404: Do you have the skills to be a CPO – with Rick Kelly

Skills to move from product manager to Chief Product Officer

Today we are talking about the role of CPO, Chief Product Officer, and the skills and capabilities that help you move from product roles to a CPO role.

Joining us is Rick Kelly, who is the CPO at Fuel Cycle. They’ve developed an insights platform to facilitate collaboration between market researchers, UX professionals, marketing managers, and product leaders.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[6:11] What technical skills have you found helpful for your CPO role?

Product is the most fun role you can have because it sits in the nexus of pretty much everything. You have to understand finance, technology, and customers. On the technical side, for me it’s been learning by hook or by crook. Something comes up at a meeting and I don’t understand the newest database structure, and I have to dig deep and learn. My background was customer-facing, so I had to be self-taught and learn to communicate in a way developers would align with, understand, and respect. Speaking the language of development and being fluent and conversant are requirements for product leadership. It’s like learning another language—you have to be persistent and patient and spend a lot of time on YouTube listening to the latest talks on technology.

[8:14] What do you mean by having the respect of the developers?

You need to have the collaboration and respect of all kinds of departments. Whether it’s developers or your finance team, they need to know you’re willing to listen and be conversant in their field. My finance team and developers want to know I’m going to listen to them and trust them, and they’ll respect the decisions we make together. Product management is about efficient value delivery. Maintaining collaboration across teams requires that you as a product manager are conversant in other team members’ fields.

Have sessions where you ask somebody to explain something is important. I don’t know everything, and I wouldn’t expect myself or any other product manager to be perfectly knowledgeable about all things technical. Asking honest questions is really important. There are junior developers who know a lot more than I do about the latest front-end framework, and and asking them to explain it to me engenders trust.

[11:49] How did your customer interaction skills help you along your journey to CPO?

The role of a product leader is value delivery. The goal of product management is to build things people will pay for. Understanding what people are willing to pay for is an absolute requirement for building a successful product. Understanding customer needs and knowing how to speak to them and elicit their needs to identify what’s truly valuable to them is an absolute requirement for anyone in a customer success or product management role. I map our platform’s value to customer needs and bridge the gap between the two.

[13:10] What kinds of customer interactions were you having as an account manager?

In many cases, customer success team members are compensated and evaluated based on their ability to review accounts, and that’s something product leaders should care a lot about. They have to be revenue-focused and find ways to deliver value. Product management is about making the right trade-offs to deliver valuable growth to the business. The biggest rate-limiter to growth is how well you understand customer needs.

[17:00] What’s your perspective on emphasizing value to the customer or value to the organization?

Solving customer problems is the most important thing. Monetization and the ability to grow follows that. Individual PMs need to be laser-focused on delivering customer value. As people grow in their careers, they have to be increasingly concerned about how the organization grows, monetization,