7 Things a CPO Is Not
A Chief Product Officer (CPO) is a crucial role in any growing company, but misconceptions about what a CPO actually does, or should do, are common. Founders, investors, and even product teams sometimes have fuzzy or unrealistic expectations about the role. These misconceptions can lead to misalignment, inefficiency, and frustration on all sides. They can also lead to bad choices on who the first (or next) CPO should be, as well as time wasted on hammering out the role instead of building a product strategy and hitting key commercial milestones.
To set the record straight, here is our view on seven things a CPO should not be, based on conversations with 20+ startups and scale-ups across Europe and the United States.
1. The Chief Project Manager
A CPO is not a glorified project manager responsible for tracking tickets, micromanaging execution, or updating other company leaders on small, decontextualized product changes. The CPO’s primary role is to set the product vision and strategy, ensuring their team is solving the right problems for the business and its customers. If a CPO is buried in sprint planning and backlog grooming, they are not focusing on the higher-order work of product leadership. Furthermore, while building a strong execution machine by restructuring the product organization or putting in the right processes is certainly within the CPO’s scope, being excessively hands-on with execution indicates that more work remains to be done in these areas.
What to expect instead: A great CPO empowers product teams to own execution while ensuring alignment with the broader company strategy. They focus on market opportunities, customer needs, and long-term differentiation. They also work to put the right people and processes in place so that execution is fast and efficient without their direct involvement.
2. The CEO’s Sous-Chef
A full time, permanent CPO is not merely responsible for bringing the founder’s or CEO’s vision to life. While alignment with the founder or CEO is critical, a great CPO brings their own strategic insights and data-driven decision-making to shape the product vision, strategy, and roadmap. If a company treats the CPO as an order taker, they are missing the true value of having a product leader who can challenge assumptions, prioritize effectively, and push for customer-centric innovation. A CPO’s job is to be more informed than the CEO on some topics, which is why they should not simply execute the CEO’s latest idea no matter what.
What to expect instead: A strong CPO partners with the CEO to refine the company’s vision into a viable product strategy, balancing commercial goals with customer needs, and ambition with feasibility. When presented with a new idea from other company leaders, they should listen, investigate, and give feedback, but not jump to implementation by default.
3. A Solo Product Genius
The myth of the lone product visionary is dangerous. No single leader, no matter how brilliant, can single-handedly dictate what the company should build. A CPO must foster collaboration across engineering, design, marketing, sales, and customer support (to name a few). Great product leadership is about harnessing the collective intelligence of the organization, not dictating solutions from the top. Furthermore, the desire for a solo product genius is often a cover for the founder or CEO’s lack of vision for the company as a whole. Ultimately, product vision emerges at the place where commercial goals and customer needs overlap; if the CEO does not play a part in saying what those commercial goals are, the company is in trouble and no CPO can save it.
What to expect instead: A top-tier CPO builds and empowers a strong product team, ensuring cross-functional collaboration and a culture of experimentation and learning. They create a framework for decision-making that enables multiple teams to contribute meaningfully to product strategy. And, they partner closely with the CEO and other commercial leads to align product strategy with business strategy.
4. A Growth Hacker in Disguise
Startups in particular sometimes conflate product leadership with growth hacking, expecting the CPO to be a master of viral loops, conversion optimization, and short-term engagement tricks. While growth is essential, a CPO is neither a VP of Growth nor a performance marketer. Their role is to create sustainable value through product innovation, not just incremental funnel tweaks for short-term gains. There may be times in a company’s journey where market penetration is the main objective. To this end, a CPO may build a strategy around product-led growth, adjust the metrics their teams prioritize, and drive a culture of experimentation to support collaboration with other functions. However, no CPO worth their salt would claim that a small set of tactical user-acquisition experiments constitutes a viable product roadmap, let alone a strategy.
What to expect instead: A successful CPO takes a long-term approach to growth by building products that solve real problems, drive engagement, and exhibit market-leading retention rates. They partner with teams like marketing and sales that own product distribution, but they do not take on their responsibilities. Ultimately, they are responsible for sustained growth and long term commercial success, not short-term tactics.
5. A Feature Factory Manager
Some startups believe the CPO’s primary role is to keep product managers, designers, and engineers busy by churning out feature after feature. This mindset leads to bloated products, weak differentiation, and a lack of strategic direction. Think about “lines of code written” as a success metric for engineers, and how misleading that actually is; the same is true for “features launched” as a metric for product management. A CPO’s real job is to define a compelling product vision, ensure alignment with business goals, and drive meaningful outcomes for customers or users. Overseeing a never-ending list of feature launches can be done by someone with far less experience at a far smaller price than a typical CPO (see Chief Project Manager, above).
What to expect instead: Strong product leaders prioritize outcomes over output. They focus on solving real customer problems, optimizing the product experience, and ensuring that engineering resources are used effectively to drive business value. Shipping features for the sake of it is not good for anyone, and should not be used as a goal at any point in a company’s journey.
6. An Owner for a Sales-Driven Roadmap
Some companies bring in a CPO expecting them to prioritize sales-driven feature requests to accelerate revenue growth. While working closely with sales is important, a product roadmap dictated solely by short-term deal-making leads to a fragmented and unsustainable product. Worse, it relies on expensive sales-led tactics by default, and fails to deliver on the promise of product-led growth and sustainable market penetration.
What to expect instead: A CPO should balance customer needs, market trends, and long-term business goals to build a product that scales. They must partner with sales, but cannot blindly implement every request without strategic validation. Great product leaders are both wonderful co-ideators and sparring partners for other functional leads, and emotionally adept negotiators who are capable of saying “No.” Their job is to reach for sustainable product growth, not just enable the sales team to reach this quarter’s revenue targets.
7. A Savior for a Broken Culture
Some companies bring in a CPO expecting their sheer presence to bring about cultural change. Whether they worry about a lack of innovation, siloed thinking, or inter-departmental strife, the elusive C-P-Unicorn can seem like the person to fix all their troubles. And because product management lies at the intersection of many skills, requires cross-functional collaboration, and generally yields charismatic leaders, this misconception often goes unnoticed until it is too late. But the truth is, a CPO is neither a jack of all trades nor a culture-changing wizard. They have a very specific expertise, and they will need to operate within the existing constraints of your company just like everybody else. A great CPO can build or finesse the product organization, teach other functions about product management, add a product-led mentality to leadership discussions, and write a future-defining product vision and strategy that they then use to rally the rest of the company. But hiring them will not automatically turn your startup into the next Google, Meta, or OpenAI (and maybe that’s a good thing).
What to expect instead: A CPO can drive change, but they need the right environment to succeed. Companies must be willing to adapt, invest in the right talent, and commit to a culture that supports product excellence.
Final Thoughts
A CPO’s role is complex and multifaceted. They are strategic leaders, not just executors, and their success depends on collaboration, vision, and alignment with business goals. Founders and CEOs that understand what a CPO brings to the table will be better able to choose the right person to complement the rest of their company’s leadership team. And if you need a temporary product expert to hold this role while you look for your permanent hire, reach out to us.