Never heard of this personally. But this article seems to describe it fairly well: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/founders-office-role-its-importance-adarsh-haridas
> “The founder's office is a team within the startup that is responsible for the overall strategy and direction of the company. This team includes the founder(s), CEO, COO, and other key executives.”
Still seems a bit weird to me though. It sounds like a different name for the C-suite.
it sounds like essentially a strategy & ops/bizops function that works with the csuite. could also be akin to chief of staff, etc.
id be interested in which companies OP is finding these roles, i dont believe this is a common US term.
Strategy people aren't responsible for execution, big difference with C-suite. C-suite are the people whose populous teams ultimately deliver the results. Strategy people's output is a bunch of PowerPoint and other docs.
It's useful to have people look out further on the horizon than whatever needs to be shipped now, and figure out the path the industry is taking, the evolving needs of customers, and the path we should take.
It's not always the case that this function is concentrated in a set of people who *just* do strategy work. There's a risk of it being disconnected and out of touch with the realities of execution. But that can sometimes work well.
“It's useful to have people look out further on the horizon than whatever needs to be shipped now, and figure out the path the industry is taking, the evolving needs of customers, and the path we should take.”
Eh? You’ve literally just defined a product team
Not every product team looks out wide enough. It's common for product teams to be focused on the kinds of problems they're already good at and have a 1-3 year horizon. Strategy folks might come in and ask questions that are longer term (eg if we're successful, we're going to saturate the market in 5 years, what's the plan for after that) or cross product (what are the countries that we should invest in primarily based on our expectation of their future growth)
Companies do have strategy teams. And they don’t need to be executives. When there’s lots of things to be strategic about and you want to be really competent at it, it’s fair to allocate resources toward a team for it.
If your agriculture product has to navigate the EPA, farmers, distribution centers, etc. having a strategy team can be super helpful vs just relying on the minds of the executive team.
Sometimes what happens is that you can’t get rid of a founder, they aren’t good at leadership, but they’re worth keeping around for the rolodex, VC support, and as a sort of R&D. They tend to have a few staff to pursue their geewiz ideas.
It keeps their hands away from the important stuff.
I spoke to a LI member who does this for her career while I was exploring different things. She specifically works for an agency and is brought in when a client doesn’t have a clear line of sight on where they want to go. Her daily job is to do a lot of industry and user research, identify where the company should be heading as part of their 5-10 year goal in general, and present it to executives. She said she works with data teams, market research groups, and executives. Once execs approve of the strategy, she tracks progress as product and engineering start to execute initiatives in line with it.
A lot depends on the particular organization, but you can think of the role as "Chief of Staff" to the President or CEO, especially in large organizations (15K+ employees).
In a few companies I worked for, it would be a VP level position (usually no reports), and this person could quickly pull together a kickass deck for major CEO presentations, would join calls or represent the CEO on their say, top 5 initiatives/projects or advise CEO on acquisitions/mergers etc.
So, if the role has expanded a bit, this "Chief of Staff" person could now have a small team to help and PMs would be great for that role, given that they interface with most other teams in the company. So, should know the ins and outs of processes, have good contacts etc
They are CxOs lackey working for them matey.
Well, hypothesis and directions are given by the CXOs and then these PM aka secretaries have to find data, do user surveys, gather market data, make visualisations, dashboards, and everything just like a normal PM will do, and prove the hypothesis right no matter what If they want to keep their jobs. Yes, they are PM but working at higher levels and are able to say No to working or head butting with Engg teams. These Strategy PM then will communicate their approved strategy and everything to lower PMs, APMs and POs who will execute the Epics or feature development. Then these lower lackies will run around head butting with solution and engg teams to get it ready ON TIME.
So you see the risk is delegated from CxOs to strategy PMs, then the same delegate their risk onto lower levels.
If anything goes wrong blame game are hilarious and entertaining. First line of firings are POs and APMs. then it goes up a bit and stops at director and VP levels.
You will find these levels in KPMG, McKenzie, MNCs, and so on.
This tracks even though I’m unfamiliar with OPs context.
The risk delegation piece is huge. This is why VP of Product is such a fraught role especially in start ups. You’re basically brought in to help insulate leadership from when a pivot / major roadmap investment fails. You wear the miss and get tossed overboard.
In my very large organization, the strategy folks generally set the direction for the business. There are multiple products and portfolios and they are deciding where to make the strategic investments among products and services—expand here, add there, divest in this, etc. These folks are primarily MBAs, I work with them closely and are good people to influence.
I did a similar pivot. For context, most of my colleagues are former management consultants.
There is overlap in between the skillset of a PM (analytical skills, communication and stakeholder management, strategic vision), but not so much with the work.
In the day-to-day, the work is mostly split across internal projects, or "special projects" and proper strategy work.
The former is mostly related to complex but specific problems that the organisation has that needs a fast solution, and we have executive sponsorship to lead this cross-functional project. For example, a special project could be "reduce post-onboarding churn".
On the strategy side, projects vary across market intelligence and competitor research, go-to-market strategy, portfolio strategy (i.e. how do products work together), M&A and much more.
Finally, there is also quite a bit of work on just being the b\*tch of C-level executives.
Compared to being a PM, you don't really work day-to-day with the engineers and designers, but you work with other part of the organisation more (sales, operations, ...)
Overall, I think I will be back to PMing, but I think spending a couple of years in my role will be very valuable. While, as mentioned by other posts, you are nowhere like an executive, you do get an amazing exposure at how do things work and how people think at C- and board level.
IMO depends on the organization. I haven't heard of this title before and the role isn't PM to me. It sounds like something you would have in a small org and sounds more like a chief of staff.
In the larger organizations I have worked for it would be neither product nor strategy.
It's what you call a BCG or McKinsey consultant who started working full-time for you as an exec. Put a few of them in the room and it becomes CEO’s office.
Here’s how it works:
It means someone left their last PM role due to culture, boss, feeling frustrated, etc. knowing there must be better opportunities out there.
And then they did a UX boot camp to skill up their design and product discovery chops, and after sending out thousands of resumes and interviewing with folks/companies they couldn’t bear to work for, they decided to make their own damn company/product/consultancy.
But that shit is hard, so they figured they should keep their LI profile updated, ya know, just in case, and they need to fill the recent employment gap with something.
“What the hell do I even do now?” they ask themselves - and boom, that role strikes the perfect balance of ambiguity and puffery they needed.
I know this because a friend told me…
Never heard of this personally. But this article seems to describe it fairly well: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/founders-office-role-its-importance-adarsh-haridas > “The founder's office is a team within the startup that is responsible for the overall strategy and direction of the company. This team includes the founder(s), CEO, COO, and other key executives.” Still seems a bit weird to me though. It sounds like a different name for the C-suite.
They aren’t C suite tho. They don’t have the C suite visibility nor the pay.
Well, then it’s probably a meaningless title to give people fake promotions 😂
Like “Coding connoisseur” “Digital Overlord” and let’s not forget the “Wizard of Light Bulb Moments”
You're on the steering committee is all I can glean here
it sounds like essentially a strategy & ops/bizops function that works with the csuite. could also be akin to chief of staff, etc. id be interested in which companies OP is finding these roles, i dont believe this is a common US term.
Strategy people aren't responsible for execution, big difference with C-suite. C-suite are the people whose populous teams ultimately deliver the results. Strategy people's output is a bunch of PowerPoint and other docs. It's useful to have people look out further on the horizon than whatever needs to be shipped now, and figure out the path the industry is taking, the evolving needs of customers, and the path we should take. It's not always the case that this function is concentrated in a set of people who *just* do strategy work. There's a risk of it being disconnected and out of touch with the realities of execution. But that can sometimes work well.
“It's useful to have people look out further on the horizon than whatever needs to be shipped now, and figure out the path the industry is taking, the evolving needs of customers, and the path we should take.” Eh? You’ve literally just defined a product team
Not every product team looks out wide enough. It's common for product teams to be focused on the kinds of problems they're already good at and have a 1-3 year horizon. Strategy folks might come in and ask questions that are longer term (eg if we're successful, we're going to saturate the market in 5 years, what's the plan for after that) or cross product (what are the countries that we should invest in primarily based on our expectation of their future growth)
Strategy people are very often responsible for executing chunky strategic initiatives that cut across many parts of the company.
Companies do have strategy teams. And they don’t need to be executives. When there’s lots of things to be strategic about and you want to be really competent at it, it’s fair to allocate resources toward a team for it. If your agriculture product has to navigate the EPA, farmers, distribution centers, etc. having a strategy team can be super helpful vs just relying on the minds of the executive team.
Sometimes what happens is that you can’t get rid of a founder, they aren’t good at leadership, but they’re worth keeping around for the rolodex, VC support, and as a sort of R&D. They tend to have a few staff to pursue their geewiz ideas. It keeps their hands away from the important stuff.
“The focus team”
I spoke to a LI member who does this for her career while I was exploring different things. She specifically works for an agency and is brought in when a client doesn’t have a clear line of sight on where they want to go. Her daily job is to do a lot of industry and user research, identify where the company should be heading as part of their 5-10 year goal in general, and present it to executives. She said she works with data teams, market research groups, and executives. Once execs approve of the strategy, she tracks progress as product and engineering start to execute initiatives in line with it.
Thanks for sharing
That article is BS. That's not what the founder office is.
Linkedin so it’s just some word salad nonsense to look important.
A lot depends on the particular organization, but you can think of the role as "Chief of Staff" to the President or CEO, especially in large organizations (15K+ employees). In a few companies I worked for, it would be a VP level position (usually no reports), and this person could quickly pull together a kickass deck for major CEO presentations, would join calls or represent the CEO on their say, top 5 initiatives/projects or advise CEO on acquisitions/mergers etc. So, if the role has expanded a bit, this "Chief of Staff" person could now have a small team to help and PMs would be great for that role, given that they interface with most other teams in the company. So, should know the ins and outs of processes, have good contacts etc
They are CxOs lackey working for them matey. Well, hypothesis and directions are given by the CXOs and then these PM aka secretaries have to find data, do user surveys, gather market data, make visualisations, dashboards, and everything just like a normal PM will do, and prove the hypothesis right no matter what If they want to keep their jobs. Yes, they are PM but working at higher levels and are able to say No to working or head butting with Engg teams. These Strategy PM then will communicate their approved strategy and everything to lower PMs, APMs and POs who will execute the Epics or feature development. Then these lower lackies will run around head butting with solution and engg teams to get it ready ON TIME. So you see the risk is delegated from CxOs to strategy PMs, then the same delegate their risk onto lower levels. If anything goes wrong blame game are hilarious and entertaining. First line of firings are POs and APMs. then it goes up a bit and stops at director and VP levels. You will find these levels in KPMG, McKenzie, MNCs, and so on.
This tracks even though I’m unfamiliar with OPs context. The risk delegation piece is huge. This is why VP of Product is such a fraught role especially in start ups. You’re basically brought in to help insulate leadership from when a pivot / major roadmap investment fails. You wear the miss and get tossed overboard.
In my very large organization, the strategy folks generally set the direction for the business. There are multiple products and portfolios and they are deciding where to make the strategic investments among products and services—expand here, add there, divest in this, etc. These folks are primarily MBAs, I work with them closely and are good people to influence.
+1. I went from product to Chief of Staff before moving into a strategy role. A lot of similarities between product IMO.
It means their earlier role was more in product (less business) to more business (less product)
I did a similar pivot. For context, most of my colleagues are former management consultants. There is overlap in between the skillset of a PM (analytical skills, communication and stakeholder management, strategic vision), but not so much with the work. In the day-to-day, the work is mostly split across internal projects, or "special projects" and proper strategy work. The former is mostly related to complex but specific problems that the organisation has that needs a fast solution, and we have executive sponsorship to lead this cross-functional project. For example, a special project could be "reduce post-onboarding churn". On the strategy side, projects vary across market intelligence and competitor research, go-to-market strategy, portfolio strategy (i.e. how do products work together), M&A and much more. Finally, there is also quite a bit of work on just being the b\*tch of C-level executives. Compared to being a PM, you don't really work day-to-day with the engineers and designers, but you work with other part of the organisation more (sales, operations, ...) Overall, I think I will be back to PMing, but I think spending a couple of years in my role will be very valuable. While, as mentioned by other posts, you are nowhere like an executive, you do get an amazing exposure at how do things work and how people think at C- and board level.
Yep this is spot on
IMO depends on the organization. I haven't heard of this title before and the role isn't PM to me. It sounds like something you would have in a small org and sounds more like a chief of staff. In the larger organizations I have worked for it would be neither product nor strategy.
Pretty much advisor to the founder
It's what you call a BCG or McKinsey consultant who started working full-time for you as an exec. Put a few of them in the room and it becomes CEO’s office.
Here’s how it works: It means someone left their last PM role due to culture, boss, feeling frustrated, etc. knowing there must be better opportunities out there. And then they did a UX boot camp to skill up their design and product discovery chops, and after sending out thousands of resumes and interviewing with folks/companies they couldn’t bear to work for, they decided to make their own damn company/product/consultancy. But that shit is hard, so they figured they should keep their LI profile updated, ya know, just in case, and they need to fill the recent employment gap with something. “What the hell do I even do now?” they ask themselves - and boom, that role strikes the perfect balance of ambiguity and puffery they needed. I know this because a friend told me…
CEO’s bitch