CPO as a Service for Venture Capital and Private Equity firms
Your trusted partner in driving success for your portfolio companies.
Fast-growing tech startups often become overly reactive in their product development approach, struggle to maintain their Product/Market Fit and adapt to rapidly evolving market conditions. Effective product leadership plays a critical role in ensuring the growth and profitability of your investments. I offer a comprehensive suite of services to provide strategic guidance, operational support, and talent solutions to put your portfolio companies on a trajectory for sustainable growth and market dominance.
Tailored Services for Investors
Tailored services crafted to meet your specific needs, as an investor, by providing strategic and operational support to your portfolio companies.
1. Strategic Planning and Operational Support
I can assist your portfolio companies in developing and implementing product strategy and roadmap, and identifying key milestones, KPIs and growth opportunities. The operational support includes optimising resource allocation, prioritising initiatives, performance measurement, identifying bottlenecks and ensuring compliance with relevant regulations and industry standards. As a result, you can expect improved product development processes, reduced time-to-market, enhanced product quality and growth in revenue and profitability.
-
Developing tailored product strategies and roadmaps aligned with market trends and customer needs, and identifying key growth opportunities to explore innovative product ideas.
-
Conducting data-driven analysis and utilising customer insights to prioritise product initiatives, and optimising resource allocation to ensure efficient utilisation of time and talent.
-
Establishing key performance indicators (KPIs) and measurement frameworks aligned with strategic goals to track progress and make data-driven decisions.
-
Ensuring regulatory compliance and providing guidance on industry-specific regulations to mitigate risks (Regulatory experience in Healthcare and Fintech).
2. Portfolio Management
Portfolio Management entails performance tracking of products and product companies within your firm’s portfolio, identifying and addressing potential issues with the teams. I act as a liaison between you, the investor, and your portfolio company’s product and tech leadership team to translate and communicate product info, strategies and feedback between both parties. Additionally, I can monitor potential product-related risks, recommend contingency plans to minimise potential disruptions and participate in board meetings as an independent advisor.
-
Building strong relationships with the portfolio company’s leadership team, and acting as a liaison between you and your portfolio company to share product information and strategies, and facilitate effective communication and collaboration.
-
Conducting comparative analysis to benchmark portfolio companies' performance against industry peers. Implementing robust tracking and reporting mechanisms to monitor KPIs, and providing timely updates and insights to ensure you stay informed about the portfolio company’s performance.
-
Conducting comprehensive risk assessments to identify potential existential threats and providing guidance on crisis management and business continuity.
-
Providing board-level guidance and participating in board meetings as an independent advisor.
3. Strategic Advice — Culture, Product, UX, GTM etc.
A strong customer-centric culture is one of the best investments for the long-term success of a product organisation. I provide strategic advice, guidance, mentorship and support to cultivate a customer-centric culture, foster product excellence and accelerate professional growth. Moreover, I can take organisations on a path to becoming Product-Led, i.e. fully autonomous mission-driven teams using the product as a primary means to deliver value to customers and drive engagement and retention.
“I found in him a mentor who would listen to my struggles and give me some advice of where I could start looking for an answer. He never gave me the solution, but rather taught me how to fish, for which I'm thankful.” — Camilla Lichti, CPO, Lendis
-
Cultivating a customer-centric mindset throughout the organisation, ensuring that every decision revolves around delivering value to customers. Nurturing a culture of innovation, experimentation, and continuous learning to foster product excellence.
-
Encouraging an approach using the product as a primary driver of growth, customer acquisition and retention, and ensuring all product, strategy and marketing efforts are driven by deep customer insights.
-
Mentoring product, design and tech leaders by sharing insights, knowledge, expertise and best practices to increase impact, enhance decision-making and accelerate professional growth.
-
Helping with product positioning by identifying customer needs, market gaps and areas of differentiation. Providing insights on emerging technologies, disruptive innovations and potential threats.
-
Instilling product sense in teams that encompasses a combination of skills, including customer empathy, market awareness, strategic thinking, problem-solving, experimentation and data-driven decision-making.
4. Talent Acquisition and Retention
Attracting and retaining top-tier talent is critical for a startup’s breakthrough success. I work closely with the People/HR and leadership team to identify, nurture and hire high-calibre talent based on a targeted talent acquisition strategy. After hiring successfully, I continue working with the teams to nurture and retain talent, including succession planning to ensure business continuity.
“Harpal recruits excellent product people, and takes raising the bar on talent very seriously, never setting for anything below excellent.” — Claire Novorol, CMO & Co-founder, Ada Health
I led several B2B strategic partnerships, e.g. Untold <> Amazon, Automata <> Parmley Graham, on behalf of tech scaleups resulting in product distribution and new revenue. I utilise that experience to advise and facilitate strategic alliances for distribution, technology licensing and joint ventures.
-
Identifying and attracting top-tier talent specific to your portfolio company’s needs by leveraging my existing network and tapping into talent pools of passive candidates.
-
Working directly with employees to understand their motivations and career aspirations to build a retention strategy, and executing a development plan for employees centered around their needs and areas of improvement.
-
Helping companies build diverse candidate pipelines and implement almost-bias-free hiring processes to drive innovation, creativity and employer brand value.
-
As a trusted advisor, I make frequent high-quality thoughtful introductions to talent, service providers, potential customers, partners, coaches and seasoned entrepreneurs.
-
Advising, facilitating and negotiating B2B strategic alliances for distribution, technology licensing and joint ventures.
Outcomes for your portfolio companies
An overview of the key activities and outcomes you can expect for your portfolio companies, spanning people, products and processes.
Activities
-
Making high-quality, timely and effective decisions about products, business, customers, resources, hiring, prioritisation and strategy in collaboration with others (Fortunately, one of my biggest strengths is making difficult and bold decisions fast, esp. in a crisis or stressful situation).
-
Constantly aligning the organisation by communicating the why, product vision, strategy, roadmap, customer insights, product updates and future plans through active sessions like All Hands and passively via documentation. Stepping up the communication game during crisis management.
-
Running vision, strategy, roadmap, product audit, positioning, innovation, scenario planning and alignment workshops with key leaders, teams and other executives. Coordinating efforts across the business with other departments like marketing, sales and customer service.
-
Hiring top-tier talent and nurturing them via 1-1s, team meetings, check-ins, progress reviews and active feedback to improve retention. Mentoring and coaching product and design leaders to develop skills and overcome challenges.
-
Understanding and gathering customer insights from quantitative and qualitative data, and working with teams to operationalise those insights for day-to-day product decision making.
-
Analysing market research data and reviewing product, finance and user engagement metrics and indicators to assess product performance, mitigate risks and adhere to regulatory and compliance standards.
-
Managing costs and budget, and allocating time, resources and people across different initiatives to improve effectiveness and alignment with the company objectives, and giving inputs for financial forecasting, reporting, investments and acquisitions.
-
Sharing updates and presenting at the board, customer, investor and partner meetings and addressing questions or concerns about product, strategy, roadmap, metrics, competitors etc. Meeting and maintaining relationships with vendors, partners and media to aid development, delivery and marketing.
Outcomes
-
Defining and articulating a compelling Product Vision and Product Strategy to achieve that vision informed by a deep understanding of customer needs and market dynamics.
-
Providing strong leadership, attracting and retaining the best talent, and designing the Product Org to execute the product strategy and vision efficiently and effectively.
-
Ensuring the product offers an intuitive and engaging experience by leveraging customer insights and behavioural data.
-
Overseeing product development, achieving and maintaining the Product/Market Fit and hitting core KPIs like acquisition and retention.
-
Driving the company's financial performance by making decisions and driving initiatives to grow revenue and profitability.
-
Building a high-performing Product Org and making the organisation product-led, i.e. fostering a customer-centric mindset and using the product as a primary means to deliver value to customers.
-
Improving product positioning in the market via messaging, branding and pricing, and driving go-to-market strategies using a combination of sales-led and product-led growth.
-
Facilitating cross-functional collaboration between the departments, esp. Product, Design, Research and Tech, and aligning the whole organisation around vision, strategy and roadmap, fostering a shared understanding and commitment to the company’s success.
Partner Services for Investors
I offer two services in collaboration with specialists and experienced partners, who bring data, infrastructure, AI/ML and technology expertise to the table to complement my product skills, namely
Pre-investment due diligence
Exit Strategy and Preparation
Solutions for your portfolio companies
Pre-packaged services with battle-tested methodologies, frameworks and ready-to-use content for faster, exceptional results. The solutions are always bespoke in the context of an organisation’s unique needs.
Product/Market Fit
Assessing P/MF for your portfolio company and helping them achieve it by following a hypothesis-driven process to tighten up each aspect of P/MF, like customer segments, acquisition channels, and product features.
Product Strategy
Formulating and integrating an evidence-based product strategy within an organisation and providing a strategic decision-making framework to product and business leaders.
B2B Service to Product Business Transition
Scaling and transforming a tech-enabled B2B service business to a product-centric business by building a self-serve product. Result: Higher revenue and valuation.
All of these solutions take 6-12 months to execute. In some cases, starting with 1-2 weeks of exploratory workshops for diagnosis and assessments before committing is recommended.
Ready to increase your ROI on portfolio companies?
Together, we can create a great environment for your investments to thrive, leading to success stories and profitable returns.