The Full Stack Leader

Flavors of Executive Leaders

This is a frequently shared document for product, technology, and business executives when recruiting (buy-side) and job seeking (sell-side).

Chief Executive Officer / General Manager

The five most common archetypes for CEOs at mid-cap ($10M–200M):

  • Capital Allocator: a leader with deep strategic financial experience who can determine where and how to make investments, run capital markets processes
  • GTM Specialist: a strong customer facing leader and deep expertise marketing & CS experience helping catalyze growth where things have stalled
  • Product Guru: a general manager who has come up through eng, product management, innovation, who understands how to continue to innovate to delight
  • Customer Visionary: an industry leader who has strong domain expertise, external relationships, a talent following, and is credible to strategic and the investor landscape
  • Integrator: Someone who can manage the game, scoreboard and drive strong cross functional harmony and operational discipline across the business

Via Nick Cromydia of Hunt Club in March 2024.

Chief Product Officer

Product leaders fall into five broad archetypes, each exhibiting a different combination of technological and commercial acumen and each delivering value in a different way:

  1. Strategic visionary and evangelist
  2. Customer or user-experience guru
  3. Technology leader
  4. Commercial champion
  5. Brand communications expert

Via Heidrick & Struggles

Chief Technology Officer

  1. R&D, innovation: future potential
  2. Technical strategy and product vision
  3. Organizational head: build and manage the team
  4. Execution: align, coordinate, prioritize
  5. Face of technology, external (sales, recruiting, client partnerships)
  6. Infrastructure and tech operations (scale)
  7. Business execution

Putting these together into packages based on the needs of the company.

Examples:

  • Organization plus execution = VP Engineering
  • Business execution, tech strategy, organization, and execution = CTO

The CTO is not necessarily the best engineer; should be a much more strategic role. More of a senior manager than “chief nerd.” The strategic technical executive the company needs in its current stage of evolution.

Via The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier in chapter 8, “The Big Leagues,” as a primer for technology leaders.

Chief Operating Officer

Common scenarios:

  1. Partner to CEO, groomed for replacement
  2. Projects or partner model, run half the teams or tackle special projects
  3. Coach a young, inexperienced CEO

If the desire is a “President” who takes charge of GTM and revenue, which should be a CRO instead.

Reading and notes

Decent introductory article: So you want to be a COO by Cori Land.

EY synthesizes the COO role in their report, Aiming for the top: a guide for aspiring COOs and their organizations (2013). I couldn’t find this one. Same site, different story: How COOs can sustain operations and keep workers engaged.

COOs are the company’s go-to “fix it” person. Keep the trains running.

The 7 EY archetypes for COO are: executor, change agent, mentor, other half, partner, heir apparent, and MVP.

HBR “flavors” shows the wide possible structure for a COO role:

Second in Command: The Misunderstood Role of the Chief Operating Officer by Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles

COO flavors via HBR:

  1. Executor — day-to-day operations
  2. Change agent
  3. Mentor an inexperienced CEO
  4. Other half — complement the CEO
  5. Partner — co-leaders
  6. Heir apparent
  7. “Most valuable player” — retain a top exec with a title; similar to “President”

Books

Riding Shotgun, The Role of the COO by Nate Bennett. Low ego, doesn’t need credit. Internally focused. Able to work under relentless pressure with a breadth of experience. This job means non-stop action! Strong communicator, leadership skills for both people and execution. Good relationship to CEO: COO must respect them. COOs focus on performance.

To be effective, this COO needs to (1) establish credibility with the operational people at all levels, (2) be a strong communicator, (3) be capable of managing several things at one time, and (4) be able to make sound operational decisions.

How to be a Chief Operating Officer by Jennifer Geary. Foundations for all COOs: change, culture, and strategy. How to be a Chief Operating Officer, 16 disciplines for success. Functional skills, as technical areas, vary a lot with 13 of them from IT to HR and Finance.

Functional skills, as technical areas, varies a lot: 13 of them from IT to HR and Finance:

  1. IT
  2. Finance
  3. Human resources
  4. Operations
  5. Risk
  6. Governance
  7. Legal
  8. Compliance
  9. Supply chain
  10. Facilities
  11. Internal comms / Public affairs
  12. Sustainability
  13. Safeguarding vulnerable people

Other good books:

  • Execution by Larry Bossidy
  • Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
  • Traction by Gino Wickman
  • Measure What Matters by John Doerr
  • The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary
  • Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by Claire Hughes Johnson

Ask a COO: “What’s your general set of duties?”

In mid 2021 I interviewed a wide set of COOs and chief executives to get their take on what “flavors” and strengths they’d look for in a COO.

I find each COO I talk to varies widely, mostly based on industry and style of the CEO as main partner. Wide array of duties and functions, need to enjoy the context switching and a relentless pace of action.

For example, a CPG or physical goods ecommerce company would look for a COO with a background in supply chain logistics and e-commerce across functions like shipping, fulfillment, transportation, and customer service.

Common oversight (functions vary):

  • Improve productivity even with limited resources, own value production, both internal and external
  • Design and run the org as key manager, own alignment down into teams
  • Plan and prioritize, own requirements
  • Drive performance and measurement of dashboards and KPIs, own metrics
  • Maintain and monitor staffing, levels, skills, learning, knowledge across teams

Question: “Most modern tech companies operate without a COO” — true?

Answer: Depends on the company and CEO’s skills. What do they want? Finance help? Find a CFO and CRO. More common with supply chain and manufacturing operations. One tech/software COO example is where the job requires oversight of AI automation.

Style is defined in relation to the CEO, depending on their style and needs. Not all COOs want to be CEO. COOs can certainly grow up from within. If a COO candidate has a gap in one area, the company can use strong compensating partners around them. Not a blocker to promotion.

Key: Good relationship to CEO. COO must respect the leadership team and CEO.

These are the 3 most common variations of partnership with CEO I heard from this listening tour:

  1. COO runs internal teams while CEO focuses on external fundraising and such
  2. COO takes on special projects
  3. COO is being groomed to replace CEO

Changelog:

  • Updated: Mar 7, 2024 – added GM/CEO.
  • For 2023 and earlier, this list was focused on product, technology, and operations.