How CPO qualities differ from Head’s or Lead’s qualities

If you are going to apply for job as a Chief Product Officer in a large company or, on the contrary, going to interview someone for this position, you might be answering/asking the following questions to get aware of developed competencies in a particular person.

— Strategy

Tell us about an at least three-month project, which you managed and are proud of. What are the most difficult strategic decisions you made on it? What was your biggest mistake? What conclusions did you draw on it?

— Co-working

How would the people you have led describe you? What was the most difficult thing about leading people? How did you give the person feedback (negative/positive)? What have you done to help them improve?

— Interaction with stakeholders

Tell me about the time when you strongly disagreed with your manager. What did you do to convince them that you were right? Were there any situations when you had to notify concerns? Tell us about the situation when you took the initiative on a difficult task. How did it go? What difficult decisions have you made?

— Communications

How do you keep your team posted about issues of the organization?

— Hiring staff

What is your standard method of interviewing? What is important to you about hiring?

What are the CPO functional responsibilities

What kind of things CPO spend time on and how much?

1. Protecting and evangelizing the interests of users. The CPO should understand better than anyone else in the company what segment of target audience the product is aimed at. About 5–15% of the time.
2. Formation of product vision. The image of the product in 3–5 years: what people’s problems should it solve; what are the objectives; how to pull money from it, what do we give up meanwhile. About 5–10% of the time.
3. Formation of the product strategy. What the organization must do to make the vision a reality. How to supplement the product, what organizational changes to make, what to buy, what to grow, and so on… About 10–15% of the time.
4. Integration (creating an environment of co-existence) of business, technology and product. Product management is multi-disciplinary and uses elements from different disciplines like marketing, project management, design etc. About 15–30% of the time
5. Providing clarity to the team (stakeholder-management). All key stakeholders (first of all, the team of top managers and product-owners) must be aware of what is happening with the product and why. Managing expectations at the highest level. About 20–40% of the time.
6. Defining and tracking product health-metrics. The product should have progress-metrics (whether we are achieving our goals or not) and health-metrics (whether something bad is happening with what is already there). The CPO’s task is also to focus the team on it. It About 10–15% of the time.
7. Creation, support and development of a product leader’s team. The CPO should devote much more time to hiring, developing and forming the team than other top-managers usually do. About 10–20% of the time.
8. Determination of the principles of efficiency of the product management team. You can judje the product by the team that works on it. About 5–10% of the time.