Hire Chief Product Officer — product vision at the executive table

When product strategy is company strategy: multiple product lines, platform bets, or a business where the product roadmap determines the company’s future. If product is one function among many, a VP usually suffices.

The CPO owns what to build and why; the CTO owns how it gets built and the technology strategy. Healthy tension between the two is a feature — I have sat on both sides of that table.

Vision craft and portfolio judgment transfer; deep domain helps in regulated or specialized markets. More important is a record of setting direction that actually shipped.

Portfolio outcomes: revenue and retention impact of product bets, the hit rate of strategic initiatives, leadership bench strength, and whether the company can articulate its product direction without them in the room.

Yes — often more so, because fractional executives have seen the movie across companies. The vision and portfolio work is the highest-leverage part, and it does not require forty hours a week.

I work on a fixed monthly retainer tied to a defined scope, not an hourly rate, because executive product work is about judgement and outcomes rather than hours logged. Most engagements run two to four days a week at the start and step down as the operating model takes hold. I quote only after a scoping call, since a two-squad startup and a fifty-person product organisation are genuinely different jobs.

You will have an honest diagnosis of your product operating model inside two weeks, which is often valuable on its own. The first measurable changes, a clear north-star metric, a reprioritised roadmap and a working discovery cadence, land within thirty to forty-five days. Deeper shifts like leadership bench strength and portfolio returns take a quarter or two, because those are built, not announced.

I diagnose before I prescribe. Weeks one and two are listening: the data, customer calls, support themes, and how decisions really get made. Weeks three and four I propose the operating model, agree the north-star metric with leadership, and run the first properly prioritised planning cycle. By day thirty you have a written product strategy, a reshaped roadmap, and a team that knows what good looks like. I do not reorganise anything before I understand it.

Yes, and it is one of the better reasons to hire a fractional chief product officer first. I define the role and scorecard around what your company actually needs rather than a generic template, screen and interview candidates alongside you, and run the function to a high standard in the meantime so you hire from strength. When the permanent CPO arrives they inherit a working system and a clean handover, not a backlog and a blank page.

I work with them. My job is to raise the ceiling on the team you already have, not to clear the floor. I coach your PMs and any Head of Product on discovery, prioritisation and stakeholder management, and I am direct with you about genuine gaps. In most engagements the existing team is capable but under-led, and a few weeks of real product leadership changes what they are able to do.

Yes. I am based in Dubai and run product engagements remotely for clients across the UAE, US, UK, Canada, Pakistan and Malaysia, with deliberate overlap hours for your core team. Senior product leadership is mostly decisions, writing and coaching, all of which work well remotely when the operating model is set up for it. I travel for the sessions that genuinely benefit from the room, such as strategy offsites or board meetings.