The case for hiring an experienced fractional chief product officer to set the right foundation
This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion. Now Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage startups with traction called End Game.
Contributing Author: Ken Leaver
One of the things i’ve done several projects around the past few years is the idea of a fractional product leader. I’ve done this for a couple of use cases:
Use case 1: Someone left and they needed an interim product leader
Use case 2: The startup was still small and didn’t have the need nor the budget for someone full-time.
In addition to formally doing this role a couple of times I’ve also been involved with several clients where I advised them a bit on product topics even though my main scope was something else.
And so it has generally given me some learnings about common issues and mistakes.
First, let’s look at how your average startup builds product
Your average startup will build product by the CEO or one of the founders doing product themselves. That person hires some engineers that he finds somewhere and starts building.
And often they will have had some direct product experience from a previous company or startup they’ve done. And occasionally they will not have had any experience.
But generally if the startup is getting traction they will actually be doing an ok job of it. Typically the founder will have watched some Youtube videos or read some books about the importance of talking to your customer.
And so they will often take a very customer-driven product building approach.
But of course occasionally, you will get the founder who just builds what they think the customer needs without talking to them… and this more often than not does go well.
Now let’s look at how most startups scale their tech team
Most startups that have raised a decent amount of seed funding will now look to take a more scaleable approach towards building their tech team. And so they’ll look to hire their first product manager.
But they’re in a bit of a dilemma. Do they hire an experienced CPO or do they hire a relatively junior product person first?
Hiring a CPO is typically overkill because they will be the only product person at the outset and doing very grunt-level work. Which many CPO’s that have already managed teams will not even want to do.
So more often than not what I have seen is that the startup will hire a relatively junior product person. And hope that this person was the right choice and does a good job.
Starting your team with a relatively inexperienced product person is generally going to be a bad idea
Think about it for a second… what are the keys to building good product?
I’ve spent about a decade in product and have managed probably around 100 product managers. I’ve also seen the inside of at least 10 tech organizations (3 as an employee… 7+ as a contractor).
And I would say the keys to a well run team team are:
1: Strong process (agile process, documentation, delivering on time, etc.)
2: The right habits (talking to customers, numbers-driven, learning-orientation)
3: Good vision (study the market/competition), understand the company strategy, play the long game and not just chase small optimizations)
Now look at this list and ask yourself… is a junior PM going to be good at this? In my experience the answer to that is ‘no.’
And so the risk is that you create a tech organization with bad/messy processes and the wrong habits.
Probably not the right foot to set off on.
An example of this from my experience
One startup I helped had no product person and had been building product for like over a year. They used a messy Trello board for everything and when I onboarded I had little visibility on what was being worked on, when it was gonna be delivered, or how utilized the ~6 engineer teams was.
So I spent the first few weeks cleaning up the process and moving it all to my structured Clickup process. Pretty soon not just me, but the entire org, knew who was working on what, when it was gonna be delivered, and what the process for prioritising was.
I also figured out that some of the engineers were underutilized, so we addressed this.
It didn’t take long before I’d estimate we significantly accelerated the output of that team. Simply with better transparency and process.
Another common problem… pressure from the CEO
On another client of mine I was focused on something outside of product… but rather just observed their approach. They built their initial products having talked to no customers… but rather based on the hypotheses of the commercial team.
“We think this will work. Lets build it.”
And the product person, who was relatively early in their career, probably felt pressured to agree regardless of whether they truly felt it was the right thing to do.
But it fell flat time and again. Not only that.. but they weren’t learning anything helpful about who their real customer was nor what the future value prop should be.
They were just taking shots in the dark.
An experienced CPO, or at least most that I know, would have outright disagreed to this approach. It goes against the grain of what the profession (and our experience) has taught us to do.
Which is… “Talk to customers, prioritise their pain points, and build based on that feedback.”
A much wiser approach in my view… is getting someone more senior but on a fractional basis
When you want to set the right foundation but you’re limited in budget… the approach that I think makes a lot more sense is getting someone who can build the right foundation but on a fractional basis.
For the same price of a more junior full-time PM you may only get 20-25% of this senior product leader’s time… but if its the right person I think it is a far wiser choice.
Because that person will know what solid processes and a solid foundation looks like.
One caveat is that I think this person should have some cofounder experience and know what its like to build something from scratch.
I am not a fan of ‘corporate CPO’s’ in startups. These are the guys that worked in large organizations their entire careers, but never really built anything meaningful themselves. Oftentimes they forgot how to get their own hands dirty.
I’ve built ~7 of my own startups from scratch… most of them bootstrapped… three of them were eventually profitable. Building a business like this takes a very different mindset.
Interested in chatting and getting some feedback on how your team can potentially apply some of these principles? Just grab a slot and let’s chat! Calendly
Or just connect on Linkedin and pop me a message: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenleaver/
