Role of the CPO

Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing some of the learnings I've had over the last 6 years at talabat. Starting here...

Most people misunderstand the CPO role. I’ve learned it’s not about coming up with the best ideas, pushing the right frameworks, or planning processes. It boils down to three responsibilities: bringing clarity, good resource allocation, and pace-setting.

1) Bring clarity

The default of most organizations of talabat's size is chaos (or organized-chaos at best). Your job is to bring clarity upwards, sideways, and downwards in the organization to help the deliver a consistent flow of value.

- How do company goals translate into product strategy?

- How does what you build actually go to market?

On one hand, you are a master connector and architect, making sure investments in Product & Engineering clearly contribute to growth.

On the other, you must step back and ask the harder question: Do these pieces actually add up to something greater than the sum of their parts? How do you enable teams to run autonomously once direction is set?

You can’t do this without strong opinions: on process, on product direction, and on commercial reality.

2) Allocate resources

Your job is to make sure that your teams are working on the right priorities for the business:

- Who do you staff, and where?

- How much do you put into cash cows vs. scale-ups vs. new bets?

Your job is to facilitate hard trade-off conversations: deciding what gets funded, what waits, and what stops.

3) Unlock speed

This one took me the longest to learn, but more than ever I believe this to be true. Your role as CPO is to pace-set.

To demystify this a bit more - it's not that people are lazy (quite the opposite I believe). When you get to some scale, there are many reasons for why things become slow.

Speed is unlocked through quality, clear prioritization, and scalable processes that keep momentum from slowing as the organization grows. If you can crack this as a CPO, the flow of value grows exponentially.