HIRE RIGHT, WITH THE RIGHT TITLE

Your Product Roadmap Won’t Become Real Until Your Job Titles Do.

You hire a Chief Product Officer, then spend six months asking why they aren’t updating tickets, formatting roadmaps, and producing weekly status reports.

There’s your first problem.

You hired someone to build product strategy, then assigned them a job coordinating tasks. Eventually, everyone gets frustrated. Leadership thinks the executive isn’t delivering. The executive spends their time chasing updates. The team still doesn’t have a clear direction.

But the spreadsheet looks fantastic.

I have worked across product development, operations, innovation, and growth long enough to recognize this pattern. Companies want better products, reliable plans, and reports they can trust. Yet they build the organization around titles that have very little relationship to the work they actually need done.

A title can help recruit someone. It cannot resolve a poorly defined job.

A CPO’s primary responsibility is deciding where the product organization should go and why. Which customers should we serve? What problems are valuable enough to solve? Where can we compete? What deserves investment, and what should we stop doing?

They are accountable for the roadmap’s direction and credibility. Personally maintaining every row of it is a different responsibility.

The same applies to a VP. Building an effective organization, allocating resources, developing leaders, and resolving competing priorities should occupy a meaningful part of that person’s time. If their main assignment is collecting updates and assembling a Friday report, the company needs to be honest about the position it has created.

Executives absolutely need to understand the details. They also need to step into execution when necessary. But being willing to do the work does not make every piece of work the best use of that position.

Hire for the actual responsibility. Pay for the actual scope. Evaluate against expectations you established before someone accepted the offer.

If you need product management, hire for product management. If you need program coordination, hire for program coordination. If you need someone to establish the company’s product strategy and build the organization around it, give them the authority, resources, and compensation that responsibility requires.

A small company may need one person to cover several functions. Fine. Define that arrangement clearly. Make the workload achievable and acknowledge the tradeoffs.

Putting “Chief” in front of an overloaded job description does not create additional hours in the day.

Then address the question that should come before any roadmap:

What are we building, who is it for, and why should anyone care?

“An innovative platform” is not a clear product vision. Neither is “an AI-powered solution,” “a better customer experience,” or a list of features someone admired at a conference.

Name the customer. Describe the problem. Understand how they solve it today, what that costs them, and what would make them change.

That applies to software, a café, an automotive service, a consumer product, or a new business division. A product needs a credible reason to exist in someone else’s life.

Market evaluation is where that belief starts earning its place. Talk to potential buyers. Examine alternatives, including doing nothing. Test willingness to pay. Understand how you will reach customers and whether the economics can support the business.

Nobody can guarantee success. But we should be able to explain why an opportunity deserves investment using something more substantial than internal enthusiasm.

Once that direction is clear, a roadmap can become a useful plan.

It should connect customer needs to business priorities, available capacity, dependencies, and evidence. It should distinguish a committed delivery from an estimate and an idea that still needs investigation.

If nobody has assessed the work, assigning a date creates an expectation without establishing a basis for it.

And when new information changes the plan, someone needs to explain the change, its consequences, and the decision required. That is how management gets a report it can count on.

A useful weekly report tells leadership what moved, what is blocked, what changed, and where intervention is needed. Its credibility comes from clear ownership and an operating process that reflects reality.

No amount of presentation polish can manufacture that underneath it.

The product leader remains accountable for results. Strategy needs to produce decisions, priorities, and measurable progress. Execution needs capable owners with the time and authority to deliver.

Both deserve properly defined jobs.

Before demanding another roadmap, look at the organization producing it. Are expectations explicit? Does compensation reflect the responsibility? Is the vision understood? Has the market given you a reason to believe?

Give good people a credible product, a clear mandate, and a job that matches the one you hired them to do.

Then hold them accountable for it.