What companies call their top product hire is a big clue to the company stage, the role’s scope, and the relationship with the CEO or founders. Here’s a decoder for what you’re getting into for different head of product titles.

Director of Product / Product Manager: Often the first product hire. Regardless of title, the role is an IC to execute the founder’s vision. They triage bugs, prioritize for engineers, and handle inbound feature requests. Product vision and strategy remains with the founder. This role often fails due to mismatched expectations.

Head of Product: Somewhere on the spectrum between a Director of Product and a VP of Product. This role might be exactly how I describe the Director role, might be really a VP role. Often is a blend of both. Sometimes used when the company is unsure of which title to give because they think they can’t get the right people using a Director title and aren’t ready to hand out VP titles.

VP of Product: Owns and scales the product. There’s one dominant prroduct that has product-market-fit, and perhaps a second smaller product, add on, or incubating product idea. The company vision is the same as the product vision, so the CEO is setting the broad vision overall. The VP of Product handles TAM expansion, processes, hiring, and detailed product strategy. The founder or CEO does oversight to keep the product aligned with their vision and runs any big transformational bets.

CPO: Focuses on scaling the product function and creating the conditions for product success. Not a lot of direct product work, the CPO isn’t building products. The CPO defines the broad portfolio strategy: which markets to enter and where to invest. They set up methods for measuring and improving the product organization and make sure it’s well aligned with the company goals.

TL;DR: The top product hire’s scope by title

• Director: Tactical work to execute founder’s vision
• Head Of: maybe Director, maybe VP
• VP: owns the product in a single-product company
• CPO: Doesn’t build product; functional exec creating conditions for product success

Seth Godin explains the difference between a brand and a logo by saying that if you heard Nike was going to open a hotel, you could instantly imagine exactly what that hotel would be like. That’s a brand. Nike has a distinct point of view that shapes how it presents itself to the world. This point of view is so strong and consistent that you can easily extend it to a hypothetical hotel.

This concept is very similar to how you should think about company culture.

Your culture is the framework that helps people understand how they should act, even in situations they haven’t encountered before. It must be rooted in a strong point of view. This is why you can’t simply adopt another company’s corporate values as your own. Those values are shaped by a unique perspective that doesn’t necessarily align with yours.

Your culture, then, is the combination of your organization’s point of view about how to behave and the actions your employees take to embody that perspective.

Designing processes can be tricky. Often, people create individual processes to solve specific problems. Running around plugging holes might feel effective in the moment, this piecemeal approach is counter productive.

When you focus only on individual problems, you risk creating a heavy and cumbersome process. Over time, these processes can feel authoritarian and arbitrary, leading to frustration and disengagement among your team. Instead, it’s crucial to adopt a systems thinking perspective.

Systems thinking helps solve complex problems by looking at how the components of a system interrelates. The systems thinker evaluates actions in context of all the other actions, activities that take place. To apply systems thinking to your policy creation instead of focusing on isolated incidents, consider the overall problems facing your business. Ask yourself:

• What outcomes are we trying to achieve?
• How can we create those outcomes effectively?
• What else will happen if we implement this policy?

By shifting your focus to the larger issues at hand, you can design processes that are not only efficient but also aligned with your business goals.

Evaluate the underlying causes of problems rather than just treating the symptoms. This way, you can create policies that genuinely add value and support your team, rather than constraining them.

Company culture isn’t what’s written in your handbook. It’s how your people live every day. Culture is the collective behavior and attitudes, the norms and standards. Policies and formal rules can help reflect and reinforce the culture, but they are not the culture itself.

This confusion is seen yesterday’s Wall Street Journal headline, “Netflix’s Extraordinary Parental Leave Was Part of Its Culture. That’s Over.” The author implies that this signals a culture change. But the parental leave policy isn’t their culture. Netflix has a culture of “freedom and responsibility.” Netflix may have thought that the policy wasn’t driving the culture they wanted. People were using the freedom part without taking responsibility. Removing their unlimited parental leave policy doesn’t change their culture. The culture at Netflix was already built around the idea of taking the time you need and being responsible about it.

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Everyone hates oppressive processes, but somehow we keep managing to create them.

Process should add value, not prevent it. Lightweight processes can drive a business forward. But when policies are layered on top of each other, it leads to a bureaucratic bulk that’s a drag on productivity.

No one intends to build a cumbersome bureaucracy. Policies are a response to corporate trauma. A Bad Thing happens. You create a system to prevent that problem. At some point, more Bad Things happen and your new system didn’t stop them. You react to the trauma with more policies.

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Add-on products won’t help you grow. They’re limited to your current customers and only some of them will buy an add-on. Your total market is constrained.

Creating and selling add-ons to existing customers is easy. It’s hard to envision how you’d sell a standalone product.

Add-on sales can boost revenue, but this isn’t sustainable growth. Some customers won’t buy this, so the add-on will grow more slowly than your main product. Even if the combination attracts some new customers, you’re still mostly selling to existing customers.

While add-ons don’t work as a growth lever, they can help you reach more customers by unbundling your product. They are a powerful pricing and packaging tactic. By splitting your product into a lower core price and paid extras, you can still capture the higher revenue from those that need the extra capabilities while still serving a broader market.

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