Hiring a CPTO is hard - the role is new, the title is inconsistent, and the combination of product and engineering leadership is easy to describe but difficult to screen for. The text below is a starting point you can copy directly into your job listing. It is grounded in the canonical CPTO definition and reflects what boards and recruiters should actually look for.
Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO)
We are looking for a Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO) to own the connection between customer value and technical execution. This is a C-level role that unifies product strategy and engineering leadership under one accountable executive.
The Role
As CPTO, you will be the single executive owner for the trade-offs between what we build, why it matters, how we build it, and what we learn from the result. You will lead both product and engineering, ensuring that customer problems, product strategy, software engineering, and business outcomes are connected - not split across competing C-level columns.
Key Responsibilities
- Product strategy: Define which customer problems we solve and how they connect to business strategy. Own strategic bets, prioritisation by value, feasibility, risk, and timing, and roadmaps that express outcomes rather than feature lists.- Product management and discovery: Ensure teams investigate problems before committing engineering capacity - through customer research, prototypes, experiments, measurable outcomes, and lightweight MVPs. Build empowered teams, not a requirements factory.- Engineering and technology: Own the capabilities required to deliver and operate our product - architecture, security, reliability, scalability, maintainability, engineering effectiveness, technical debt, and build-versus-buy decisions.- Business outcomes: Connect product and technology decisions to growth, retention, cost, risk, investment, M&A, due diligence, and board communication.
What We're Looking For
- Proven leadership across both product and engineering - not just one discipline reporting to the other.- The ability to move from a customer conversation to a product decision, from a product decision to a technical approach, and from that approach to a measurable business outcome.- Systems thinking: can hold quality, security, reliability, speed, and customer value in the same decision.- Communication: can translate technical reality and product evidence into decisions a board can act on.- Experience with AI-enabled product development and its impact on the product-engineering workflow.
What We're Not Looking For
- A new CTO who happens to have product reporting to them - product strategy must carry equal weight.- Someone who will personally do every task - this is an executive role, not an operational one.- The single best engineer or product manager - depth matters for asking the right questions, not for personal heroics.There is no single solution that fits every company. Company size, industry, operating model, and maturity all change what the role looks like. Treat this as a strong starting point - adapt scope, seniority, and emphasis to your context, but keep the core: one accountable leader connecting customer value, product strategy, engineering, and business outcomes.
The CPTO is especially relevant for companies that sell digital products or services, where technology is not merely an internal support function but a central part of the customer experience and business model. If your organisation repeatedly sees roadmap conflict between product and engineering, or the CEO is acting as the human API between the two, this role is the answer.
Want to understand the reasoning behind each section?
Read the full CPTO definition or browse the FAQ.