Why Great Product Leaders Should Stop Obsessing Over the Roadmap

What does an excellent Chief Product Officer actually do?

A lot of people think a good CPO actually helps ship stuff. But that’s, from my experience, far from the truth. The key job of a great chief product officer is essentially setting the direction — not worrying about every single feature, not worrying about even reasonably sized products down to every feature level — but setting the vision and the direction for the product, which then aligns with the vision and direction for the company. And then building a team around it that can execute down into the details.

Most people think a CPO is someone that decides the roadmap, someone that decides how each feature ships, how it’s designed. I don’t think you get really good products based on that.

The second thing for an excellent CPO is understanding your customers deeply so that you can decide what bets to make. Because you can’t make every bet. And if you don’t truly understand your customers deeply, what ends up happening is you make bets that don’t really add value.

The third thing is resource allocation. Where do you actually put your resources? And people think resource allocation is a one-time thing, but it’s not. The world around us these days changes every quarter. So these are decisions you have to revisit almost every quarter.

Is the CPO role the same across all companies, or does it depend on the CEO you’re working with?

The basics are the same — being able to explain the direction of the product to your team, understanding your customers, and resource allocation. I think the process of getting there is very different at different companies.

If you have a founder as a CEO, the founder has had a vision for a while. You can’t just go off into a room with your team and co-create a vision. You have to co-create the vision with the founder, and to a very large extent, actually influence the founder. Because at the end of the day, they’ve been thinking about this for ten years.

What you can often bring to the table is depth of understanding of the customer. Very often a founder starts with deep understanding and intuition of the customer, but then they’re running a company — and that understanding can become stale. That’s where you can help co-create the vision.

With an operational CEO, you still co-create the company vision, but you then have genuine room to create the product vision. Operational CEOs are not in the weeds of why does this button on this UI look different, whereas a founder will often be in that much detail.

What does it actually take to succeed as a CPO in a founder-led company?

You have to be willing to give up some level of autonomy when thinking about the product. And you have to know how to influence really well — you have to understand what influences the other person.

For operational or executive CEOs, the metrics are clear: business growth, customer happiness. For a founder, they are what made them a founder. The reason they become successful is often that the whole world said they were going to fail, and their gut instinct made them succeed. So more often than not, they will go by their instinct. Whereas an executive CEO more often goes by repeat patterns of things that are known or data. How you influence in either case is very different.

Working with a founder as a CPO requires probably more EQ and understanding of what the founder values, in addition to just business growth.

There’s a real tension for CPOs in founder-run companies — between being too deferential on one hand, and not pushing back enough on the other. How do you navigate that?

At the end of the day, founders want the company to succeed. So if you put the best of the company before yourself, and you are recognized as someone who puts the company before themselves, then people know where you’re coming from. You’re coming from the best interest of the company. You define the outcomes and you debate the outcomes.

If you can get alignment on the outcomes, you have more room to debate the tactics. And usually, founders care a lot about outcomes. So start there — and build trust from that foundation.

What’s different about being a great CPO in 2026 compared to five years ago?

Roadmaps need more risk in the AI era. AI has changed the concept of what an app is. The features and capabilities that would have taken quarters to build can now be assembled and shipped much faster. That means you need to be making bigger, bolder bets — because the stakes for not being bold have changed. If you’re only optimizing around the edges, someone else is going to leapfrog you.

It’s also essential for CPOs to fly at a low altitude. You have to deeply understand the product — not just the strategy. If you lose touch with what’s actually happening at the feature level, you lose your ability to make good bets.

You talk about raising your team’s ambition as the CPO’s number one job. What does that actually look like in practice?

It’s about being demanding without creating a fear-based culture. I had a boss who taught me to keep raising the bar — never settling for the first answer, always asking whether this is truly the best we can do. That’s not about being critical; it’s about believing the team can reach higher.

Raising ambition means helping your team see possibilities they haven’t imagined yet. You can’t just tell people to be more ambitious. You have to show them what more ambitious looks like — often by asking the right questions, not providing the right answers.

You’re described as “militant” about your calendar. Why?

The hardest part of being a CPO is carving out dedicated thinking time. The default is to fill every hour with meetings — syncs, reviews, status updates. But if I’m in back-to-back meetings all day, I’m reacting, not thinking. The best insights I have about where the product should go don’t come from a meeting. They come from unstructured time where I can actually think.

So I protect that time aggressively. I block it, I guard it, and I’m honest with my team that it’s non-negotiable. The best executives need to spend roughly half their time thinking, not doing. That sounds radical, but I genuinely believe it.

You have a three-bucket framework for delegating decisions. Can you walk us through it?

The framework helps me decide which decisions I need to own, which ones I should be consulted on, and which I should fully delegate. The first bucket is decisions only I can make — typically things that cross organizational lines, involve major resource trade-offs, or set precedent for how we operate. The second bucket is decisions I want to be in the loop on but don’t need to drive. The third bucket is everything else, which my team should own completely.

Most CPOs have the buckets wrong — they’re in bucket one for things that should be in bucket three, and they’re absent from bucket one things that actually need them. Getting the categorization right is a big part of the job.

What advice would you give to ambitious PMs who are chasing titles?

Chase impact, not titles. The four bottlenecks that stall career growth are all impact-related: not solving the right problem, not building the right relationships, not communicating your impact clearly, and not operating at the right altitude. Titles follow impact. If you’re obsessing over the title, you’re focused on the wrong thing.