Do I need a CTO or a CPO?

If your company is founder-led and has grown on its own revenue, you probably need both product and engineering led, and you can probably only afford one senior salary. Hire a CTO and nobody leads product; hire a CPO and nobody leads engineering. So for now, I recommend you put one person in one seat who leads both, and make the full-time hire later, once the evidence says which seat needs it most.

If you’ve found this, you’ve probably reached the point where you can’t hold product and engineering yourself any more, or the person who has been holding both is stretched past what’s fair to them. You can afford one senior hire, and you’re worried about getting it wrong. At your size a wrong senior hire is a year and a salary you don’t get back, and you’d only find out it was the wrong seat once the problem turned out to be in the other one.

The seat I’m describing is a fractional CPTO: product and technology leadership in one seat, for founder-led and owner-funded software companies that can afford one senior hire, not two. That’s what I do, so weigh what follows with that in mind. I’ll also tell you when it’s the wrong answer.

What’s the difference between a CTO and a CPO?

A CPO (chief product officer) leads what gets built, and why. A CTO (chief technology officer) leads how it gets built, and the engineering team that builds it.

The CPO’s questions are about customers and the market: which problem is worth solving, for whom, and what you’ll stop doing to make room for it. The CTO’s are about the system and the team: how to build it so it keeps working, how long it will take, and whether the team can deliver it without burning out.

Both matter. But in my experience, most of the waste in a software company doesn’t sit inside either one. It sits between them: in the roadmap that promises what the team can’t deliver, in the work that waits for a decision nobody owns, and in the handover where what was meant becomes what was built.

Why can’t I just hire both?

You can, if you can afford two senior salaries and have enough work to keep both of them busy. In my experience, most founder-led companies of up to £20m in revenue can fund one. Whichever you hire, the other discipline goes unled, or it falls back to you.

The usual first choice is a CTO. Pave looked at 1,947 companies in its customer base with only one C-level executive who wasn’t a founder, and that executive was a CTO 45% of the time, well ahead of a CFO (18%) or a CMO (12%) (Pave, Who should your first C-level executive hire be?). Pave says its data skews heavily towards tech companies, so read it as what software companies tend to do, not what every business does. It doesn’t give a figure for CPOs at all … which might tell you something of its own.

That data tells you what most companies choose. It doesn’t tell you whether the CTO solved the problem they had.

What happens when one of them goes unled?

With only a CTO, the team builds well, and the roadmap normally ends up belonging to whichever customer shouted loudest last. With only a CPO, the roadmap is clear and well argued, and it promises more than the team can deliver, or fails to address the technical debt that builds up. Either way, the cause is the same: nobody is clear about what the work is for (in both directions), and it lands on engineering as slowness.

I’ve seen what that costs. A post-merger engineering team of a little over 30 people, across three continents, was working in silos and shipping reliably less than half the time. The technology wasn’t the problem. The people had stopped trusting each other, and stopped believing in why they were there. Six months of building the foundations that should have been there from the start (structures, a shared language, and genuine clarity about what the work was for) took delivery reliability from below 50% to above 90%, and a $300K account that was leaving, stayed.

Every case study says what it cost me, and that one cost me credibility. I leant hard on trust to drive the change through, and couldn’t always report accurately on what was happening when I was asked. Next time I’d keep a way to verify what I’m told that doesn’t undermine the trust I’m asking for.

The fix there wasn’t more engineering, and it wasn’t more product management. It was one person deciding what the work was for and how it would get done, in the same conversation.

What is a fractional CPTO?

One part-time executive who leads product and technology from one seat: a fractional CTO and CPO in one. I work on an outcomes based model, but for an easy way to understand, it’s usually one to three days a week (fractional.quest). You’ll also see it spelt CTPO; it’s the same role with the words reversed.

The point isn’t that it’s cheaper than two hires (though it is). The point is that what you build and how you build it get decided together. A combined seat “can reduce handoffs when product and technology decisions are tightly coupled” (wavect), and in a company your size they almost always are.

Underneath it, this is about communication. Most problems are people problems, and most people problems are communication problems. Two senior hires give the gap between product and engineering two owners. One seat gives it none, because there’s no gap left to own.

How do I tell which one I need right now?

Ask where work waits. It normally waits in one (or more) of three places:

on deciding what to build: priorities change weekly, the team builds things nobody uses, and every customer request feels urgent. That’s a product gap;
on building it: the priorities are clear, but releases are slow, things break, and estimates mean little. That’s an engineering gap;
in the handover between the two: the plan and the team’s capacity disagree, work arrives half-defined, and decisions wait for someone to be free. That’s the gap between them, and you need both disciplines, in one person.

Seventy engineers in six teams were shipping on a three-month cycle when I arrived. Everyone had agreed the problem was speed. Nobody had asked what was actually slowing it down. It was confusion, not effort, and three months became two weeks or less because of clarity, not because anyone pushed harder.

Three more questions sharpen it:

What are you deciding today that you shouldn’t be?
Who would this person lead?
Could someone you already have grow into it?

That last one matters more than it looks. The best first engineering leader is often already in the building, which I wrote about in how to scale engineering without funding.

When should I split it into two full-time hires?

When each discipline is a full-time job of its own. Several product lines, a team big enough that one person can’t hold both, or a regulatory load that needs someone every day. One source puts the usual split at around 300 to 500 people, or when a second product line arrives (fractional.quest).

Team size is a prompt, not a rule. There’s no evidence for a universal breakpoint (wavect). What I’d look at is the same thing as before: where the work waits. When the waiting is inside product or inside engineering, and not between them, it’s time for two people.

And sometimes a full-time hire is right sooner. If one discipline is clearly the problem, it needs someone every day, and you can afford them, hire full time. A fractional seat is for the stage where you don’t yet know which one, or can’t yet afford both.

What should I do first?

Find out which seat your company actually needs before you pay for either. Find it before you fund it.

Before you pay for a second senior salary, find the capacity you already have: it’s usually in the building. Two senior salaries is often what a raise is for, and the gap they’re meant to close is often one a clear seat could close without either.

If you’d like help with it, this is what I do. In two weeks, find out whether your next stage needs capital, or whether the team you already have can get you there. It’s called the Growth Without Dilution Plan: three or four days of my time inside your company, looking at where work waits and why, then a written plan showing where your capacity is trapped and what unlocking it takes. If you do need a full-time hire, the plan says which one, and why. You keep it whatever you decide.

Let’s find another way

Who this is for

Founders and CEOs of software companies up to £20m in revenue that have grown on their own money, exist to do something rather than only to reach an exit, and are weighing their first (or next) senior product or technology hire with room in the budget for one. A fractional CPTO is product and technology leadership in one seat, for exactly that company.

It isn’t for companies that have already chosen capital to grow fast and are building a full executive team, for companies big enough to need two full-time leaders now, or for anyone looking for a CTO to run sprints.