Episode 164: Positioning Yourself for a Chief Product Officer Role with the CEO & Co-Founder at Artico Search

In this episode of Product Thinking, Mercedes Chatfield-Taylor, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Artico Search, joins Melissa Perri. Together, they discuss navigating the hiring landscape for Chief Product Officers, the importance of technical expertise and commercial acumen in today's market, and what the difference is between a Head of Product and a Chief Product Officer.

Mercedes is a serial investment professional as well as Co-Founder and CEO of Artico Search. She’s a Limited Partner at four investment firms, including B Capital and Next Coast, and is a go-to woman for building teams for the most successful global investors and portfolio companies in the world.

Mercedes is passionate about diversity and inclusion across investor and operating roles. She also sits on the Board of the The Posse Foundation. This organization identifies public high school students with extraordinary academic and leadership potential who may traditionally be overlooked through the college selection process.

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You’ll hear them talk about:

[02:44] - The effects of COVID have impacted the macro environment for Chief Product Officers (CPOs). Silicon Valley has the tendency to be reactive, but Mercedes says if you want to stay in business, you don't fire your CPO, who’s doing a great job. Like many industries, there is less funding to go around after COVID. In this environment, there is a real focus on doing more with less. Combining roles is more common, for example, if you're coming from an engineering background and now tackling a product, there’s no shortage of opportunities.
10:17] - Hiring a CPTO isn’t as simple as giving a CTO a go at product or vice versa. The role of CPTO marries the technical with the commercial acumen and understanding of the customer. Firstly, to be a great CPTO, you often come from a great product company. Secondly, you’re going to need to know the product landscape. Technical individuals typically struggle with the landscape or macro environments.
[19:42] - A Head of Product and Chief Product Officer have key differences. Mercedes clarifies that a CPO has an executive perspective, they think about the macro and the product's role in an ecosystem. Whereas the Head of Product starts with the product line within the company and therefore has a narrower perspective than a CPO. The CPO also requires a breadth of experience and understanding of marketing, sales revenue, and finance while working closely with CFOs. The Head of Product has a micro view compared to the CPO’s macro view.
[26:38] - Mercedes shares her insights for applying to these chief product roles, but in some cases experience with well known and high performing product companies is key. Pattern matching could be the key to a successful job switch. Mercedes advises pattern matching what it is you want to do with what you've done, so to get the attention of the hiring manager is to tailor your resume specifically to your experience in a product that matches the role.

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Previous guests include: Shruti Patel of US Bank, Steve Wilson of Contrast Security, Bethany Lyons of KAWA Analytics, Tanya Johnson Chief Product Officer at Auror, Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School, Stephanie Leue of Doodle, Jason Fried of 37signals, Hubert Palan of Productboard, Blake Samic of Stripe and Uber, Quincy Hunte of Amazon Web Services

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