breadth of experience and understanding of marketing, sales revenue, and finance while working closely with CFOs. The Head of Product has a micro view compared to the CPO’s macro view.
[26:38] - Mercedes shares her insights for applying to these chief product roles, but in some cases experience with well known and high performing product companies is key. Pattern matching could be the key to a successful job switch. Mercedes advises pattern matching what it is you want to do with what you've done, so to get the attention of the hiring manager is to tailor your resume specifically to your experience in a product that matches the role.
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Intro - 00:00:01: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
Melissa - 00:00:36: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today, we are talking about how to become a chief product officer, what you can do to stand out on your resume, get the attention of executive recruiters, and then pass that interview. And I'm going to be joined by Mercedes Chatfield-Taylor, who is a CEO and co-founder of Artico Search. Mercedes is one of the best executive recruiters I have come across to hire CPOs and VPs of product. I worked with her personally on a ton of recruiting and staffing events. We've placed probably maybe like 10 different CPOs around the different companies that I've worked with. She really knows what to look for in a product leader, and I think that's very rare to find in executive search firms. So I'm excited for you to hear from her what she looks for when recruiting CPOs, when working with companies to get out there and figure out what the role is that they should be hiring for, whether it's a CPO or something else, and what you can do to really pass that interview and stand out. But before we go talk to Mercedes, it is time for Dear Melissa. And this is the segment of the show where you can ask me all of your burning product questions. Go to dearmelissa.com and drop me a line about what you would like me to answer in a future episode. All right. So this week's question is this.
Dear Melissa, what is your take on live product exercises and the ability to truly determine if you'd excel at the role? So I actually love live product exercises, and I think they're important. I do case studies whenever I'm recruiting chief product officers, and I did do case studies when I was recruiting staff-level product managers as well, especially senior-level product managers. If you're entry-level and just getting started, I'm not going to expect you to use a lot of the tools that we would as a product manager. But if you are experienced and you're going for a leadership role or you're going for a senior IC role, I would expect you to be able to demonstrate some things. The way that I always do case studies is to give people a lot of information about the case or the problem that I want them to solve and then a clear direction of what I'm looking for. So I don't try to surprise them and say, like, oh, I want you to, like, just tell me what you think. What I do is I do a case that's relevant to the company that they're actually interviewing at. So they should have discovered some of this information by talking already to a bunch, because this is the last step. The case study is the last thing before we make a decision. So I tell them up front that there will be a small case study at the end. Ask questions about the company and about what you want to see as you go and you meet with the head of sales and you meet with different product managers and you meet with the CEO, everything like that. So get some ready. And I tell them what the case study is going to be, too. I'm not trying to surprise them. And through that, though, I also give them more information, more data that they might need to be able to answer the case study. I don't expect people to spend 40 hours putting this case study.
What I'm trying to do is figure out how they are understanding the problem that the company is facing and then what would be their first steps in the first 90 days once they came in and what they're kind of thinking might be the issue, might be some of the product problems that we're experiencing. And I encourage them to ask questions to us and ask questions to the team and ask for anything they may need to actually do that. And it should take them maybe a couple hours to put together a short presentation. I also ask them to put together a presentation, like five slides, to illustrate their findings and what they want to look at. The reason I'm asking for this is because I want to see how clearly they can communicate. And having done this dozens and dozens of times, I could tell you that some people do not pass this case study really well. They can talk a really good talk in the interviews and they get to the case study and they fail it miserably because they're an awful communicator when it comes to actually talking about what they want to get done, what they want to put into action. So it's a really good way to see how they structure their thoughts, how they break down problems, how they approach problems, and what they're going to do, to get going. And they're allowed to actually ask questions in there too and point out hypotheses. What I'm looking for is you don't need to know all the answers to actually complete this. You have to know what the right questions are to ask. So I want to see what questions you're going to be asking in the first 90 days, how you think you should go about actually answering them. And it doesn't have to be 100% correct. The idea here is to figure out how can somebody get some momentum and go through the right steps to go towards the goal that we wanted to get to.
Product strategy is usually a big issue that we face when hiring CPOs. I want to see how they're breaking down what they think the issues are today and what they would do to actually dive deeper into figuring out what the product strategy should be. And I'll tell you, a lot of people do get to this point and they don't go through the right steps. They're not asking for the right data. They're not going out to talk to customers. They're focusing more in process. They're like, oh, we'll just put in a bunch of agile processes. These things come up in the case studies. So this is really helping me see if they effectively understand the problem that we're facing, right? And if they're going to be effective in the job. Those that I've done case studies with have usually been pretty successful in their roles once we've hired them, because I do think it helps us see if they're going to get some good momentum when they first get started. If you're a lower level product manager, you might be doing a case study around a smaller problem, right? I might have you go through the product, look at the product, tell you some stuff about the customers, and just try to gauge your opinions. Where do you see things working? What questions would you ask? What would you want to do? Here again, I'm trying to see what your thought process would be and how you would drive to action to discover what needs to get done, what questions you need to ask, how you approach uncertainty, all of those things.
So I really do love live product exercises. I think it's a great way to just see how your brain works. You should approach them if you ever get into this very curiously. Ask questions. Ask them about their customers. Usually a lot of times with these case studies, that's what people want. Like the person who's interviewing usually wants you to just ask a bunch of questions and see what questions you ask. That is almost always the thing that's more important there than getting to the right answer. Nobody expects you to have a right 100% answer. They want to see about what your assumptions are that you're making. Are they logical? What's your path to actually discovering these? What would you do? What questions do you ask? Those parts are usually more important for a live case study. So I hope that answers your question and that if you do run into a live case study, you will remember those types of tips as well. Now it's time to go talk to Mercedes all about landing that CPO job.
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Melissa - 00:07:22: Welcome, Mercedes. Thanks for being on the podcast.
Mercedes - 00:07:24: Of course. It's good to see you, Melissa. Happy to be here.
Melissa - 00:07:27: Good to see you, too. So you are an executive recruiter. I've worked with you personally on placing a lot of chief product officers in different companies. Can you tell us a little bit about what an executive recruiter does and what types of companies that you work with?
Mercedes - 00:07:42: So there's different types of executive search. We are on the retained side. And so that means that we're hired by the companies themselves. So the kind of projects that we work on range from venture-backed companies that have just gotten Series A and are looking to hire their first executive team members through to companies that we've worked with since they've been small and have gone and gotten public. So it's a continuum of Series A, B companies all the way up to Fortune 10 companies. So pretty broad. The common thread for us, at least, is that there is always an investor connection. So we've worked very heavily with what I think most folks would consider top-tier investors to help build out their portfolio companies for years.
Melissa - 00:08:28: And are those just VCs or you work with private equity firms?
Mercedes - 00:08:32: No, we work with venture capital and private equity. And the bulk of our work, I would say, is actually at the scale up stage. So usually well past product market sit at some type of turning point, if you will, or evolution. It might be single product to multi-product. It might be where the top vertical SaaS company in Europe were expanding into the US. It might be the company has been at 30% year-over-year growth and wants to expand that TAM and is doing some acquisitions. So generally, we're brought in by multi-stage venture firms through to growth equity firms and occasionally by very large private equity at the buyout stage. So pretty rangy again. But again, the common point is there's some type of transition going on. And again, it can be a product transition. It can be a roadmap transition. It can be an ownership transition. And it can be in this market a little bit less so, but it can be preparing for IPO and wanting that team that's going to be able to represent the company in the public markets. So those are the times that we're brought in. But yeah, it's across the boards from fairly early stage to late stage with an emphasis on scale up.
Melissa - 00:09:52: And when you're out there looking at the market right now for product management, it's been a lot of change since COVID and since the money is not just flowing in everywhere anymore. Can you tell us a little bit about the macro environment that you're seeing around hiring chief product officers and what changes have been happening?
Mercedes - 00:10:12: Yeah, I think particularly if you're based in Silicon Valley, you'll notice that we have a tendency to be extremely reactive. So when there's a big change, and this was a big change in the market, everybody sort of says, oh, Silicon Valley is dead. Venture's dead. Growth is dead. CMOs are going away. CROs are going away. If your company wants to stay in business, you don't fire your CPO if you have a great CPO. If your company is going through a transition in any type of macro environment, and you are a software company, you need to have a phenomenal chief product officer or head of product. It doesn't matter what the title is. We can talk about that in a minute. So I would say in general, there are fewer chief product officer roles out there because there's less funding at the moment, and there's less of a window for exit. But there are still very high-quality companies who need to expand their product roadmaps or rationalize their product roadmaps or going through M&A or looking to go to M&A. So, I would say fewer higher quality than two years ago, where there were all types, with a real emphasis on doing more with less, and with a real growth mindset. So product officers, chief product officers, particularly if you're in a PLG environment, who have driven growth, are in huge demand.
Chiefs product officers always, generally, who are very commercial. But I'd say more so than ever, it's that combination of deep technical chops and commercial acumen. Because the bad news is, or bad news, good news, is you're expected to be able to do more with less. And so if you start off your career in engineering and then took on product and now run product and engineering, that's a huge win for a $100 million company who doesn't want to separate out the role. So I would say there's a little bit more consolidation of the two roles. And there's more of an emphasis on quality versus quantity. And there's certainly an emphasis on people that have been there and done that a couple of times. So I would say four years ago, if you could spell product management, you might have a shot at getting a role in a pretty interesting, well-backed company, leading product. If you came up the right lineage. Here it's, have you managed through a down cycle before? So that means, have you managed through 2007, 2008, 9, or even before? And so that's the big change that we've seen. It's just that fewer better, do more with less. But the role is still in huge demand.
Melissa - 00:12:45: You mentioned something, too, about the consolidation. Are you seeing more CPTOs out there?
Mercedes - 00:12:51: Yeah, we are intact in the last six months for several private equity firms and one growth equity firm. We did projects that were titled chief product officer. But when we dug into the role and really worked with the CEO and the founding team of the board, it was chief product and technology officer. That's a small sample. But I would say, again, if you look across at sub $500 million companies, you will find quite a few combined roles in vertical SaaS, even in horizontal SaaS and in marketplaces.
Melissa - 00:13:31: When you're a leader and you're trying to figure out like, can I do a CPTO versus a CPO, right? Standalone or standalone CPO, standalone CTO. I think a lot of them probably want one to save money. How do you determine if that's going to be right for your company or not? If you should combine things all under one person as like a leader of a company.
Mercedes - 00:13:51: Yeah, I mean, I think it's really dependent on the strength of the company's leadership. So if you are a founding CEO and you are highly, highly technical and you've come up the ranks of product, let's say, then you might hire a chief product and technology officer knowing that you can weigh in on some of the product decisions with in partnership. Not in micromanagement, in partnership with that chief product and technology officer that you hire. But she might have more of a background in running global development, R&D and engineering, having also taken on product. If you think about product and engineering, big P, big E, in that scenario, you're a technical founder who comes up the ranks of product or technical CEO who comes up the ranks of product. You might hire for a CPTO with big E not big P. So, I think it really depends on the dynamic of the company and the leadership. And then I would say in terms of the if you are the product person thinking about the role, if you don't have a technical background, if you haven't really run engineering, you probably shouldn't run product and engineering because the best engineers are going to want to work for an engineer's engineer. And unless you can hire that person, you have that person in your network who will work for you again. Then that's great. Then you could be the chief product and technology officer bringing in that engineering right hand who you have in your network. But again, I think it's really important for the firing company to make these decisions before they go to market, because in these situations we work through with them in advance of getting into market. That really what they were talking about was, in fact, a product and technology officer.
Melissa - 00:15:43: One thing that I've seen is when companies think that they can put everything under a CPTO, right? And what they'll do is they'll take somebody who was a CTO there and they'll say, oh, we'll just have product underneath you too and we'll call you the CPTO. But yeah, that person is extremely technical and they don't have that commercial thing that you were talking about before, right? The commercial acumen to do the product side. So they almost always approach product from a agile perspective, right? Like I will set up a scrum cadence and that will be product. We will go through our roadmaps, right? And I will slot it in and that's that. And I think that's so dangerous for companies to assume that they can do. When you're going out there and helping these companies who say, hey, I want to put a CPTO and I want to hire this person. I imagine a lot of them get really excited when they see somebody with great technical acumen. How do you make sure that the companies understand what's required in product? Because I've had to do this too, right? But like, what are you telling them for how do you make sure that they got enough product chops to do this? And how do you evaluate people who maybe come from a very technical background to see if they can take over the product side too?
Mercedes - 00:16:48: In order to be a great chief product officer, you have to have been in a great product company. It's very unusual for somebody to jump out of a company not known for great product, great engaging product, and all of a sudden be that CPO. I was just looking at a chief product officer who I know used to be the CPO of Slack. She now sits on a whole bunch of different boards and she's technical by background. But she made a shift early in her career to really understand the customer and to go into every meeting with the customer strapped to her back, essentially. And so I think product is one of these roles where it's pretty obvious whether the company has great product or not. And then it's when did that person join that company? Did they join that company when product was being evolved and developing? Or did they join way later on and they were responsible for some sliver of product that became an offshoot of the roadmap? And so if they've played a role in developing the product roadmap, working externally with customers, and you'll get the signaling. They'll tell you about the customers. They'll tell you about how the customers use the product and how they've made changes with the team based on that customer's continued usage. Whereas, when you're talking to somebody who's very technical, they can tell you the technical intricacies of how the product works, but they actually don't know exactly how people, business customers, people, they're all people, use the product and why they use the product.
They don't know the competitive landscape. That's another real, like, if you're going to be a great commercial product manager and eventually a chief product officer, you need to know the product landscape. You need to know the competitive landscape. You need to know, how your products operate out in the wild, not just with your end customers, but with that end customer's ecosystem. So I think there's a lot of things that in discovery, you can work with your client to determine if the person that they have sitting in the seat is highly technical and building product for their engineering team, because that's what their engineering team wants to use, or whether they're out there building product because you and I are on this, this podcast. And what I got on, I said, wow, I can't build background on my screen. That's a failing of whoever put together this product, right? On Zoom, you can do that on Teams. You can do that on. So there's, the little commercial things that matter that all accumulate together to make incredibly great sticky product. And those are the things you look for. And a great engineer will build exactly what it is that great product leader and product managers ask them to build, but they won't know the competitive landscape. They won't know how to change the roadmap. They won't know how to adapt with the macro. So that was a lot, but there's just, there's such a big difference and there's pretty big gifts for each one of those differences.
Mercedes - 00:19:56: I like the way that you think about that and where people gravitate towards. And I've seen a lot of very technical people just get into the weeds and the details, but they can't talk about how the product drives the business forward, right? They can't talk about what it does for customers. They can't talk about problems to solve.
Mercedes - 00:20:10: Yeah, I'll give you an example because we're in the middle of a product search right now. And I'll try to give it to you without the details of the client. But as you know, a lot of product organizations have back-end infrastructure engineering and customer-facing engineering and product, right? So we have a client right now that is trying to help create a very connected consumer experience. And it's a software landing on hardware offering. And there are some constraints to hardware, right? Like if you're building the iPhone, you've got mobile embedded apps, your mobile embedded apps might open your front door. Well, if the front door doesn't open, the software development team can't do anything about that. But they can bake into their product, something that will help you as a consumer if Ring isn't connecting with the front door. This isn't Ring. Clients aren't Ring. But it's a Ring kind of problem, right? So as we are interviewing candidates for this particular role, this client, it's a huge product launch for them. This client is really looking for somebody who is deeply technical enough to understand the constraints of software landing on hardware, embedded mobile systems. But at the end of the day, they want somebody who's going to delight and engage the customer, the consumer, and then get a bunch of constituents on board within this organization to make the changes that are possible. And what we find is that tends toward commercial product management, customer facing in the hands of customer product.
But there are a lot of people working on the back end of these organizations, the back side of Uber, the back side of Ring, the back side of you name that mobile app. They think what they do is the commercial side of product management. And there's just a danger there. You just have to be really careful that you're not taking somebody out of a role where they're dealing with the infrastructure, which is incredibly technical, has to be perfect, has to be really, really good, has to be enterprise grade. But what you need in order for that client to be successful is for you and I and everybody else to be able to use the app. So it's just there's so many different things that when you come from engineering, move into product, and then want to move into product leadership, the difference between a CPO and a VP of product is the CPO thinks about that entire landscape that I just butchered trying to describe, but that entire landscape and thinks about the overall customer journey. The product manager thinks about their thin sliver of that wedge. And the engineer thinks about how to deliver it. They're not even thinking about the end customer really. So to me, it's very obvious what the difference is. But even when we do these searches, and we've got hundreds, we come across really phenomenal people who are quite senior in the organization who sit too far to the dev side of that and don't realize it. So back to your question, it's a great one. And many people within these organizations just don't actually even know that that's the bucket that they're sitting in.
Melissa - 00:23:09: And I think too, when you are coming from an engineering background, right? Like if you grew up, let's say you grew up and your career has happened in technology, stressed different things than product management. And I've worked with fantastic people who have made the switch from engineering to product, and they've been great. But they see that commercial side of it, right? They've always been super user-focused. And they also understand how the business runs. And I think that leads me to your next question that you were just alluding to. But what's the difference between a head of product and a chief product officer or a VP of product level and a CPO that we're talking about here?
Mercedes - 00:23:46: So I agree. There's a big difference. But people do go through this change. They gravitate towards the commercial. So engineers who start being curious about how the end user is operating, how the company's making money really early on, they're very commercial. And so it's not a shift late in career. It's a shift that starts, they start, they're very technical, brilliant. They start in engineering. They move closer to the customer, maybe product and sales engineering. Then they move into product. Then they take on more and more. So I was looking at a spec we wrote. To me, there's a head of product is mid-level management. They're great. They might manage a product team. A CPO is an executive. So a CPO has an executive perspective on the company. It's sort of the difference between a CPO is thinking about the macro. So a CPO will start the conversation around product, people, TAM, the total addressable market. They'll start the macro. The head of product is going to start with the product line within that company. So there's a different orientation that generally is learned throughout someone's career. And when they get there, some people burn fast and bright and get there in 12 years. Some people take longer, right? So that's one thing. I would say the other thing is depth. Like a product manager might be, we found this with this same client when we went looking for them for another role around electric vehicle systems. You might be a thousand miles deep in one area in product. So you might be the world's leading authority on geospatial positioning. But the Chief Product Officer, while they may have deep expertise in one area or another, again, understands how their product fits into the macro, understands the ecosystem. So I think that's a really big difference is that breadth of experience.
A Chief Product Officer understands revenue. They've worked closely with sales. They understand marketing. They've worked on product launches. They understand finance. And that's one thing we don't want to skip. A chief product officer's great friend is the CFO. They should be. I believe very strongly in the sort of intuit product management where you own the product like a CEO. And that's a big difference. Very few CPOs really have that piece. So that's another piece. The other thing is around a product manager is thinking about what their product needs, the budget for their product, the user for their product. A CPO is thinking about the entire category. This is the category I work in vertical SaaS for construction. I know every single vertical SaaS player in the construction space. And I understand how we might become a payments company. I understand how we might cross-sell. So you're constantly thinking about ways to expand your TAM that a VP of product or a head of product just isn't. And that's actually a huge difference. You really do think about the macro. And it's how companies like think about Snowflake or... I mean, they're just a great example. Or Datadog or Databricks. There's just so many of them that have, you know, in the vertical SaaS world, ServiceTitan, Shopify. There's so many things that they do. They did that through incredible product management. They decided to always be this thin sliver, but they built those companies to expand into so many other aspects and become stickier and stickier. I mean, the ultimate in that is Microsoft, right? Like, they're in everything. So I think that's the huge difference is that micro versus macro view.
Melissa - 00:27:34: I like the way that you're thinking about it too with how do we constantly expand? Where do we grow? Where do we go from here? It's not just about how do I improve my current product, but it's what could we potentially be one day, right? There's a lot of strategy in there too.
Mercedes - 00:27:48: Oh, yeah. So strategy for sure. And I would say the other thing is a CPO, a head of product, is passionate about product. They're probably passionate about their consumer. But a chief product officer is a great leader. They're passionate about their team. They're passionate about building a team. They're passionate about leading through other people and developing those teams. And if you're not passionate about that, then you should become a product manager and continue to be the world's best product manager. There's a great career in product management, just that. But if you want to be a CPO, you better really love teams because you're only as good as the team you can develop. Because all those companies I just mentioned have multiple, multiple teams doing different things. And the product organizations are really complex. And they sit at the middle of everything.
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Melissa - 00:29:07: One of the things that you said before, too, was if you're going to hire a great chief product officer, they've got to work at a great product company. And when I work with a lot of founders and CEOs, they always rattle off a bunch of the companies that I think are well-known, not necessarily in their category, but just everywhere. They're like, I want the head of product from Atlassian. I want the head of product from Snowflake. I want the head of product from over here, get me those people. But there's also a lot of companies that you might not know, maybe in different categories or in different areas, that are good product companies, sometimes smaller ones that are at a different stage. How do you, as a product person, when you're going out applying for these jobs, help make it known that you have the experience working at these companies that people may not have heard of before? Because they might not just be as famous as Slack.
Mercedes - 00:29:55: I'll just be candid. In some cases, there's no winning that battle. Like people go looking for a set of trophy companies, and that's who they want to hire from. But we try very hard to move people away from the idea that greatness only comes in one particular company or another in a category. I think it's really important to think about what part of the journey you want to play in. So if you want to play in the journey, like I mentioned, series B to D. So that might be a company that's $20 million in ARR looking to go to $100 million in ARR. Highlight what you've done that's in that experience. I think the challenge is people often get into market looking for these roles and they sort of say, I want to be a chief product officer. I don't care what kind of company, really. You will wind up looking like you're a million miles wide and a centimeter thin. So it's much better to think about, okay, what is my experience really parlay me into? So the way to come to it, in my opinion, is to say, okay, so I've just taken a company from 20 to 100. The company was acquired. It was an okay outcome. It's not enough for me to want to retire. I've got a ton of fire in the belly. I'd like to do that again. I'd like to do 20 to 100 again. Or I'd like to do 100 to 200. Those would be reasonable things, right? I think sometimes people sort of say, well, I've done 20 to 100. I've done big company, big company at a less level, like at an individual contributor level. And now I want to go be CPO at a small company because clearly if I can be in a big company, I can go be small company CPO. That is not going to get you anywhere. So again, really look to pattern match what it is you want to do with what you've done. And then don't assume that people know your product.
Even if you are with Slack or with Google, Google has so many different products that often from the outside looking in, people will assume you've only done one thing when you might have done other things. So make sure that you pull apart what it is that you've done and match it to the market that you're looking to attract. And so that's the biggest piece of advice is really, really. Tailor what it is you've done and pull it out of your resume when you are in contention for one of these roles or when you're trying to get the attention of one of these hiring managers. And I think it's really important. And then the other piece is if folks don't know what we care about is what did you do? What were you hired to do? What did you walk into on day one? What did you do? Why are you leaving the company? And then what can you show me that you accomplished? And so, if you have any type of product releases, press releases that are like, out there and easy to link, link them, show people what they are. So even if I don't know your product, but you've worked at a product that is, there's something written about it, there's something out there linked to it. So let me see it. So I think those are important things.
Melissa - 00:32:51: I think those are good tips for people. So what if you're a not a chief product officer yet? So if you are a chief product officer, you can say, this is what I've done as product leader at these companies. I want to make a move to, maybe do the next little phase of growth or a similar company. Pretty easy to go back and refer to it. If you haven't been a chief product officer before, but you want to make that leap, how do you position yourself and how do you tell your story in a way where recruiter is going to look at it and not just disregard you because you were a VP or a senior director at a certain company?
Mercedes - 00:33:24: So we do a lot of hiring of first-time CPOs. And I come back to a couple of things. One is, do you know what good looks like? Hopefully, do you know what great looks like? Can you articulate what you did and what you worked on that went from good to great? And are you ready to be that CPO? So are you ready to own the macro vision? Are you ready to be part of an executive team? Are you ready to be a great peer to the chief marketing officer, the chief revenue officer, the chief financial officer? So if you're a VP of product and you're trying to make that next step, try to get exposure to board-level conversations. Try to get exposure to overall company strategy. Try to get close to revenue. So try to get yourself into those conversations so that when I call the CMO that worked with your company, and you were not the CPO can say, yes, she was phenomenal. She did these things. She owned these things. She's ready to be a CPO. So if you're not ready, those conversations when we make those calls will not go particularly well. But the best way to prepare is to act as if.
So talk to your CPO. Say, this is what I want to do. I want to become a CPO. What are the things that I need to round out? Have that conversation early and often. And if they're a good leader, they will help you along that journey. If they're not a good leader, you have other problems. And then when you go to apply for those first CPO roles, don't talk about the VP level things that you've done. Talk about the broad macro of what you accomplish in each one of these roles, but talk about the macro level things. You contributed to company revenue. You contributed to new product launches that contributed to the overall company's positioning. Just constantly look for ways to go from single product to multi-product. And then the other thing is look for ways to show that you enacted the strategy, not just the execution. I'd say that's a huge difference. We see a big difference between successful chief product officers who have done the job for a while versus first timers. Is the, once they've had the top spot, they've had to come up with the strategy and the vision and then deal with the execution. So look for ways to get that experience before you step into that role.
Melissa - 00:35:51: I find that's a big issue when I go out and interview people. I'll ask them, what did you own? How did you put together this strategy? How did you do that? And when people talk about it in a very generic way, and sometimes they'll just like refer to a framework, I'm like, okay, did you own it? Like, actually, did you own that strategy, right? Like, did you build that strategy? And even if it's for like a smaller piece of the product or maybe one product out of a whole suite of products, I'm looking for how did they do it though? And you can tell that somebody handed them something and instead they went and executed on it.
Mercedes - 00:36:22: That's exactly right. And so when you're trying to get into that role, take those risks in your current role. So look for ways to launch new product. Look for ways to launch product extension. Look for ways to get involved in the build-buy decisions. That's another big thing. We haven't even talked about that yet. Chief product officers not only are evaluating what it is that they're going to build as a company, but they're constantly evaluating whether or not it makes sense to build those things. So they are making the build-buy decisions with the company. They are working just as much on the company's acquisition strategy as Austin, as is the corp dev person, the biz dev person. And so talk to your biz dev people. Find out what they're looking at. Find out why they're looking at those things. So I think it's just constantly trying to get that strategic view. Where is the company going? How do you contribute? Look for ways to take risks. I don't know what you've been seeing, but we still see a lot of companies that will guinea pig entire product lines in like Australia because it's like a very contained market. So if you're in a company that's big enough to do those kind of things, get involved and take risks and learn how to assess the data, learn how to decide whether the product's commercially viable. Because until you do those things, if you get a chief product officer role and you haven't done those things, it's going to be very, very hard to be successful. And you're probably not ready yet.
Melissa - 00:37:53: One big thing I see where people get into a first-time CPO role too that I think shocks them or causes them to be ejected from that role, let's say, you know, is they get in and they don't realize that it's all up to you at the end of the day, right? I think a lot of people are like, I want to be the leader. I want to be the leader. I want to be the leader. And then they get to that top leadership role and then they're like, okay, somebody tell me what to do. And I feel like when I'm interviewing people, I want them to demonstrate that they actually went out there and did risks. I hear a lot of people when I'm interviewing for CPO roles, and this is to me is the biggest turnoff, right? And any company that I come into, and even when I do board roles and I start talking to the leaders and they're like, hey, go tell me what my product team looks like. Tell me what we need. If I hear somebody start complaining that they couldn't get something done because of all these other people, or they're allowed to do those things. That immediately makes me go, and it was in their purview. Let's say that it was part of their job, but they just weren't allowed to do it.
That immediately makes me go, okay, why were you waiting for permission? If you were the leader and this was part of your scope, why were you waiting for somebody to come over and say, oh, yeah, you can do product management. You're allowed to go do product management. Like, why are you not taking it upon yourself as a leader to go negotiate those things? A big one. Oh, legal won't let us go talk to customers. Why didn't you sit down with legal and work out a way that they felt comfortable for you to go talk to customers? Even in a heavily compliant organization, people are still doing user research. So why aren't you building those bridges? Why aren't, why are you having like that type of infighting? And to me, that's showing the mark of somebody who's just not ready to be a leader or be in that position.
Mercedes - 00:39:29: A hundred percent. I will tell you about 70% of the time, there's somebody in the organization that we're evaluating. So there's a sitting CPO and the CEO and board has made a decision that they likely need to hire a chief product officer, but they have someone sitting in the organization. And so I'll interview the incumbent. The incumbent will often say, the incumbent will, first of all, often be doing a really good job, but like whack-a-mole, like just heads down, running around, putting out fires. And they have all these reasons why they couldn't do the strategic things. Well, part of being a CPO is actually taking the time and having the soft skills and the persuasion skills to get the time to put some quick wins on the board and buy yourself that time so that then you can go and do the bigger things and make sure that the roadmap is accurate and correct. And you can start executing on that overall roadmap. And so, yeah, we look for people that will take risks. CEOs want you to come to them with the answer.
They want you to come to them with the answer, but they don't want you to say, I have a hunch or I think. They want you to come to them. With your plan, based on the data, based on the macro, based on the team that you have or the team you need to go hire, and then show them what it is you're going to go do and then say, okay, I'm going to go do this, right? Right. Okay. I'm going to go do it. So a huge part, whether we're hiring a CPO for a Fortune 100 company, which we're doing right now, or we're hiring a CPO for a top tier private equity bootstraps roll up that we did last month. Those powers of persuasion and soft skills and getting the resources together and coming to the table with the answer. Having the right background to ask the questions, but then coming to the table with the answer, that is such a prerequisite because you just find that people, the difference between those executives, like I was saying before, and the VP or the heads up is they'll get stuck fighting fires because everybody, you know, product is often not unlike marketing. Product is one of these things that people will weigh in on constantly. Your customers will be screaming and yelling about it. Your CEO may say, let's go do that because it's going to make us revenue in the short term. And so if you don't take the time to get the strategy right, you're never going to have the time to execute on it.
Melissa - 00:41:56: What do you do if you're in the situation I'm thinking about too? Like maybe you are a product leader right now and you don't have the support of the CEO. Let's say technically you're doing what you should be doing. But let's say the CEO, I see this a lot with founders, where they don't know what they should be doing as a CEO. So they're not, the strategy they set might not be the best for the company. You're trying to help them get back on track. You're trying to do that, but it's just not pulling the company along. So now you got to go out and try to find another place to move to. How do you tell that story or how do you approach that so it doesn't look like it's a huge failing on your part to say like, this is what I tried to do. But when you're not the CEO, you can't call all the shots, obviously.
Mercedes - 00:42:36: No, 100%. And I think we talked about this before. There's a fine line between leaving too soon and staying too long. And so don't stay in a situation that you know is not going to change. Because you eventually will have to tell the story as to why you stayed for an extra year, an extra two years, an extra three years. On the other hand, don't leave something that you think can be fixed until you've given it 100% effort and can talk about that effort. And then you move on. So I think a couple of things. One is, if you're interviewing, be extremely careful about how you tell your story. Tell it to someone else. Tell it to someone, not your spouse, not your best friend, not your mom or dad. Tell it to somebody who's going to be critical about it because you don't want to sound critical. I was just talking to a CPO who's absolutely phenomenal. And he had a hugely successful run as CPO, took the company public. It's a brand name company now. It went from not much to something very, very good. It's a leader in its space. He joined another company. He likes founders. It's another founder. And what he found is not what he was sold. And he didn't say that. Even that is negative. So the way he framed it was, I love the space that they're in. It's a great company. It's his company. He can do what he wants with this company. It's not my company. My mistake was not doing enough diligence to realize that he was command and control and that he was going to grow through acquisition, not through product development, not through any organic. In fact, we're not even integrating. We're just milking these products. It's not an environment that works for me. That's on me. So I want to go find something like what I had before, where there's an opportunity to build. I don't mind fixing things. I don't mind hard problems.
I love hard problems. I love founders. At the end of the day, my mistake for not doing as deep a diligence as I could have done, but it's time to move on. So just be extremely careful when you tell the story. You don't want to. To your point about they wouldn't let me. I couldn't. If you're a chief product officer or a head of product and you've made a mistake, say you made a mistake. Say this is what I thought I was getting into. Next time I'll do better diligence. As soon as I found out, I tried to address what I could address. At the end of the day, it's their company. They can run it the way they want to. And this isn't a fit for me. So just make sure that you tell the story. One thing I will say is that. Some recruiters don't dig into the whys. I do. My entire team does. All of the investors we work with do. So just tell the truth. Just tell the truth. Put a positive what you learned on it, about it, spin on it. But tell the truth. A mistake is not the end of a career. A mistake is a mistake. What's really concerning is not owning the mistake, not recognizing the mistake, and not learning from the mistake. Mistake might be, I mean, if you look at, again, if you look at some people's careers, you'll see phenomenal wins mixed with little belly flops. It's okay. So that's what I would say to that. It's just own it and articulate it. And if you don't own the narrative, somebody else will make it up for you.
Melissa - 00:46:04: I think that's really good advice for people out there job hunting and trying to become first-time chief product officers. Thank you so much, Mercedes, for being here with us on the podcast. If people want to learn more about you and your firm, where can they go?
Mercedes - 00:46:17: articosearch.com. And we would love to hear from you. We've got open CPO projects. We've got open roles with venture funds who are really interested in people with product and engineering backgrounds. And so, yeah, always happy to talk in confidence.
Outro - 00:46:34: Thank you so much for being here. And we'll put all of those links in our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com. So make sure you head there and check out the notes. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another guest. We'll see you then.