Why Every Scaling Tech Company Needs a Chief Product Officer on Their Team

Let’s kick off with a statement that might cause a few raised eyebrows over flat whites in Surry Hills and spark a mild existential crisis in your average scale-up boardroom: most growing tech companies aren’t floundering because they lack developers or because they haven’t discovered the Next Big Framework™. Nor are they victims of stingy funding or uninspired feature sets. No, the affliction is deeper … and more awkward to admit. 

What they’re truly missing is a Chief Product Officer (CPO). Not someone with the title buried four lines deep in an org chart. I mean a real CPO. A real CPO is someone who possesses lived scars, a keen commercial sense, instincts for matching patterns, and a borderline obsessive compulsion to transform chaos into clarity.

And before you say, “But, we can’t afford one of those yet,” allow me to gently suggest that this is not a reason to delay, but precisely the reason to reframe. A fractional or embedded CPO is not a placeholder or some kind of consultant cosplay. It’s a tactical upgrade in disguise. 

Now, with twenty-odd years on the tools, give or take a few startup-induced grey hairs, I’ve been lucky (and occasionally unlucky) enough to work with companies across the full tech spectrum: from ragtag, pre-seed battlers in converted warehouses in Pyrmont to globe-trotting unicorns with shareholder meetings in those fancy glass towers in Barangaroo. And let me tell you, despite the geographic and budgetary spread, one pattern shows up as reliably as a poorly documented API: once a startup sniffs product-market fit, they break out the champagne, slap together a hiring plan, and hurtle headlong into the mythical land of “scale” as if it’s some kind of Shangri-La.

The problem? They're often equipped with more capital than clarity. With roadmaps written in optimism rather than logic. With pitch-deck dreams and no one asking the hard, unsexy questions like, “Hang on, why are we building this, exactly?” What emerges is not the elegant upward curve you see in investor updates, but a spaghetti junction of misaligned initiatives, teams sprinting in different directions, a product backlog that reads like a stream-of-consciousness novel, and a definition of success that could be politely described as … negotiable.

In short, they’re not scaling. They’re swirling. They’ve traded the disciplined chaos of early-stage discovery for the undisciplined chaos of unchecked ambition. The lack of a seasoned CPO at that critical juncture not only creates a gap, but also poses a significant risk.

A talented CPO, and I’ll say this with all the humility of someone who’s made every mistake at least once, doesn’t just wrangle Jira tickets or sit in on design sprints like a well-dressed houseplant. We shape the entire product operating system. We’re part strategic therapist, part commercial sherpa, and part cultural interpreter between engineering, sales, marketing, and the founder’s latest sleepless insight at 2:00 am. We're the ones who can read a customer research deck and a profit-and-loss statement with equal fluency, and know how to make them argue productively.

So when I see a founder telling me they’ll “worry about product leadership once we’ve scaled a bit,” it raises a case for great concern. Because by then, the product debt has already been accrued, the misalignment has calcified into culture, and the roadmap is held together with duct tape, caffeine, and wild hope.

If you’re serious about scaling, not just growing, but scaling with intent, then someone needs to be standing at the helm of the product ship with a map, a compass, and the authority to say “No” more often than “Sure, let’s ship that too.”

And that someone is your CPO.

The illusion of arrival: Product-Market Fit as a false summit

In the modern startup vernacular, product-market fit has achieved a semi-religious status. It’s whispered in coworking spaces with reverence, spoken of at demo days like it’s the promised land. For many founders, it’s imagined as the ultimate arrival point: that triumphant moment when the market finally winks at your value proposition, customers start throwing money your way, and investors slide across the table with grins and term sheets. Cue the obligatory celebratory tweet thread and a medium-roast espresso.

However, it's important to note that product-market fit is not the final goal. It’s not even a proper milestone. It is, in fact, the beginning. It is the moment when you finally earn the right to take on the real problems. The deep, structural, and often excruciatingly nuanced challenges of scaling a product without destroying your team, your customers, or your business model are what you must confront. PMF doesn’t guarantee success; it merely removes your right to use ignorance as an excuse.

And yet, bizarrely, once PMF is declared, usually with the smug certainty of someone who’s just ‘won’ a game of Monopoly, most teams immediately slam the brakes on strategic product thinking. As if reaching this mythical benchmark means the hard thinking is done and it’s time to sprint. Except now the sprint is toward … what, exactly? Roadmaps become a pastiche of hastily gathered input from loud stakeholders. Delivery becomes erratic, oscillating between “move fast” and “fix last week’s launch.” Previously sharp and agile teams lose their edge and begin to float, or worse, flail.

The shift is subtle at first. A few too many features released with no measurable outcome. A sudden spike in design debt. There is a growing unease among project managers as they struggle to consistently define "success". 

McKinsey notes that only 14% of digital transformation initiatives lead to sustainable performance gains, having spent the better part of the last decade counting digital misfires. Fourteen per cent! You’d have better odds backing a three-legged horse at Flemington. One of the most chronically underdiagnosed reasons? The near-total absence of strategic product leadership at the moment it matters most.

Because here’s the dirty secret: PMF may prove your product is loved by someone. But it says absolutely nothing about your ability to scale that love without losing the plot. And in my experience,  that’s the inflection point where the presence (or absence) of a proper Chief Product Officer makes all the difference.

Scaling without structure: Where things begin to break

On paper, scaling is presented as the glamorous victory lap, the long-awaited reward for the sleepless nights, the ramen-fuelled pivots, and the awkward investor coffees where everyone pretended they understood blockchain. Scaling is supposed to be the moment when the flywheel ignites, growth accelerates, and everything begins to function smoothly like a well-functioning espresso machine. But in practice? It’s often the point where promising startups go from “rising rocket ship” to “burning satellite” in record time.

The symptoms of scale-induced entropy emerge fast, often before anyone realises they’ve gone from “agile” to “adrift.” Backlogs, though full of noble intentions, lack discipline. Delivery timelines begin to stretch out, like with all the urgency of a government IT project. Feature creep infiltrates the project like a persistent rash, and soon your engineering team is frantically developing the features that Sales expressed the most concern about during last Friday's retrospective.

Each meticulously crafted roadmap reflects the anxiety of a single stakeholder. Meanwhile, “success” becomes a philosophical debate better suited to a uni lecture than a sprint review.

In the absence of a senior product leader, someone who isn’t just “in the room” but genuinely empowered with strategic oversight and cross-functional clout, teams inevitably revert to tribal instincts. They build in silos. They optimise for noise, not value. Meetings get louder, not clearer. And the customer’s voice, once the North Star, is drowned out by a chorus of internal opinions, OKRs, and someone’s half-baked idea from a competitor’s roadmap they saw on LinkedIn.

Product managers, well-meaning and full of potential, find themselves making isolated decisions with limited context. They ship features, yes, but disconnected from a larger narrative, they resemble puzzle pieces from different boxes. It’s not acceleration. It’s fragmentation. And it’s often at this stage, ironically, that companies start spending the most, in time, in dollars, and in talent churn, while getting the least in return.

Many of the most costly and slow-burning mistakes occur at this juncture. It's not as if individuals aren't exerting significant effort. They are. Often too hard. But because they’re flying without a map, or worse, arguing over which direction north actually is. And without a seasoned CPO to pull the threads together and reframe the chaos as a coordinated strategy, scaling becomes less about growth and more about survival.

The strategic role of a real Chief Product Officer

Let’s be clear, a Chief Product Officer is not just a glorified traffic controller or a PowerPoint enthusiast who appears once a quarter to adjust a roadmap and disappear into the mist. Nor are they simply an exalted project manager with better coffee preferences and a fancier job title. A truly great CPO plays a far more consequential role: they are the translator-in-chief, not between English and code, but between vision and execution, between the abstract dreams of the founder and the gritty pragmatism of what can (and should) actually be built.

At the core, CPOs are commercial cartographers. We map the hazy contours of ambition onto the cold, hard terrain of delivery. We ensure that every product decision, from the smallest UX tweak to a market expansion, is wired directly into commercial logic. If a feature doesn’t move the business forward, it doesn’t get built. Full stop. We shield teams from the powerful influence of internal politics, which can be likened to energy drains where user needs are neglected. And we ensure that strategy isn’t some retrospective justification for decisions already made but the scaffolding that supports every move from ideation to iteration.

You could see this play out beautifully at Atlassian, where disciplined rituals around product discovery weren’t just encouraged; they were codified. Product teams were trained to elevate real user pain above the volume of stakeholder noise. User needs weren’t just “considered”; they were treated like sacred texts. Over at Canva, the same principle was applied with that distinctive Aussie blend of design flair and execution muscle. What began as a scrappy, creative chaos machine has matured into one of the most cohesive product organisations on the planet, laser-focused on user outcomes over feature fireworks.

And let’s be honest, none of that was the result of blind luck, fairy dust, or inspirational quotes in Slack channels. Those transformations didn’t happen in spite of product leadership; they happened because of it. They happened because someone in the room was senior enough, savvy enough, and stubborn enough to insist on building the right thing the right way. A good CPO doesn’t just drive alignment, we become the quiet architect of a company’s ability to scale without combusting.

What happens in the absence of a CPO?

Without proper product leadership at the helm, the kind that can see the forest, the trees, and the termites, companies don’t just slow down; they begin to drift. It’s rarely dramatic at first. In fact, from the outside, things may look deceptively productive. Teams are shipping. Stand-ups are happening. Roadmaps are filled with colourful cards and confident timelines. But underneath it all? Chaos, in a designer T-shirt.

Teams move fast, but not together. The engine is running, yet the wheels are not in perfect alignment. Features are released, uncelebrated, unloved, and more often than not, unused. Delivery becomes theatre: a performative frenzy of motion with little to no measurable impact. Sprint demos feel more like hostage negotiations. Metrics dashboards get updated, but no one’s quite sure what they're looking at. The product may be moving, but it’s not going anywhere with purpose.

And the founder? Ah yes … our exhausted protagonist. Without a seasoned CPO to delegate to, they become the reluctant ringmaster of the entire product circus. Instead of stepping into true CEO territory with vision, culture, capital, they’re trapped in the operational mud, obsessing over button copy, debating Jira priorities, and fielding Slack messages at 11:42pm about why the beta launch didn’t include dark mode. This isn’t visionary leadership. It’s founder burnout dressed as hustle.

Now, let’s look at the cautionary tales. Remember Clubhouse? It shot into the zeitgeist like a comet, then nosedived just as quickly. Within a year, engagement collapsed. The idea was novel, the hype undeniable, but the follow-through? Lacking. Then there’s Quibi … a case study in how not to spend $1.75 billion. Despite its Hollywood glitter and ample runway, it somehow missed the most basic requirement of a product company: build something people actually want, and can actually use. 

Neither venture failed due to lack of funding or fanfare. They failed because no one in the room had both the authority and the experience to ask the awkward question: “Why are we 

building this, and who exactly is it for?”

In both cases, what was missing wasn’t ambition, it was clarity. And clarity is what a great CPO delivers in spades. When that voice isn’t present, assumptions go unchallenged, and user needs become an afterthought. 

What changes when a CPO is present

When the role is filled by the right person (and I don’t mean someone who just displays the title on LinkedIn) the effect is both immediate and transformative. Suddenly, the fuzziness clears. Product vision sharpens from vague ambition into deliberate, market-shaping differentiation. Just look at Figma, which didn’t just build a design tool; they zeroed in on real-time collaboration as their north star … a move so surgically precise it left incumbents scrambling for a response.

Execution, too, undergoes a bit of a glow-up. No more teams interpreting the roadmap like it’s a Rorschach test. Everyone (design, engineering, marketing, sales) begins to operate with a shared sense of direction. Not just “what are we building,” but “why does it matter?” The result? Fewer features, better outcomes. Notion is a brilliant case in point. They resisted the urge to bloat, delivering a product with fewer bells and whistles than some of its competitors, but with clarity, coherence, and that elusive thing we call delight. They didn’t win by doing more. They won by doing it better.

Most crucially, and this bit makes every founder I work with breathe a little easier, the presence of a capable CPO allows the CEO to actually step out of the product weeds. Not into absence, but into genuine leadership. Vision casting. Capital raising. Team building. You know, the job they actually signed up for. With strategic product stewardship in place, founders can stop triple-checking Figma files at midnight and start leading their company like they mean it.

When you’ve got someone senior in the room who understands both the poetry and the plumbing of product, everything gets crisper. Cleaner. Calmer. You stop sprinting in circles and start moving forward with purpose.

The pragmatic answer: CPO-as-a-Service

Naturally, not every company is poised, or cashed up, to bring on a full-time Chief Product Officer straight out of the gate. And that’s perfectly reasonable. But let's be clear: this is not an argument for postponement or paralysis. This argument advocates for adaptability. In fact, it’s precisely this kind of conundrum that inspired us to create Alkemy’s CPO-as-a-Service model … a modern solution for the very modern problem of scaling complexity faster than you can staff a product org.

This model offers the best of both worlds for founders who need a co-pilot for both product and commercial strategy, working from inside the engine room rather than from the sidelines with a PowerPoint and polite advice. We bring rigour to the roadmap, ferocious prioritisation to the feature list, and a proven, battle-tested lens to the many, many existential product questions that arise once traction becomes “uh-oh, we’re scaling.”

Embedded, fractional, and genuinely hands-on, it's a way to de-risk the next leg of the journey without investing heavily in a $400K CPO hire before you've even determined which hill you're climbing.

Let's acknowledge that while taking a risk may seem daring, it's not always a brilliant decision. Sometimes the smartest move isn’t hiring more, it’s hiring smarter.

The data leaves little room for ambiguity

The evidence in favour of robust, senior-level product leadership isn’t just compelling; it’s conclusive. Consider this: over 80% of features shipped by product teams are barely used, if at all. They sit in your codebase, but offer no real support. Roughly two-thirds of startups end up pivoting due to poor product decisions; this happens not because the technology failed or the market changed, but because someone built the wrong product, often with excessive enthusiasm and at full speed.

And it gets better. Only 27% of teams even bother to measure whether the features they’re shipping actually deliver value to users. That’s not product development; that’s feature roulette. In the meantime, founders often dedicate 40% of their post-Series A time to product development, even though they lack formal product experience. It’s like being thrown the keys to a 747 because you once flew Jetstar. You can press buttons, sure. But should you?

Perhaps most telling of all: high-growth companies with C-level product leadership scale at 2.5x the rate of those without. That’s not correlation dressed up as causation. That’s the hard operational payoff of having someone in the room who knows how to steer a product from good to great, and from great to commercially scalable.

These aren’t scattered anecdotes or cherry-picked factoids. They’re a chorus of caution, and, for those willing to listen, a roadmap of what actually works when the growth gets serious. Ignore them at your peril … or embrace them and enjoy fewer sleepless nights wondering why no one is using that shiny new dashboard you shipped last month.

The Strategic Imperative

So if your company’s showing signs of real traction, the phones are ringing, the graphs are going up and to the right, and your product has some actual fans, but the clarity is starting to slip through your fingers like sand, then you’ve reached a critical juncture. If your teams are frantically busy, yet eerily unaligned; if product decisions feel more like gut reactions than intentional, strategic moves; if your roadmap looks suspiciously like a backlog of everything that’s ever been asked for, then it’s time to stop scaling fast, messy, and without a clear winner.

Because the problem isn’t effort. It’s orientation. It’s not that you’re not doing enough, it’s that you’re doing too much of the wrong stuff, in too many directions, with too little intent. The answer here is not more code, more features, or more “quick wins.” The answer is leadership, product leadership, specifically.

Recruit an individual skilled in navigating through multifaceted chaos, guiding cross-functional chaos towards a coherent direction, and constructing with clarity rather than fear. Whether it’s full-time or fractional, homegrown or embedded, what you need is a human compass, someone with the battle scars, the frameworks, and the conviction to challenge lazy assumptions, connect commercial and customer value, and craft a product strategy that’s as scalable as it is sane.

Trying to scale a tech company without a Chief Product Officer isn’t bold. It’s not innovative. It’s not “lean.” It is setting a course for confusion, misalignment, and missed opportunity. It’s choosing velocity over direction, and choosing noise over signal.

The companies that endure are the ones that grow with grace and precision, not just with speed.

They understand that product leadership isn’t a nice to have. It’s the difference between building a product that ships and a product that sticks. So if you’re aiming to scale with purpose, start by putting someone at the helm who knows how to turn vision into velocity and chaos into clarity.