Revenue, margin, or whatever number the company is actually being judged on this year.
anemail4brandon@gmail.comCut mobile development cost by an order of magnitude after bringing the function in-house and rebuilding the architecture
Grew brand awareness through rebuilt marketing, CRM, and personalization platforms
Profitability impact from re-architecting international money movement at Meta
Asset growth at PenFed over the years spent building the digital and product organization
The number usually moves for unglamorous reasons. Somebody finally decides what the product is for. The team stops shipping six things badly and starts shipping two that compound.
I've done this at a credit union, at Meta, and inside a federal agency during a national emergency. The playbooks didn't transfer between any of them. What transferred was being able to tell which unglamorous thing was the one holding that particular company back, and being willing to go work on it instead of the thing that would have looked better in a deck.
I have the Ivy League MBA and I've sat through the consultancy playbooks. They're fine as reading. They're not a plan. A plan has to survive contact with the engineers you actually have and the eleven weeks before the board meets.
Which is why size doesn't worry me in either direction. A nine-person company doesn't need a smaller version of what I built at Meta. It needs the two decisions that unlock the next eighteen months. Most of what I learned at scale is useful to a small team as a warning.
Most people are one or the other. Either they can sit in an architecture review and write the sprint plan, or they can hold the strategy conversation a board wants to have. I've spent eighteen years doing both. The useful part is knowing which one a given week calls for.
Eighteen years in product leadership. Payments, billing, and identity at Meta, across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Before that, Wiser Solutions, PenFed Credit Union, and Guidehouse.
Time inside the team, not around it. I sit in the standups, the customer calls, and the code reviews, and I do some of the work. The assessment comes out of having been in it, rather than out of a week of interviews where everyone knows they're being evaluated.
What comes back is a straight read on what's actually happening and which gaps are worth money to close. Written for whoever asked for it: you, the board, or an investor. Scoped to what the team can execute with the runway it has.
Thirty days is the read and the first moves. Sixty gets those moves running. A hundred and eighty is long enough to know whether they held.
Two days a week. I own prioritization, the delivery cadence, and whatever the board needs to see.
Fixed deliverable. Consolidating data pipelines, integrating LLM and agentic workflows, or standing up a unified platform foundation.
The same ninety days, with the option to turn it into the permanent seat if it's working.
Seed or Series A, past first product-market fit. The founder still makes every roadmap call and has started to resent it. Engineering and sales want different things. A full-time CPO is on the plan, but not for this year.
Companies that aren't really trying to grow. I'll write the spec, run the negotiation, or set the three-year plan, whatever the week needs. What I can't do much with is a company that wants the title in place without changing how decisions get made.
Every quarter the founder stays the de facto CPO has a cost, and it never shows up as a line item. It shows up as the feature that shipped instead of the one that would have moved revenue, and as the fundraise where product is the weakest slide in the deck.
Hiring fractionally first is the cheap way to find out what the number actually needs. Ninety days costs less than a bad executive hire, and tells you more than another round of interviews.
If any of that sounds familiar, email me.
anemail4brandon@gmail.com