Panel discussion: The convergence of product and tech leadership
We recently held a panel discussion with five senior leaders to explore the overlap of product and tech leadership. The panel covered the emerging trends such as the CPTO role and how the role could bridge product and tech leadership. Also the realities of leadership roles in tech and the work still needed to be done by organisations to build products customers love.
The panel
Jaz Chana, CTO @ Flipdish
Jaz has advised, built, and led high-performing teams across large enterprises, SMEs, and startups. More recently he played a pivotal role as CTO in scaling one of the UK's most successful startups/scale-ups, cinch, growing the team from 3 to 250+ in just 18 months.
Richard Poole, CTO @ RiskSmart
Richard has 20 years' experience in the tech industry working at the likes of Accenture and has an impressive track record of designing robust applications and leading agile teams across many sectors such as fintech, logistics, retail, insurance and, healthcare.
Holly Donohue, Fractional CPO @ Product Rebel
Holly is a fractional CPO and product coach. Holly has a deep understanding of product thinking, agile and, lean with over 20 years' experience in tech across diverse industries, working as Head of Product at Co-op, the Product Director at Aquila Heywood and more recently the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Purple.
Anna Dick, CPTO @ Capsule
Anna has over 20 years' experience with a proven track record of transforming and growing tech teams, and businesses across many sectors including Media, Travel, Retail Services and Recruitment.
Jon Saunders, Director of Product, Design & Engineering @ Reach PLC
Is a senior product and technology leader, with experience in large scale digital transformation, mission-critical enterprise product delivery, accountability for end-to- end management of large scale (500+) teams and large-scale re-engineering of digital and cloud platforms.
What was discussed
We are seeing fast-growing scale-ups cautiously choosing profitability over growth at all costs. The latter mantra was popular during a period where teams would be required to build fast, often at the detriment of the customers expectations and the businesses bottom line.
The constraints from the current economy has meant that although it is a tough time in the job market for product leaders, many organisations are choosing to consolidate both product and tech leadership into the CPTO role.
The new trend of organisations hiring a CPTO could be a step in the right direction, affording those with the right experience and expertise the opportunity to join a fast-growing business, break down silos and align modern product vision and tactics into business goals and technology deployment.
But eventually, especially as organisations grow, we should see businesses choosing to have a CTO and CPO working side by side, due to the difficult nature of someone having to lead on product and technology simultaneously.
Finding someone who can lead on technology delivery, execution and, architecture whilst delivering business and customer value and driving results and retention effectively is very hard, but it’s an exciting opportunity for those who have the expertise.
But there are still challenges. Although product leaders and teams may have the data at their disposal, there was shared frustration and agreement that they haven’t always been able to influence important decisions, due to there still being a misunderstanding of what it takes to implement a modern product strategy.
This led the discussion on to the difficulties of leadership and the realities of their day-to-day responsibilities and the work to be done to break down misconceptions and jargon.
The panellists covered: expectations from leaders and teams, influencing decisions, being in love with your customers, not your product and how there needs to be more trust between founders and product leaders, who may choose to disrupt the founders vision, if there’s strong data to back up the change.
Key takeaways
- The industry has come a long way: The industry has transformed from just being IT support for hardware management to building websites and software, to now treating tech as a product to build and sell.
- There are many challenges to overcome: With such high startup failure rates, it's clear there's still much to learn about succeeding in this rapidly changing industry.
- Need for innovation whilst balancing customer needs: We are moving into a period where businesses now understand the importance of having someone in leadership that can champion their customers' needs, alongside technology.
- Bridging gaps: However, many misconceptions still exist due to the vast amount of jargon and misunderstandings about what it truly means to build products your customers love.
- The CPTO is an emerging role: The CPTO role is relatively new, emerging from the need for businesses to have someone who can take on the responsibility of leading both tech and product, especially in a more conservative economy than in previous years.
- A tough job for one person: Having someone who can provide value to customers and business needs whilst understanding how to enable this through technology is a great cost benefit to a business, but a big task for one person to do.
- Step in the right direction: Having someone in this role is also a step in the right direction for the industry whether it’s a CPO working alongside a CTO, or a CPTO balancing technical and product strategies.
- Leaders need to be comfortable: Leaders must be comfortable with a team that can derive insights from customers and usage data, using this to build new features and inform the direction of the business.
- Skills over title: What matters more than the title is having the right blend of skills and personalities in the team.
- There’s still a lot to learn: Such as bridging the gap between team and leadership expectations, cutting through the jargon, and helping leaders understand what it means to build a customer-centric, data-driven business.
- The foundations: These aren’t just buzzwords—they’re the foundation of creating a product that resonates with customers and drives sustainable growth.
- Leadership complexity: Those in product development may question leadership choices, but we must recognise that leaders often navigate complex trade-offs to keep initiatives on track amidst competing priorities.
- Reality of product leadership: For aspiring product leaders, don’t be surprised to find yourself sitting on spreadsheets for hours crunching numbers and balancing budgets. Whilst setting visionary strategy is important, you’ll spend much of your time navigating budgets, building alignment across teams, and managing expectations.
- Choices: Those closer to the details might sometimes question leadership decisions, thinking, "I can't believe they chose that!" However, leaders often aren't able to choose the best option; instead, they opt for the least worst option due to the context switching required to manage numerous priorities and expectations.
- A balancing act: It’s a balancing act of compromise, aligning different teams, and navigating competing priorities to keep things moving forward.
- Chase progress: So as a product leader, embrace the hard realities and chase progress, rather than perfection.
A special thank you to our five panellists, Jaz, Anna, Jon, Holly and Rich for sharing their experiences and insights, and for answering the audience’s questions.
Closing thoughts and useful resources
As companies scale, deciding who leads on product strategy is critical. Without someone leading, you risk missing customer needs, leading to costly mistakes and contributing to the 85% of products that fail, according to Forbes.
However, it’s equally important to recognise that you should have a strong CTO at the helm.
A CTO brings the technical vision and architecture that ensures innovation can be delivered at scale, and no matter how robust your product strategy is, without a solid technical foundation, the risks of failure multiply.
When it’s just a founder and CTO working side by side, the following quote from a16z helps to articulate the growing need for introducing product expertise:
Quote from article: Hiring a chief product officer written by Caroline Horn, Charles Hubbard & Jenna Zucker
Deciding when to move away from just a technical focus that supports growth to beginning to uncover insights on your customer and using this to balance the growth of a product customers love with technological innovation is challenging.
It requires someone to understand the complexities of continuing to grow the product through customer-centric, data-informed methods, whilst overcoming the technical hurdles that appear when scaling.
Below are guides from us which are designed to help you navigate that balance. Find articles, tools, and insights, all of which have been built from our first-hand experience of building products.
It will help you to lead confidently at the intersection of technology and product leadership, produce better outcomes for your team and delight your customers.
Bookmark this guide, skim through it, and refer back to it whenever needed. These insights are designed to help you evolve as both a technology and product leader and team.
Whilst you may already be familiar with some of the topics, we always look to offer fresh perspectives and first-hand experience in every article to deepen your understanding and help you see problems and solutions from our experience in building and scaling products.
If you are a founder looking to make that key hire, start by reading CTO, CPO, both, or CPTO? to understand the roles of the CTO, CPO and someone who is balancing both - the CPTO.
As technology and product responsibilities merge, you’ll be required to understand the nuances of technical leadership and product strategy and how they fit together.
These articles can help:
- What is a product mindset explains the product mindset and why we think it’s possibly the most important shared trait of high-performance product teams.
- Four ways of defining your product vision gives you practical frameworks for setting a direction that aligns with business goals.
- How product principles drive better decision making offers practical advice on integrating product principles into your leadership approach.
- How to shape a product function to set your product engineering capability up for success.
- The core roles every product team should have to understand the key players in a high-functioning product team.
- Lean comms: maximise productivity and collaboration provides strategies to improve communication within and between cross-functional teams.
- Story mapping: set context, align teams, bring focus ensures alignment across teams and drive towards key objectives.
- AARRR: getting the most out of pirate metrics provides a simple framework to help you track acquisition, activation, retention, and other crucial metrics.
- The tech debt elephant: a product perspective offers insights on managing tech debt without derailing your product roadmap.
- Improve resilience and scalability with event-driven architecture provides guidance on building scalable frameworks.
- Serverless 101: an overview with examples offers practical insights into building flexible, scalable products that grow with your users’ needs.
- Template: story map gives you a step-by-step guide to structuring product development efforts, helping alignment across teams.
- Template: product team canvas is also a useful "one-pager" where anyone should be able to have a good grasp of the shape of the team's domain within minutes, be it personnel, tech, ways of working, or wider business context.
