Eric Rea(@ericwilliamrea):Every piece of advice I got as a founder said that once you reach a certain size, you hand product to a professional and get out of the way. At @PodiumHQ, we did the opposite, and it’s the most important org decision we’ve made in twelve years. The standard advice is that once a company gets big enough, the founder hands product, and most other functions, to professionals who have “seen the movie before.” I’ve never thought “hire professionals and get out of the way” was particularly good advice for founders. But having a Chief Product Officer made sense in a market where innovation moved steadily and you could see the roadmap a year out. When we realized how disruptive AI was going to be for us, our customers, and basically every company in the world, we decided to go the other way. I became the Chief Product Officer in addition to being the CEO. Every product leader at Podium reports to me and has for the last two years. We made that call because the rate of change was clearly about to accelerate past anything we’d seen. We were going to be playing a different game, and I wanted to make sure the company could move as fast as possible. Having a founder as the Chief Product Officer has allowed us to make big bets quickly. When I started using OpenClaw, it was immediately clear that this paradigm was a great way for our customers to interact with Podium and run their entire business. We started building what became Operator that same day. A hired product leader usually has a dozen priorities already committed and teams built around, naturally incentivized to mitigate risk. They’re trying to reduce the chance of screwing something up, rather than taking big swings. As the founder, I can just decide. This comes with tradeoffs. I have around 16 direct reports now. I can’t spend all of my time as CPO, and it’s forced us to become more efficient and focused as a senior leadership team across the rest of the business. It’s busier, but it’s also better. I don’t think this is set in stone. I could see a world where Podium has a Chief Product Officer again that isn’t me. But AI is changing every part of a product organization right now. I believe that requires the founder to be as close to the product and the customer as possible. I can’t imagine handing that over to anyone else right now. If you want to see what we’re building, DM me.

2026.08.25 17:13

Every piece of advice I got as a founder said that once you reach a certain size, you hand product to a professional and get out of the way. At @PodiumHQ, we did the opposite, and it’s the most important org decision we’ve made in twelve years. The standard advice is that once a company gets big enough, the founder hands product, and most other functions, to professionals who have “seen the movie before.” I’ve never thought “hire professionals and get out of the way” was particularly good advice for founders. But having a Chief Product Officer made sense in a market where innovation moved steadily and you could see the roadmap a year out. When we realized how disruptive AI was going to be for us, our customers, and basically every company in the world, we decided to go the other way. I became the Chief Product Officer in addition to being the CEO. Every product leader at Podium reports to me and has for the last two years. We made that call because the rate of change was clearly about to accelerate past anything we’d seen. We were going to be playing a different game, and I wanted to make sure the company could move as fast as possible. Having a founder as the Chief Product Officer has allowed us to make big bets quickly. When I started using OpenClaw, it was immediately clear that this paradigm was a great way for our customers to interact with Podium and run their entire business. We started building what became Operator that same day. A hired product leader usually has a dozen priorities already committed and teams built around, naturally incentivized to mitigate risk. They’re trying to reduce the chance of screwing something up, rather than taking big swings. As the founder, I can just decide. This comes with tradeoffs. I have around 16 direct reports now. I can’t spend all of my time as CPO, and it’s forced us to become more efficient and focused as a senior leadership team across the rest of the business. It’s busier, but it’s also better. I don’t think this is set in stone. I could see a world where Podium has a Chief Product Officer again that isn’t me. But AI is changing every part of a product organization right now. I believe that requires the founder to be as close to the product and the customer as possible. I can’t imagine handing that over to anyone else right now. If you want to see what we’re building, DM me.

Gokul Rajaram@gokulr

2026.02.01 17:02

PREDICTION: THE CPO ROLE, AS WE KNOW IT, WILL VANISH IN FIVE YEARS At young AI native companies, the traditional PM role is on the wane, replaced with a product builder archetype that’s a combination of Product, Design and Engineering. These companies will never hire a CPO. A separate product leader leads to too much cognitive dissonance when the IC roles doing the actual work are blending, extra overhead and imposes an unnecessary coordination tax on the product development organization. Five years from now, these companies will be the leaders and set the cultural tone for the next generation, so my prediction is that all tech companies will stop hiring for the CPO role in five years. There will be a singular product development leader at each org. Ironically, this new role might still be called the CPO, except they will run the entire product development org. CPTO is far too unwieldy of a title and only exists today to alleviate confusion. Career implication: early / mid career product leaders need to stop aspiring to become CPOs. instead, you need to develop a panoply of product development skills across all three disciplines (+ analytics), be able to fluidly navigate the roles, and become a product builder, period. Farewell, CPO! It was a good 15-20 year run for this role in tech. But like everything else, it’s time to evolve.

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