Practical Use Cases
What Do Interim CPOs Do?
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Companies hire interim CPOs to bridge a strategic leadership gap in their product development hierarchy. In this capacity, interim CPOs help spearhead product development processes, including developing a product vision, streamlining product innovation, leading product design and development, and, in some cases, leading product marketing. Companies that work with Interim CPOs gain better visibility of their product development processes and achieve better alignment of resources like UI/UX design and engineering.
Further to this, Interim Chief Product Officers offer crucial support in the following areas:
Ideation and Validation
Interim CPOs use their research and analytics skills to uncover valuable insights around product value proposition (VP). By crafting an empowered VP, they help a company pick winning products to pursue and bring to market. Interim CPOs also work closely with customer care and customer experience teams to run surveys and collect feedback about current product offerings. If they are leading a new product development initiative, they work towards understanding target market needs and using experiments and prototyping to validate ideas that can lead to success.
Minimum Viable Product and GTM Strategy
Interim CPOs bring years of experience and expertise in developing minimum viable products into a company’s product development cycle. They help create lean MVPs that generate useful feedback either from a customer segment or internal test groups. From this data, they help a company decide whether to pursue a go-to-market (GTM) push or go back to the drawing board. In this way, they help a company accelerate innovation and product development while minimizing the total capital outlay required to test each product.
Customer-first Product Framework
Interim Chief Product Officers help mold a company’s product development structures using a customer-first framework. Some of the structures they may put in place include customer listening channels, a customer success team, and customer data collection and analytics. While these are on the downstream side of product development, they will also apply similar customer-centric structures on the upstream side, including instituting design-driven engineering, lean prototyping, validated learning, and data-driven decision-making.
Business Model Transformation
In the process of developing new products, a company may need to transform its business model to accommodate the latest products. Interim CPOs excel at managing this process, helping companies make a smooth transition. During the change, the digital product strategist will lead transformational processes in sales and marketing, product design and development, and financial performance. Through their input, they help companies optimize their current teams, seek strategic partnerships, and recommend new technologies that will support the transformed business model.
Tips on How to Hire Interim CPOs
Hiring an Interim CPO is a strategic step that companies take to accelerate their new product development and bring innovative products to market faster. The hiring process often involves evaluating skills, experience, and other capabilities to identify the right match for the position or project. During this process, it is imperative to consider Interim CPOs who bring extensive experience working on projects like yours and who have attained a veritable record of accomplishment.
As such, in your Interim CPOs panel, consider filtering your options based on the specific skills and capabilities outlined below:
Leadership Skills
Interim CPOs are responsible for leading cross-functional teams that include UI/UX designers, software engineers, product managers, and marketing executives. The best Interim Chief Product Officers have well-honed leadership skills that they bring to bear in this position. Through their incredible leadership, they enable collaboration across these teams, an essential ingredient for successful product innovation. Additionally, they work closely with customer-facing teams to foster a robust customer-focused culture that helps generate data crucial for product innovation.
Excellent Communication Skills
Product innovation involves working with diverse teams and stakeholders. An experienced Interim Chief Product Officers approaches these situations with tack and brings all stakeholders on board without compromising the effectiveness of the product innovation. They also use their profound communication skills when dealing with cross-cultural stakeholders, such as foreign investors or partners, and ensure every interaction is handled with diplomacy.
Customer Focus
The best Interim Chief Product Officers demonstrate exceptional empathy for the customer while maintaining a clear view of company objectives. Their mastery of this delicate balance allows them to champion customer needs while ensuring any trade offs made do not hurt the company's bottom line. Customer empathy is especially crucial to this position as it forms the underlying basis of all activities and decisions the Interim CPO makes. Working with such an expert will ensure all your product development resources are focused on the right problems, those that your customers are willing to pay you to solve.
Business Perspective
Exceptional Interim CPOs use their extensive skills and experience to align product development efforts with customer needs. They do this while maintaining a clear perspective of business strategy and objectives and, indeed, using these as a guiding principle when formulating product development strategies. This dual perspective, one customer-focused, and the other business-focused, enables these experts to spearhead products that are not only a hit with customers, but that also become resounding financial successes.
Strategic Mindset
Strategic thinking is at the core of successful product development. The best digital product strategists bring this mindset to product development projects, helping integrate diverse factors like emerging trends, strategic partnerships, and disruptive technologies into new products. They also factor in market factors like the competitive landscape, business environment, and shifting customer needs. The result is a cohesive and holistic product development strategy that creates new products capable of withstanding disruptive forces and yielding sustainable value for the business.
Creative Advocacy
The best Interim Chief Product Officers bring creative advocacy to a process that is often saddled with competing interests. They work towards bringing together involved teams, including sales, marketing, customer success, software engineering, and design under one unified strategy. Through creative advocacy, they ensure all teams are working in support of each other, while quickly resolving any bottlenecks that emerge. Working with an Interim CPO with profound advocacy skills also ensures stakeholder buy-in from partners and suppliers who may need to adjust to accommodate new products.
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