The One Hire You [Probably] Just Can’t Make: Chief Product & Technology Officer

SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin is sounding an alarm about Chief Product & Technology Officer roles popping up at B2B companies over one hundred million dollars in annual recurring revenue. His argument: in practice, these roles rarely deliver. The CPTO typically ends up neither a true technologist nor a true product leader — not coding, not close to customers, not debugging at two a.m. Instead, Lemkin says, they become strategy-layer middlemen who slow everything down. In an era where competitive advantage comes from shipping AI-native features fast, having two hungry leaders — one technical, one customer-obsessed — reporting directly to the CEO beats trying to combine both skill sets into a single generalist role. Lemkin's real diagnosis: when a company makes this hire, the underlying problem is usually that the CEO has checked out of product details and hired a CPTO to avoid that work.

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