In my experience (as a VP Product reporting to a product-focused CEO for a few years) I think that a product-focused CEO can be the best kind of CEO for a VP product. You’ll have a “partner in crime” who can help you design better products, who is a good brainstorming partner, and who understands and appreciates what PMs do and why they exist.
Here’s a few things I’ve observed about the CEO & VP partnership and how to make it successful.
First, it’s important to recognize *why* a product-focused CEO— who’s typically served as the Head of Product since the company was founded—would decide to hire a VP Product. The usual reason is this: the CEO has gotten so busy that she can’t do a good job as CEO while running the product team too. But although the CEO realizes that she needs help, she’s also wistful and a little concerned about losing control over the product. She definitely wants to continue having a lot of influence on the product, even if she doesn’t have time to drive it day-to-day.
So with that in mind, the perfect candidate in this role is someone who:
a) Is better at PM in general (strategy, roadmapping, project management, hiring PMs, collaborating with engineers, interaction design, communication, etc.) than the CEO.
AND
b) Is eager to incorporate the CEOs ideas and feedback into the product, especially for the first year or so when the new VP Product is just learning the space.
Both of these are crucial. If you don’t know more about running a PM team than the CEO does, then your CEO will be thinking “why are you here?”. The whole goal of bringing on a VP was to lighten the CEO’s load. If you can’t run PM more effectively than the CEO can, then you’re not lightening her load and you won’t last long.
But the second piece is vitally important too. If you’re working for a CEO with strong opinions about the product— and a multi-year track record of managing that product, or else you wouldn’t have taken the job, right?— then don’t expect to be a Steve Jobs character who always knows what’s best and tells everyone else to bugger off. Instead, you need to buy into the CEO’s vision for the product. You need to think of your job as improving and extending that vision, not fixing it or re-inventing it. That doesn’t mean you should be a pushover either. But a prerequisite for success is being on the same high-level wavelength about where the product should go. If you don’t buy into the vision and have a good mind-meld vibe with the CEO during the interview process, then don’t take the job.
But if you have both (a) and (b), then it’s a great experience for both of you. You get to leverage the CEO’s industry knowledge and bottomless well of ideas, which will make you come up to speed a lot faster than if you had to build a product strategy from scratch. And the CEO gets to see how a product team works when it’s run professionally.
Just make sure that you’re always checking in with the CEO to make sure that she’s having the right (from her perspective) level of input into the product. This might mean spending most of your 1:1 time brainstorming feature ideas. It might be sending the CEO links to early code and getting her feedback. It might be sharing customer insights with her. It might be interesting data or metrics. And so on. Figure out how your CEO wants to be involved and let them be involved.
Sometimes a CEO might have too much input. You might think that they’re micro-managing. Relax, it’ll pass. The CEO has spent years thinking about this product. Now someone else is driving. This adjustment might take a while. Let it happen. If the CEO is randomizing your team with too much input then that’s probably a sign you’re not proactively involving her and/or not spending enough 1:1 time with her. If the CEO trusts *you* to make the right thing happen, then she’ll leave your team alone.
What will usually happen is that over time your CEO will get less involved in the product. Not because they don’t care; they still do! But the CEO role—with its core duties of managing VPs, “managing” the Board, recruiting constantly, and ensuring the company stays solvent—is a more-than-full-time job. Most CEOs are too busy to spend much time on anything that someone else is handling well. So just go handle it well.