As companies innovate, the ‘CPTO’ role emerges

You can get rid of a seat in the conference room.

A two-in-one C-suite role known as the chief product and technology officer (CPTO) has re-emerged, according to IT pros who spoke with IT Brew, as companies innovate and want to do more with less.

Camp counseling. At DataCamp, OpenAI powers some of the learning platform's teaching features—like generative suggestions when a beginning user gets a coding error.

There’s also a potentially contentious choice when it comes to which large language models to employ.

Some of DataCamp’s engineering pros preferred to use the newest LLMs, available from OpenAI. Some of DataCamp’s product team wanted to wait until the models became available from Azure, a preferred platform for sending B2B client data.

Eduardo Oliveira, DataCamp’s chief product and technology officer, made a decision: the smaller clients—the ones less sensitive to a decision to use Microsoft, he said—could use the faster, newer models. The bigger companies had the default option of Azure and Microsoft, with an option to use a newer model from OpenAI.

For communication between product and engineering teams, Oliveira’s role of CPTO is a valuable one requiring experience in both fields.

“It’s like everything in life, right? If you have two people from different domains, and they know a bit about each other’s domain, it makes the conversation much simpler,” Oliveira told IT Brew.

Now hiring. In September, the tech executive search firm Christian & Timbers, citing interactions with over 100 venture capital- and private equity-backed managing partners, claimed to see a surge of 110% in demand for the CPTO role—10 in 2023 and 24 this year, according to an email from the org’s CEO Jeff Christian.

CPTO compensation “ranges from a base of $350–$650K plus 30% to 50% bonus, plus equity depending on size and stage of the company,” the firm stated, and that “the majority of these new CPTOs are at PE-backed companies.”

Other firms have seen increases as well.

“We’re actually getting requests for clients that we’re doing CTO searches for, and that we’re doing CPO searches for, and then some of them have started talking about combining the two roles into the CPTO,” Sal DiFranco, managing partner of the global advanced technology practice North American executive committee at DHR Global, told IT Brew.

So suite. Oliveira sees the role emerging for three reasons:

• Accountability: “Sometimes CEOs are just tired of the ‘ping pong’ between product and engineering,” Oliveira said.
• Cost: As interest rates have increased since Covid, companies want to be smarter with their money and combine roles, he told IT Brew.
• Speed: “Decision-making gets faster because you have one person doing decisionmaking,” he said.

Oliveira began his career as a software engineer, then joined Wayfair’s product management teams. The dual experiences helped when DataCamp called for a CPTO—someone with experience in both fields.

IT budgets are increasing “at healthy, if not stellar rates,” according to a recent study from Avasant research, and “about 70%” of organizations are reporting that they plan to increase their IT budgets this year.

As companies invest in technologies requiring deep expertise, a role like CPTO is especially valuable as new game-changing technologies emerge and require specialized knowledge, Oliveira said. He admits he’d be a subpar CPTO of an autonomous car company, but he’s the right fit for data science and making communications simpler at DataCamp.

“If you are a product manager that has a deep technical expertise of your space, you can come up with innovation much faster,” he said.