I see them everywhere now. Chief Product & Technology Officers. CPTOs. Whatever you want to call them.
They’re popping up at B2B companies north of $100M ARR. Especially ones in transition, trying to get more agentic and “more AI.”
Look tiles are just titles. But the CPTO? 95 times out of 100, it’s a flag to me. Let me explain why. But the TL:DR: they are neither, they do nothing, and they fail. Especially in the Age of AI.
In Theory, It Makes So Much Sense
I get the appeal. I really do.
You’ve got product and engineering reporting to two different leaders who don’t always align. Roadmaps slip. Priorities conflict. The CEO is tired of mediating. So someone says: “What if we just had ONE person who owns the whole thing? Product vision AND technical execution. One throat to choke.”
On a whiteboard, it’s beautiful.
In practice? It almost never works.
They’re Generally Neither
Here’s what I’ve seen across dozens of B2B companies: the person who takes the CPTO role ends up being neither a real product leader nor a real technology leader.
They don’t code. They haven’t shipped code in years — maybe a decade. They’re not close enough to the architecture to make real technical calls. They’re not debugging production issues at 2am. They’re not reviewing PRs.
And they’re not close to the product either. They’re not sitting with customers every week. They’re not obsessing over the specific workflow that’s causing 40% of churn. They’re not in the weeds on the competitive feature gap that’s killing deals.
What do they actually do? They want to be strategists. They want to sit in board meetings and talk about “platform vision” and “technical transformation.” They want to draw org charts and hire VPs under them.
They don’t want to do the work.
You Don’t Need a Strategist. You Need Builders. Even At The Top — At Least Today You Do.
Even at $100M-$1B+ ARR, you need a VP or SVP of Engineering who is still technical enough to make real architecture decisions — especially now, when AI is rewriting how software gets built. Someone who understands what AI agents can actually do today, not just what McKinsey says they’ll do in 2028.
And you need a Head of Product who lives and breathes the customer problem. Who’s in calls every single day. Who knows exactly which features are table stakes and which ones are differentiated.
Those are two very different humans. Two very different skill sets. Two very different ways of spending a Tuesday.
When you combine them into one role, you don’t get the best of both. You get the worst of both. You get a layer of abstraction that slows everything down.
I Don’t Even Think Oracle Needs This
If you’re a $50B+ enterprise software company with 40 product lines, maybe you need some kind of uber-technical leader sitting across everything. Maybe.
But even then — I’d argue you need a CTO who actually understands the technical stack, and a CPO who actually understands the customer. Not one person pretending to do both.
If Oracle doesn’t need a CPTO, your $150M ARR vertical SaaS company definitely doesn’t.
In the Age of AI, This Hire Will Massively Set You Back
Here’s where it gets existential.
We’re in a moment where the companies that win are the ones shipping AI-native features fastest. Where engineering teams are 3x more productive with AI coding tools. Where product leaders need to fundamentally rethink workflows because AI changes what’s even possible.
This is not the time for a “strategist” layer between your CEO and the people actually building.
You need your product leader experimenting with AI features every single week. You need your engineering leader rebuilding your development workflow around AI. You need both of them moving at full speed, not waiting for a CPTO to “align the vision” in a monthly offsite.
Hire a CPTO in 2026, and you will lose. Full stop. Your competitors with a hungry Head of Product and a technical CTO will ship circles around you while your CPTO is working on a “unified product and technology strategy” deck.
The Real Problem Is Usually the CEO
I’ll say the quiet part out loud: most of the time, when a company hires a CPTO, the real problem is that the CEO has checked out of product.
They don’t want to be in the details anymore. They don’t want to adjudicate between the product leader and the engineering leader. So they hire a CPTO to make that problem go away.
But in B2B, the CEO has to stay close to the product. At least through $500M ARR, probably longer. You can’t outsource that to a single hire and hope it works.
If your product and engineering leaders can’t align, that’s a CEO problem. Fix it. Don’t create a made-up role to avoid it.
What To Do Instead
If you’re at $100M–$300M ARR:
Keep it simple. Strong VP/SVP of Engineering. Strong VP/SVP of Product. Both report to the CEO. CEO stays engaged enough to break ties and set direction. That’s it.
If you’re at $300M+ and scaling fast:
You might need a CTO (real, technical CTO) and a CPO. Two distinct roles. Two distinct leaders. Both with real domain expertise, not a generalist trying to straddle both.
In either case: the person who owns the product roadmap should be talking to customers every week, and the person who owns engineering should still be able to read the code.
That’s the bar. A CPTO almost never clears it on either side.
The age of AI rewards speed, technical depth, and customer obsession. A Chief Product & Technology Officer gives you none of those things. Don’t make the hire.
