Are fractional executives the future of leadership in tech startups?
In this episode of Arguing Agile, Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel unpack the growing trend of fractional CXOs. We explore the benefits and trade-offs of hiring part-time executives, including:
- Access to high-level expertise and cross-industry experience
- Considerations for small and medium-sized businesses
- Challenges in building trust and managing multiple teams
- Red flags to watch out for when hiring fractional CXOs
- The importance of domain knowledge and product lifecycle understanding
- Balancing executive skills with hands-on product management experience
Watch or listen to learn how to identify red flags and make informed decisions when considering fractional leadership roles.
#FractionalCXO #StartupLeadership #ProductManagement #AgileLeadership #TechIndustryTrends #OrganizationalStrategy #ProductInnovation #TechConsulting #StartupAdvice #ArguingAgile
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AA197 - The Rise of Fractional CXOs: Pros, Cons, and Red Flags
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welcome to the Arguing Agile Podcast, where Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel and Product Manager Brian Orlando argue about product management, leadership, and business agility, so you don't have to. Welcome back . Om, you know what I want to talk about today? Part time CPOs and CTOs. Part time. Okay. We don't say that anymore. We don't say that. Okay. Well, I want to talk about temp, CTOs and CPOs. Oh my God. That, that harkens back to the eighties temp agencies, temp people. Okay. I want to talk about, I want to talk about consultant CPOs and CTOs. Oh, right. Right. That's still So yesteryear, we want to talk about fractional people that is here in today. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Fractional CXOs is fractional any role really, but we'll talk about the, the senior roles because they, they are more challenging as not full time. So the, why we're talking about this today is like, well, I listened to an HBR Podcast about this topic, not too long ago a couple of articles came to our attention that we saw about and a couple of posts on various social media, some of which might've been good. I won't say the names of them. And we just been noticing the uptick in people with this job title. In fact, one of the podcasts I listened to on this had the claim to be in it. That pre pandemic, I don't think the article is exactly correct. Pre pandemic, there were 2, 000 ish people with fractional whatever the title was in their bio on LinkedIn, and then post pandemic, there were 110, 000, so like a major explosion over a two year period, and, that's the trend that we're kind of pointing out in this podcast. They kind of got our attention of like, ooh, is this really a trend? why is this not called Part time or yeah, that's my first question. You can already tell what side of this discussion I'm on so there's been an excellent rebranding of part time into No, we're fractional now fractional I think it's just one of those things that happens over time is you do get the evolution of Terms and terminology, right? So now in modern day, powerlines, what used to be part time is now known as fractional. The other thing is that part time, has somewhat of a, in my mind, it's slightly negative connotation. Oh, I thought you were going to say classist because I thought it was, I thought it's too early for surprise. It's Taylorism on the podcast, but listen, Taylor was part time employee. he was a consultant, but that's the term made up for being part time. He was a hired gun who didn't work a full time job. So, but that doesn't sound as good as he was a management consultant. He was a managing consultant, self titled a lot of fractional people are also, I find. Self titled. I am sure we're going to get some lashings for that, but that's okay. Lashings are welcome. Maybe it's the season. So please let us know. Let's listen. You're everybody already feels where Brian is at. We're like, brian's not going to be cynical on this podcast. Brian's going to be positive. I want to start off with, the, all of the strong points for fractional role that either is in the CTO role or CPO role or even product management, right? So someone in those, like one of those strategic direction roles that may not be that may not be a, a, a core. Key founder role in an organization. I wanna start off with the strong supporting claims on the podcast. And I wanna walk through those to give ourselves a nice fair level shot. Before Before I start Before I maraud into this room and start putting my feet up on the couch. That's the side of the arguing agile that I'm going to take, probably, it sounds like, on the other side of the fence. But that's good. Okay, alright. Well, maybe we both can explore. Alright, we can do that. The first point that we want to talk about is Listen, the Brian, I knew like part-time consultant, whatever whatever man get over it. It helps small companies and maybe medium-ish companies. That's what SMB, that's what the M in SMB means. Medium-ish. Medium-ish. Medium. Ishish. Small. Medium-ish. Yes. Medium-ish. Yes. Sean Connery is on the podcast today. Yes, medium ish. I'm Egyptian, you peacock. it enables small to like The fractional aspect of it the part time aspect of it. That's right. I said part time it enables small companies to access high level strategic experts, like the C level expertise, people with previous C level experience that otherwise, because they're a small company and maybe the founders, maybe this is their first company. Maybe they're like the Brian Chesky founders are like 23 or whatever. They get someone in there who has experience with the stress and the pressure and train big swings and stuff like that. that'd be the big advantage and specifically in the product realm, the big advantage here is. They get someone Who knows how to try out and test and feel out product strategies Without actually hiring somebody and giving them 40 percent of the company or 30 percent of the company or whatever. if you're a small company just launch it. You're maybe just an entrepreneurial organization, right? You haven't got those rounds of funding yet in that scenario? Absolutely. It's a great way, to tap into the talent you really need. But what I found is that, a lot of companies don't rise above that. So many companies just falter and die. But other companies then attract seed corn funding, et cetera, VC rounds, they quickly go away from. Fractional roles, and they have, especially with this level of seniority in the company, they will have people that bring in with brand recognition, with names. So then, in that case, they typically are not CXOs that are, Fractional, but there's that period when you launch the company and you're trying to get it off the ground, reach escape velocity, perfect to get fractional people in because you can afford them, you can't afford to bring somebody in with a mega salary, like a real CPO CXO , would command, right? So that doesn't make sense to me. Yeah. Aside from the idea of like, if you get a even if you don't get a, like let's say you're a fractional just product manager or head of product or whatever. you don't even have the chief title or the equity or whatever. CPO doesn't matter. you're just a hired gun. Part-time. working on contract product manager. Right. even you come in with experience over and above the company founders or whatever They're, they find you as a product manager who has experience, I think of like real niche. Is it niche or niche? Niche. Real niche experience. That's right. Thanks the French. Thanks The French. Real niche experience. In, in industries. So like, oh,, I wanna break into I'm going to go hire somebody , like Stormy, for example, who's been on pre like she has technology experience. She has products experience and she used to be a registered nurse. Why? I don't know. He's still a registered nurse. And like, I want to hire somebody like that. Because none of the founders of the company have that experience. So we're gonna hire somebody to help us figure out our strategies. We have this technology or this product or whatever that seems to fit in this market or we're trying to explore this market or break into this market, we need to go hire somebody. I used to be at a logistics firm and what they would do is they would hire an executive from a trucking company that was very large, That they wanted to sell the products to, and they would hire that executive and put them on staff as like the chief, well, actually it would be a VP role. they would never hire executives like this, but they would be like, you are the VP of strategic something or other VP of strategic initiatives or VP of actually I, they did do this at the C level, the chief revenue officer. They did this one time. But really all it is is like. You were the chief or you were a very high up executive in Brian and Om's trucking company. So we're hiring you congratulations Ohm, you were the one of the founders of Brian and Om's trucking company. And now Brian's Souless tech company is now hiring you because maybe we can sell Brian and Om's trucking company our widget solution for widgets or whatever. So we'll hire you and we'll keep you on staff for like 12, 18 months. And if the sale goes through. Then whatever. I mean, we paid you 150, 000, 175, 000, hold you on the payroll for a year, and if that money goes away, eh, whatever. It was a good bet. Yeah, essentially, you're buying the depth of domain knowledge here, right? That's what you're doing. Maybe you're a foot in a market. Yeah, that's a very good strategy because guess what? People that are founding the company don't have that. So you're going in with your eyes closed as opposed to bringing somebody in who can hold your hand through these choppy waters. So I think that's a very legit use case of why you want somebody like that at that stage. Phase of your company transformation. I think you're right. And, and like we could go, we talked about, we talked about trucking, we talked about logistics, talk about healthcare, what we didn't talk about is government, because if you're working on like secured systems or whatever and you don't have any experience in that how are you going to break into that? You need to go get somebody who's been through that process before with a technology company implementing and selling to the government and making systems secured. Because if you don't have somebody from inside that ecosystem, I mean, I don't know how you would ever break into it. You don't have to as long as you're friends with the person who's nominating you. No, we're not going there. We're not going there. I mean like, those people are, More expensive. I would think they are for sure. So one of the things I want to say here is this right support the people that you're bringing in that have the domain experience. They already have to be successful in their own right, right for you to tap them. If they're successful, they are, they are Taking the bet as well, right? They see something, they like it. Why would they otherwise come on to your organization, not in a full time capacity even, right? They're hedging their bet, perhaps, because they're not sure. But they have that domain, they have the depth. So you're bringing them in. The other thing it does is, for your potential customers, these might be your first customers, right? It lends credibility. That so and so has joined Fred Flintstone is joining our board, right? Makes a difference because you know, He's got the car that he steps in and runs with at least he knows about it His wheels are round and we don't know what shape it should be. It makes sense, right? So from that perspective in those kinds of organizations It's perfectly logical, right? It's for having these fractional roles. I mean, it makes so that this is probably, honestly, it's like a one line thing, a note that we wrote down. But honestly, it's ending up making the most sense out of everything we talked about. Other than like, if you're hiring someone and they're gonna do product work, they probably need Some experience about like creating and rolling out strategy. Honestly, like this might be the most important thing , is cross industry experience. I was at a company one time that two out of the three of the founders of the company were experts in. The hospitality industry, restaurants, specifically restaurants. And then the other founder was an expert in service, like service tech, like people that will come into restaurants and fix things like fix your refrigerator, fix your ovens, you know what I mean? Like, so one side of the company was service. for restaurants. The other side was restaurant management actually running a profitable restaurant. And that company always wanted to expand into hotels because if you think about a hotel, Most hotels have some sort of restaurant inside the hotel. And if they don't have a restaurant, they have like a Starbucks or they have a cafe or they have they put up breakfast in the morning. They have something. Yeah, they have those assets. It might be on a lower scale than a restaurant, but they have those assets. So that the company always had in the back of their mind this strategic bet if we could just get the right person that understands the hotel industry. All of our stuff would be applicable and they never quite made that jump because they never found the right Person who both understood them and their capabilities and understood the other domain So i'm i'm looking at this one and i'm like, ah this like note that we just made to ourselves. Yeah, a couple of words Yeah Extremely valuable. It could I completely i've come completely around it could be Extremely valuable. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I certainly agree with that. I think there are probably, we should have probably even come up with examples like that that people can relate to, but everybody is thinking about this can probably come up with their own example. I just gave you two. So there's a real life. I mean, maybe in this case, you're a small you're a small hospitality company, right? Who really doesn't have heavy presence in terms of F& B, but you want to break into that, because that's additional revenue streams. But yeah, so it just depends on your growth strategy. If the shoe fits, I mean, it also assumes you have a strategy. So you can bring people in for that too, I guess. You mentioned the role or a title earlier with chief revenue officer. So there are others that I've seen like, and today, chief experience officer and in the HR world, chief people officer. These aren't just HR people that are doing your payroll. In fact, those functions. Could be outsourced, but these are people that are growing your talent in house and so forth. So yeah, there's a bunch of those newer roles. And they have slightly different missions. The L& D and stuff might fall under people, whereas HR doesn't care about L& D. I mean, they totally care. I feel I'm getting sassier by the minute. All right, let's move on. So you like specifically for like the CTO, if you don't have a technical founder, especially like, I mean, first of all, what are you doing with your life? But you like, it's, you're getting somebody in. Who understands technical leadership, like the technical day to day and technical leadership are two different things. Absolutely that's a whole different podcast but also like process transformation, And also our previous podcast on the product life cycle It is called arguing agile. 193 product life cycle phases from MVP to sunset, a guide for product managers., it's very wordy, but it's worth it. It's good though. I mean like look at the description. a description is like pretty bare bones. So we had a podcast arguing as a 193 product lifecycle phases. That was the, the podcast where we talked about the different phases that your products are in and then the transitions, when you move from like growth phase to maturity and et cetera, et cetera, MVP to growth phase Having leadership fractional or otherwise, part time or otherwise, I'm not letting it go. This whole podcast super critical that they understand that like, Oh, we're in MVP phase right now listen, we don't need a bunch of API and front end automated testing that fires with every release and I don't need that. Like I'm in MVP phase, not everything needs a test. In MVP phase and people will look at me and be like brian Like have you been drinking like get out of my office? I'll be like no I haven't like we're in MVP phase I will throw away Everything that we're doing If the customers don't use it when we introduce it to the market I mean the most critical thing you want is feedback early, right? Yes I'm doing all this for feedback. I'm doing all this in the hopes that you will know when we have implemented a feature that people really need And because it will be night and day from like the normal like, you know Every day tick up one little thing at a time over time. Yeah. Yeah, it'll just be a very vertical climb in usage and stuff like that And I need a leader that understands that and is like you know Look 90 percent of the features we roll out They're gonna miss the target and that's okay because we're pre market fit, right? I can't have a leader that does not understand these phases and then does not have self awareness for the organization to say We are in the growth phase like growth and bringing new business in is the most important thing and it's I don't care about anything else. I've got the teams, they're up at all hours of the night watching logs, watching my product managers are working 50, 60 hours, like getting email on their phone. As soon as something comes in, like everyone's super stressed. We're in the growth phase and gearing everything towards understanding. We're in the growth phase with the idea that we're not going to be here forever.. So, like they're getting things ready for the future. There's a difference between that and just grinding your people all day long in this, what I just described could be a culture where you're just grinding people down to the nubs. The leader that understands we're in a phase right now, it's not going to last forever. And then optimizes for that phase. So having a fundamental knowledge of the product life cycle is a must of where you are. And you may not have that within your company and looking at the bigger picture which is perfect then for getting somebody in who does have that, Even if you say, okay, they're not here full time. They're here as advisors. There's a lot of ground here. They could be just simply consulting for a fee, or they could have a stake in the company., it doesn't matter how they're compensated. But fractional role is critical. Important here because you can't afford The whole rather than the fractional you can't afford to get someone full time who's done this So i'm gonna ask the first question I don't want to challenge right now because the challenge will be later in the podcast. Is it possible to get somebody? Is the median person like not like I know that there are very experienced people with very good skill at this that they act as a Calming influence a guy like that. They're just going to, they're from the passenger seat. They're just going to reach over occasionally. Like they're in the passenger seat, listening to their music and chilling out on the car ride. And occasionally they're just going to reach over and grab the wheel of the car and kind of guide it backwards should be and keep us off from crashing. just like everyone in the car is freaking out that we're drifting lanes, but this person just like, it's very calm and doing it part time. Oh, sorry. Fractionally is that possible? Absolutely. All right. No, absolutely possible because well, first of all, look at the alternative. If it weren't possible, how do you find somebody like that? Do you just let everybody in your car panic and the driver frantically go back and forth? Or do you say, let's, well that's a quick way down. Yes, that's what most people do, yeah. Then stop for just a second for me to get off this car. look, it is possible. It is possible. Again, we should have probably in hindsight got some examples like this. Maybe we'll follow up Later on with the second part as an example. We'll see how we feel so if you're listening to this, you probably could come up with your own examples like that let us know of course that we'd be sharing with everybody else too So It's possible. First of all, if it weren't possible, you wouldn't have so many companies that Start bare bones with a few people that have deep knowledge of certain aspects of the domain or the business or technology still be successful, quote unquote, market wise, right? Bring somebody in part time, I'll say that, or fractional. for the right amount of time for them to guide you through all this. And then maybe what will happen is they'll either be gone or they'll stay and they'll become your chief ex officer that will continue to steer the ship. Right. Yeah. when I was in the publishing domain we were creating software for advertising for print publications, so newspapers, magazines, and so forth. And pretty much everybody in the company was technical, including the founders. But they didn't have any, none of them had ever worked in publishing before. We had some early customers where some people naturally gravitate toward technology. Actually hired on a fractional basis. Somebody who sat in the call center taking ads for newspapers back in the day. And that's because, well, they were actually client facing. So they knew the pain points of what needs to happen and what they were going through. And we learned a whole bunch. Like one of the things that I said. I distinctly will never forget is how you have your prompts. They have prompts that they can read out to the customers how those prompts need to be tailored for sensitivity. It's a no brainer when you think about it, but nobody did at the time. And the prompts were the same. They were gained towards increasing the content and increasing the duration or frequency of your ad. But that doesn't fit everywhere for example, if you're selling a car. I'm going to ask you all that. Likewise with anything that you're selling. But what if you're advertising a Death or funeral, right? That's not right for you for me to ask you questions, right? To increase the content or even the frequency that makes no sense. So we learned a lot from somebody who had the domain knowledge who said, wait, what are you doing? So, I mean, that's just a little anecdote about how it can help you stay between the guardrails or even define the guardrails to begin with. Alright, we have one or two more things on this list. So the more on the technical side of it, it helps the startup establish robust technical architecture and development processes. We talked about that. In terms of some architectural practice, like getting your stuff future proofed, right? But also like Development practices meaning like getting your deliveries and make sure that small small releases frequently that kind of stuff you also could Talk about how your technical teams are kind of formed and reformed and split and that kind of stuff. Like strong technical leadership should be aware of this kind of stuff and should be pushing you to this kind of stuff. and also keeping you on top of any trends in technology. For example, I'm not saying AI is hype and a trend, but , what are we doing with AI? Because if we don't jump ahead of it, our investors or the market or our competitors are probably going to jump ahead of us. Any technological trends that could impact making sure that we're at least parallel or have a plan or ahead of it'd be better to be at them, but these are the main people whose responsibility is whose accountability. Right. To the leadership in the organization, this is their accountability. Exactly. Charting the path forward. I mean, for example, things like, let's adopt a microservices architecture. Because, right, those kinds of things before AI came into the picture. Well, everything's AI now, so the other main one is, they should be accelerating. Well, they should be accelerating or really creating. if you haven't created this culture yet, your product innovation. So they should be pushing the teams to learn that innovation. They really should be trying to strengthen that muscle across all your teams. So like, innovation shouldn't be a thing that's like done at the top and then pushed down and over like sales figures out what the next big thing is and pushes it down to your team or, or vice versa. That shouldn't be all grassroots. Like it should be the entire organization should somehow get involved in product innovation and then the best ideas. Should end up in your products validated by customers and up in your pushed forward by your strategy. Yeah. There's a certain expertise to do that organizationally. And Oh boy. Like even like, I'm already talking about like fractional people doing a part time. It's, it's hard enough to do full time. It is. So this is where we talk about things like product discovery, right? Yeah, it is. It's very hard to do this full time. Those of you doing it know this. So part time these people are maestros. I mean, they've done this for years, right? They come in and they but when we say by the way when we say Fractional it doesn't mean five ten hours a week necessarily. Maybe in some cases it does in most cases It's probably most of the week instead of 40 they could be working 30 hours. That's still fractional, right? So don't get you know misled by the term part time or fractional these people are still Pretty well invested in what they're doing. It's just that this is not the only thing they're working on, possibly. I skipped over a lot of that of well, what if this person is divided between other organizations? I left the low hanging fruit off the podcast well, if they're working, how many teams can they work across I mean, I guess we'll get into that here in a second of the low hanging fruit. They're not great arguing points, but they, I mean, they're things that would be asked, you know like the thing here is you've got somebody experience who knows about your Marty Cagan for You know, illity categories that the technical feasibility, desirability, usability, business viability they are tracking them across your strategies and your products. They're making sure the teams are knocking them down or maybe they're knocking them. I don't know. I don't think that you could dedicate enough time to knock them down yourself. I think you kind of have to delegate that and then make sure the teams are broadcasting that. And like at a certain level, You don't have enough time to really do it. You can delegate it. I hope it gets done. Then skim across top to be like, Oh, I don't see it being done this week. Try harder next week. So we'll get into that in a second. this is the crest of the podcast. We're about halfway through where we start cresting to go into the why this might not work section of the podcast. But those are like the accelerating product innovation. With real strategic guidance because you've done it before that's a huge skill. Yeah Like that's other than like breaking in other industries. That is the main talent that you're bringing here as a part timer Fractional fractional. No, that's absolutely correct Because you have credibility in the person that's coming in they've done it and they you know, they can do it for you, right? That's why you're bringing them in. So Makes sense to me. Well, thanks for sticking around for the positives of this podcast. I feel we've dedicated more than enough time. And now I present to you the counterpoint. So the counterpoint comes in a several part diatribe, I guess I'm monologuing. I haven't done this in a while. I haven't monologued in a while. if you're coming in and you're a part timer, the organizational level experience of like, forget tribal knowledge. Remember when we used to say tribal knowledge back in the day? Okay. Meaning like, Oh, that file is here and it's out on the network. Go figure out where it is. And Oh, either the writeup of that customer is somewhere floating around in the ether, like that kind of stuff, tracking stuff down. I guess when you're brought in as an executive level, you have some sort of gravitas to be like, no, you go find it for me. Some of that doesn't hold up when you're in a small company. So you will be fighting against the basic, the deep organizational Engagement that you would have normally if you were a full time employee. and in addition to that when you're on multiple teams, there's this cognitive load of overhead of context switching when you're on multiple teams, okay? So when you're part of the leadership team, every C level executive is a member of the leadership team first, the C suite first. So they have a horizontal C suite and they have a vertical, their team, and their team is just one silo and all the rest of the silos in the organization. So you're already on two teams trying to make sense of what you were supposed to be doing. And potentially you might be working with two companies as a, part time chief product officer at the same time. You potentially are on four teams , first of all, out of the gate, you're failing. Four teams in two different orgs is a huge challenge, right? Cause that's what we're talking about. If you're right, maybe. So if you're on four teams, if you're fractional, you're, you're at least on two orgs, maybe more, but two, if you're on two orgs on two teams. That's still a challenge, right? If you're on more than one team, let's say on org a you're on two teams or b You're on one team. That's three teams, but in different orgs, come on I mean you might say like you might say oh om It's not that bad because like the I mean the c level team the founder team is only So like, okay, like it's, it's three people. We talk in the morning, 20, 30 minutes in the morning, every morning, we just get together before like seven 30 I was once at a company where I was their first product manager and I would call the CEO first thing in the morning. At 6 30 a. m his time and i'd have a quick 20 30 minutes stand up Usually it was like 10 minutes. Sometimes it went on as long as 20 25 minutes Just these are the strategies we're employing today These are the things that we're going to try. These are the customers we're going to talk to quick sync You know what I mean? Because they didn't know product. That's before any other employees got into the office because We realized we're part of this other team, which is the executives. The executives need to sync before any normal employees, but like,, I don't know if that's a great story because basically what I'm, what I'm repping now is what you, if you go read inspired and Marty Cagan says, I don't know any successful product managers that work less than 60 hours, that is propagating that. You know what I mean? That I don't, I don't know if that's great. It's it's not great. So you're really talking about being a fractional person working 60 hours, at least 40, your fractional, each fraction, you're working 40 hours at that company and 40 hours at the other company, fractional, exactly. How does that work? Right, if you're on two different orgs, though, You have to have your head around product cycles in two different orgs, potentially two different industries.. I don't know how it's humanly possible to do that in, in spending a few hours a week on each. I completely get it if you're willing to say like, hey, when I'm working with your company, I will clear the plate. No more, no more, you know what I mean? No, no other clients, right? When I work with you. I'm solo with you. I've got no cognitive load I'm dedicated to you, your customers, your problems, your teams Make, that makes total sense then and I will tell you that is the only model that makes total sense to me. That model is Where I've seen CFOs or C FOs, directors, finance, whatever you use, right? Because they work with one company at a time during the month. So while they're working with that company, they're working only with that company. And then they switch over to another company. When you are the product manager CTO you are the accountable person for technology. Oh, we're not doing anything AI related. They need to come to the CTO and be like, why are we not doing anything AI related? That's the single point you're not going to the individual product managers or individual development teams. You need to go to the CTO as the head of the team. Like the future of technology, the person with their finger on the pulse of future technology to say. Why are we not engaging in any AI strategies at all strategic decisions that they're making it is they have to defend that you know, I understand this is probably my weakest point that I'm gonna push today, which is Because you're a part timer you cannot fully be accountable for every customer every technology every Discussion decision because there is just not enough time in the day for a full time product manager to explore all the options. And then you're going to cut that in half, potentially. I don't know what the it might be 10%, whatever. You might just be in an advisor role. the weak parts of what I'm saying is, you might say, you as the CEO, might not be accountable because you're just an advisor role and I'm going to hold the individual product managers Accountable. So like you're accountable through their accountability falling through so I mean, yeah, it's a tricky space I mean look who's accountable You know on a commercial airline, right? If you have a part time captain, they're not always flying the plane, right? They're accountable for that flight, right? So the pilots themselves that are actually, they have hands on time. These are the people that are responsible. So that responsibility is delegated to them. But if you have, The captain who is part time what happens during the time when they're not there. You still have to have that same accountability in those that are there, which would be the pilots flying the plane. so just to kind of use that as an example, you have to have people within your company who are owning this in the case where you have part time CXOs. That is a tough one. the way that you just presented that makes it very tough for me because I, even in my mind, I felt myself saying like, when the pilot is actually flying the plane, we have to give him full accountability and everything. Right. The point where he actually starts flying the plane, it doesn't matter if he's permanent, or part time, or fractional, or consultant, or whatever, you know? we have to now give that person full accountability, and trust, and everything comes along with it. Correct. and where I was kind of needling was like, I don't give this person the full time, like the person has not earned the full trust of the organization, which is my other point here that I wrote down independently, the challenges in building strong, integrated relationships, integrated leadership, trust from a person who's not there full time when the rest of the leadership is, , the crew of founders is there full time. Even if I'm theoretically talking about it being in an organization where I was joining the executive team as a product manager, although I didn't have the title chief product officer, I was the only product person in the organization, so I joined all the leadership team. Meetings as the product rep. And a lot of that stuff was like me grabbing what they would say in the future, the organization type of stuff and grabbing it and running and doing the best I can with it. You know, rather than like, because I was a consultant in that organization, rather than setting a strategic direction of like, Oh, I think we should push into this market or whatever, rather than that, it was more of like interpreting what they were saying and trying to set up strategies to set them up to success. I think people that are in that role, these fractional roles, especially, well, I'm talking about people that have been around the block, right? People that know what they're doing. They've built up over time, the expertise to be good at. Building bridges, navigating political waters, right? Making sure that they can operate that way. So if you get novices, what I call self titled, people that want to be in a fractional role, I would say steer clear of that because they don't have a track record of having done this anywhere. I'm guessing right? Because they don't have a track record. So how do you fully entrust somebody who doesn't have that as opposed to somebody who's done it before in multiple organizations, perhaps in multiple domains, that person is going to have a higher likelihood of success because they have the core skill set to build bridges and and to Walk the political tight ropes. we've been going for a while, so I want to hit the lightning round. As they say on other podcasts, it's time for the lightning round. Om, so you just he, it's, it's like PeeWee's Playhouse . If, if peewee make his way to our podcast every time we, every time we every time you say something that, that gets me really, really triggered we go into the lightning round and you said. Hey, some of these people like they never worked in this role before they like, they're kind of over their head. They're, they're pitching themselves as management consultants. I can do product, products, just basically sales, right? It's basically coming up with strategies. so the, the specifically where I see it. In my career field is I see a lot of people branding themselves, the people coming out of professional consulting, people coming out of certain training backgrounds you know, agile backgrounds, stuff like that, and calling themselves. Expert in product management, CPO, right? Yeah. Never punched a day in their life, punch a time card for product manager day in their life. So they're coming in to these roles, or people coming in and be like, I'm a product manager. Technology's basically the same as product, right? I can be a chief product and technology officer. I'm not gonna call people out to say they're right or wrong. I'm just saying, look at our recent podcast and make your own decisions and do your own stunts. There are a lot of people out there providing generic, non contextual, non industry specific advice and calling themselves chief, whatever officer dispensing Zen wisdom in the form of. fortune cookie it's just very general advice. Everyone has an eight ball. So I would say in that, yes, first of all, it's way too prevalent unfortunately, but not just look at what they've done in terms of like, where have they worked before? Let's see if they have any customers that you can talk to that were impacted by their decisions, right? Ultimately, that's one way to find out. Yeah, like how good were they because if you cannot verify that You are basically throwing a dart from 30 000 feet and hopefully you'll land in the same zip code. Yeah. Right. So yeah, you're right. This is so prevalent though. Everybody's calling themselves a there was a lot of certified CXO. That was my trepidation with this whole topic. It's like, how can you tell the difference between the snake oil salesman and like the real people that understand how to craft. You know, strategies and roadmaps from the strategies and that kind of stuff. I have a, I have a list of, of positives and negatives here that I wanted to jump through just in this category of like, how do you know if this person is legit or not? Or if they're just like a random you know it's like MBB consultant, a random consultant who's just like relabeled themselves or they have this like carnegie mellon degree or whatever and they're like, oh, yeah I can do whatever I can juggle and be an acrobat and ceo and cpo and whatever because I have this degree like I don't know man like Is that really the way it works? Like, so the arguments that will be used here is, listen, I have transferable leadership skills. Okay. The leadership skills from serving on previous C level boards or directorships or whatever is transferable in any, any job, any job needs. Even you said early in the podcast is like there's a certain political finesse in this high level organizational role that you need and you know, like I have these skills, the being able to work across departments, these cross functional skills, cross department skills, that is a talent, this cross coordination skills is a talent, the strategic, Strategic thinking, systemic system thinking is a skill. I agree. All those completely agree. But at some point when you're making the claim, like my executive function skills, my executive level experience can compensate for any lack of traditional training, product management training, CTO training. When you say that, . It is a stretch for me. it like when it comes to traditional product management, especially like, well, the Marty Cagan four categories, for example, well, how do you actually go about knocking down each of the four ilities in the Marty Cagan categories? Okay. Well, when you're saying, well, I have executive experience, so I can do anything. I mean, that comes across to me as a certain, like a, there's a certain classist connotation to me saying that, like. Shut up, Brian. That's the product manager. It's like, it's not that complicated. I can do it. I got this Carnegie Mellon degree. That's how it sounds to me. Right. You were in the cape, right? So if you're in this situation where you're looking at somebody who is like that, again, you gotta figure out so have they done this before and in different industries. I mean, don't just take that as face value because a lot of people will sell themselves. Right. And upsell themselves. It's hard to find somebody that's really, really good who wants to just simply scale back and maybe they just want to scale back their hours or something, right? But they have the gravita to pull this off because they've done it. You can clearly see that they're already a known name, maybe in your industry, but maybe not elsewhere. But if they've done that, then There is a little bit more credibility there, right? Yeah. Well, if you have one of these folks in your organization, and you're like, Brian, I have a fractional CPO, I have a fractional CTO, I have a fractional product manager I'm not sure if they're just solid on paper, Or if they have chops you know obviously we said like, well, you should talk to some of the people that they've worked with before that, that, that you should do. and more than one you should talk to at least three. Right people at least before yeah and you know Don't just read on linkedin actually talk to people because you want to get at the heart of like what these folks did Look at their background as well. Like I like to look at people's backgrounds I like to know that people like they they came straight out of college into like a chief Product role like that. That is a red flag for me. I'm like, Ooh, Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Mommy and daddy get you jobs. Yeah, absolutely. That happens. There's some red flags here because as a product manager if you don't have an understanding of product management, you come into one of these like, or I guess CTO as well. You come into one of these roles and you're the head of the organization. And you don't understand about the product life cycle. I mean, you don't understand the nuances of the MVP phase versus the growth phase versus the maturity phase. you don't understand what teams normally do in those phases, you can cause a lot of damage, like not only driving people out of the organization, but. You know, really messing up your ability to just purely deliver. You could actually cost you customers too., especially if you're one of these folks that like goes to you know, you came from the Kellogg school, you're learned about like, Hey, you do all your requirements and then you do all your software testing. You just learned poorly. The misalignment with the way modern product management, product development, the way teams work together not having a team is silos that the whole thing we talked about on the one 92 podcast about product management is dead of like, Oh, like people in Silicon Valley, they think of the Venn diagram as like these things. No, no, no. The Venn diagram is like, it's one circle. They're all just overlapping. Right. They should all be on the same team. if you're not aligned with the way that modern, I mean, like. Since the Agile Manifesto modern 20 plus 20 plus years, I mean, get with it, right? Over emphasis on the wrong metrics, huge, you know what I mean? People are like, oh, we just need more velocity out of this team. That's the problem, you know real rookie type of stuff. with folks in this, but there's some real damaging stuff in here, meaning you don't quite understand what technical debt really is and how to manage it. If you mess that up, when the company's in growth phase, when the product gets to the maturity phase. You will never recover., you'll be like the Tiger King. You'll never financially recover from that.'cause it balloons up and up. Never. Yes. You'll never recover from it. You'll never get out from under it. And then my favorite is the potential for, especially when you have sales people in the chief product role, the potential to basically create product strategies and push initiatives that are completely disconnected from technical feasibility. You're pushing your team to do things and you're like, well, the technology doesn't really hit. So we're going to make a workaround and do this. And this is a one off thing. And this other thing will be a one off thing. And suddenly. We have a bunch of custom products or custom implementations of our product. And once again, you're back in the land of technical debt and you will never recover from it. And you bring in the new people and the new people are talking crazy, like rewrites from the ground up and stuff., in some cases, you could try and kind of nip that in the bud by leveraging your architects and people like that to make sure that at least the runway is heading in one direction. But this is kind of before that. I mean, maybe, but you can't put guardrails on executives. You can't. And that that's a difficult thing, right? You cannot. Absolutely. You get sometimes you get the arrogance. Of people that have done it before. And they say, Hey, I'm the I'm the prima donna, right. I'm going to come in here and revamp everything. You do have that too, but yeah, there's again, examples of each of these successful and not so successful examples, I'm sure. I feel we've beat this up enough. I just wanted to bring up and put a pin and a little, like a little flag on the side of. Like, what if you get these people that make their money off of they understand organizational politics and they're real easy to talk to and establishing relationships and stuff like that, but now, in the Marty Cagan transformed podcast that we did with Ed, right? So in the transform podcast that we did with Ed, when we talked about the book transformed, one of the things Marty Cagan says in the book is as a product leader, like he coins that term and Silicon Valley and everyone is real quick to snap that term. We love the term product leader. But he's, but one of the things that he said, like the part of the book that they skipped while adding that to their role on LinkedIn was as a product leader, you have to be able to coach your product managers in product management. So when they ask you, Oh, how do I do discovery practices? Oh, how do I figure out a lean business canvas? How do I figure out what customers to survey and what to write on the survey and how to write surveys that actually are meaningful. They're going to ask you those questions and what are you going to say? Like you've never worked as a product manager. You're going to make stuff up. That's really what's going to happen because you were brought in as an expert. So you're not going to say, I don't know that. You're never going to say that you're going to make. Make something up. And, and unfortunately your product managers will go with that because they're following you. They follow you lead. They don't know either. I mean, they're new. So you're gonna be the first sheep to leap off the cliff Well or not, you'll just go that way. Well, that sounds exciting. That sounds exciting! We talked about the things to watch out for with , these fractional folks. Do they have the skill? to do what you're doing. Do they have the ability do they have the time The nice thing about them being fractional, AKA part time AKA temp is if it's just not working out. It's not working out let's our company, yeah, let's just part. Like, listen, you seem to have too many contracts going on. That's probably another advantage that we didn't point out, which it's a little cynical of an advantage, but it is an advantage to say like they are not a part-time employee. You agree to part ways when it doesn't seem to work out. Yeah, I wonder if there's a role here for smart contracts to play at some point in the future, right? You have to get over the trust element of it first, right? Right. We probably could have expanded more on this podcast to talk about like well How do you get these jobs in the first place? you know people or you're like maybe you're just a big firm or maybe you know There are ways to get in or maybe you just like are good at saying like, Hey pitching yourself or whatever. But that's not really the point of the podcast is like how to position and pitch yourself as this. But you know, Hey, if you're willing to cold call people and pitch yourself and, throw out flyers and emails and networking, it's networking. Tell us it is just do more networking, more networking to get your name out there and be like, Hey, I know how to do this. I can dedicate a day a week, two days a week whatever to your company. And Monday, Tuesday will be your consulting days and I'll come into your corporate office that makes total sense. There's a business for it, but it's not. If you're trying to do it fractionally and work from any part of the country or whatever, it's getting to be a hard sale. You're probably not going to, a real company isn't likely to hire you off of Fiverr or something like that. Yeah. Because anybody could say anything there. But if you have the chops you've been around and you can stand behind those, Then you might get a chance, to do this definitely lead with your experience first and offer the chance to talk to your customers. You're like obviously you're not connecting strategy to the individual roadmap items In order to establish and push forward those roadmaps and then validate After the roadmaps are delivered and then bring those learnings from the validation all the way back to the strategy level very few permanent product people are doing that because honestly, there's just not enough time Even those people are spread thin. If you're fractional, if you're part timer, contract consultant, and you have a limited amount of time. You really need to be concentrating your time on the most valuable things to the org. And I think again, just my opinion, I think the most valuable things to the org are the things that most orgs get wrong right off the bat, which is the strategies they're engaging in are wrong. And the validation that comes at the end of the roadmap, implementing through the development teams never gets back to change the strategies. I would try to fix that first. That's what, that would be my recommendation to anyone out there that's trying to like differentiate yourself as a consultant. Oh, sorry. Fractional person. That's, that would be my suggestion. I think the phrase gig worker came up recently. Gig worker. Yeah, that's a good one too. So I agree with , that recommendation. I mean, try and shorten that cycle as much as possible., that way you can go in and lead with data. I think it's applicable. Whether you're fractional or not, you could part down into how can I make the most impact as quickly as possible? I'm a permanent product manager. Well, you can still use everything we talked about. Sure. That's true. That's true. So this podcast hopefully was of some value to you brought to you by two fractional podcast people and let us know down in the comments below any , feedback that you have, including topics for future discussions, and don't forget to like, and subscribe.