Teman Product & Tech

What is a Fractional CPO? A Fractional Chief Product Officer is a Senior Product Leader that has lived through the good, the bad and the ugly of technology management and that offers their services on a contractual basis. These services are rendered on a part-time retainer basis to inject the right level of coaching, mentoring and leadership to the team without being prohibitively expensive to young businesses. Why have one? An important number of young companies, particularly in the VC-backed start-up community, experience tremendous pressure to quickly develop their products and find their market fit. And they do so with limited financial means. This creates a situation where senior product leadership becomes unaffordable and where these businesses invest heavily (and rightfully so) into Individual Contributors to ‘build stuff’. They develop a proof-of-concept, acquire some customers, understand its unit-economics and push certain KPIs to secure the next round of financing. I have witnessed that this generally creates 2 problems: a) a suboptimal product direction often devoid of actionable customer discovery and product vision/strategy which often leads to mid-to-long-term deadends, failures or setbacks and b) substantial technological, cultural and organizational debt - even when successfully finding its product-market fit - that then becomes a burden as the company grows. Who typically benefits from one? Early stage start-ups (pre seed, seed) Series A & B start-ups. Some series C. More traditional businesses that want or need to undergo a digital transformation or push a new tech-based idea to the market.