CPO (Chief Product Officer)

Scope and Responsibilities

This individual will provide leadership around organizational structure and continue to enhance and lead a high performing team for a growing SaaS company. This leader will drive the future state product vision, product strategy, roadmap, and execution for the organization.   The CPO will also be instrumental in creating a high-velocity product innovation organization in partnership with the CTO and GTM teams to elevate the organization’s new product development capabilities.  The CPO will be able to understand the needs of a complex set of small, medium and enterprise customers, and ensure that the customer base sees significant value from a broad range of products. This individual will own all product management, product strategy, data science and UI/UX for the organization.   

The CPO will be responsible for delivering products by leveraging insights gained through industry and competitive research, spending time with customers, understanding their workflows and what the critical business drivers are for their customers. The CPO will build a high-performing and collaborative team. This leader will manage a diverse suite of products but also be able to lead new product development efforts and define the business case for new opportunities of growth.  The CPO should not be afraid to ask difficult questions and should have experience in making difficult resource allocation decisions, including knowing when to sunset or double down on a product.

The ideal candidate has experience in leading an end-to-end product organization of product managers, UX/UI, and data science talent. The CPO will initially lead a team of around 20 with the ability to inject talent into the product organization. The CPO will work closely with the CTO to improve and implement the product development function.

The leader must have the strategic ability and advisory skills to work with the Chief Executive Officer and cross-functional leadership in Engineering, Operations, Marketing and Sales, and Customer Success leading the product roadmap and new product development, while balancing the need to retire tech debt and build a platform strategy. This leader must be able to navigate an established business in growth transformation. The CPO must be strong not only from a product perspective but have strong business and P&L acumen and cultivate a group of Product Managers with strong business acumen.

Specific Responsibilities         

• Transform the Product Management, Data Science, and UI/UX organization into an innovative, high velocity team that can deliver the next generation of products to the market. drive new product definition, and proof of concept in a high velocity manner.
• Experience with pricing products and analyzing current product pricing. Ability to implement a risk-based product pricing structure
• Develop and implement a process to gather inputs on new product ideas, prioritize ideas for a POC, and build a POC within 90 days
• Provide insights and leadership to developing the framework of product management such as customer definition, differentiators and advantages. Customers’ diagnosis and problems, clear identification of user needs and use cases. sequencing based on priorities of user needs.
• Develop an organization that provides strategy, direction, and has ownership of complete product suite from inception to product launch to product marketing to end of life
• Create a product organization that is collaborative and cohesive across Engineering, Dev Ops, Marketing, Sales and Finance.  Cultivate a product organization intimately aligned with customers and market need.
• Define clear measurements of success combined with processes to enable execution
• Develop a culture of customer intimacy and a team that is proactive in learning customers nuances and market trends
• Develop product roadmaps, features, requirements, and the business case for development and launch of next generation product offerings for both existing and new products
• Lead the organization through on-going product development cycles, from initial definition to final production, with products and services delivered on schedule, on budget with high quality
• Provide overall leadership to the product team, setting clear goals, metrics, and operating model for the organization

Key Year One Objectives

• Drive high velocity product development
• Drive consistency across the product platforms including intake, process, prioritization, as well as UX and UI
• Better align the product organization to customers, providing market-based and customer insights mapping of product strategy
• Define and create go to market strategies across core product lines that is collaborative and well understood and embraced by all leaders of the organization
• Evaluate and assess product operations and product commercialization methodologies for the organization and make any needed enhancements and adjustments
• Improve processes, metrics, release, and Agile methodologies.  Define scalable and repeatable processes for how products are innovated, developed, delivered to the market
• Upgrade and formalize product management organization and bring more defined structure and KPI’s to the function
• Further define Customer Advisory Board

Key Selection Criteria

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Marketing, Engineering, Computer Science, or equivalent combination of education and relevant experience. MBA is preferred.
• Experience in working with offshore teams
• Proven experience in launching new products and leading innovation efforts for a company. Experience with AI is highly preferred.
• Experience providing product management leadership in a B2B SaaS company across a suite of complex products and workflow solutions
• Experience working in an Agile environment
• Experience bringing products and platforms together through common UX/IU would be beneficial
• Proven experience developing a product roadmap that has successfully driven scale and revenue growth for an organization
• Experience in developing new product planning methodologies that have created measurable impact for an organization
• Experience working with an executive leadership team in developing overall company strategy
• Developing and delivering on product goals to enable an organization to scale and grow
• Listen to Customers and be active and visible within their market
• Experience in defining, attracting, developing, motivating and building a high performing product management organization
• 10+ years Leadership/Management experience
• 5+ years’ work experience in similar role owning all product management, data science, and UI/UX
• M&A experience and integration of products is beneficial