Title Convergence
Our colleague in the UK laughs at US titles and the myriad initials we use to represent them. “You Americans,” he chuckles when he hears about CIOs or CTOs or CPOs. We create alphabet soup and it’s continuing apace. Last week I was going to write about the CPTO and new titles our industry is spawning but decided RTO (hah, another acronym!) was a better topic as we headed into the Independence Day holiday — discussing employee flexibility vs. hierarchical, seemingly arbitrary mandates. Apropos, don’t you think?
So, in putting off the title frenzy in came a new one…TransUnion’s appointment of a CTDAO. Now that is a mouthful. Seriously, we’ve been seeing a convergence of titles in the enterprise customers our industry serves and also in our own organizations now that software runs through our veins. Here’s just a smattering of what we are seeing:
• CPTO — The merging of product management, product execution with product engineering (building) bringing product and technology under one leader’s roof.
• CRO — Less new, but more prevalent it seems, is the merging of marketing and sales into the Chief Revenue Officer who may also have client success and renewals under their belt, too. A key reason: Doing away with finger-pointing between marketing and sales and other bad behavior around territory conflict between new and renewal teams.
• CDAO — The data officer who manages and oversees data governance is morphing with the analytics officer who actually applies it.
And now the newbie title from Transunion that pulls technology, data, and analytics together.
It was a matter of time. My colleague in London is probably howling right now. I understand the need for these functions working more closely together. We, being of the industry we serve, just hired our very own Chief Analyst & Product Officer to integrate our data, research & analysis, and our product and platform engineering.
We always say where there is water, there are pipes in our industry (data/content/research and software) and it’s easier to have that overall responsibility in one very capable brain and under one very capable leader to reduce the fricking and fracking between and across functions.
Speed and agility matter and it’s easier to maneuver, especially in a virtual company where people are in disparate time zones and regions and it’s harder to collaborate. Yes, virtual has a ton of benefits but white boarding on Zoom has its limits and so do 8-hour “off-sites.” That’s not a reason to insist on RTO but it helps to have fewer C’s in the C-suite.
We’ll be discussing the future of leadership and the types of titles and functions and roles we need at the Outsell Signature Event, October 3–4.
My hypothesis: Whereas it used to be that the CEO was groomed up through finance or sales (GE/IBM-Xerox anyone?) the corporate titans of tomorrow will have technology and product DNA in their leadership roots. Increasingly the route to the corner office will be the CPTO or that ilk because they bring the necessary technology and business acumen and commercial mindset that tomorrow’s leaders must embody.
Culture, talent, and EQ is a given. It is the leader who understands and has built digital offerings and scaled them for customers with real problems who “get” customer -> need -> product market fit -> to commercial and financial success that will be tomorrow’s leaders.
Technology prowess will be a standard; building things that matter and who has gotten it done is my prediction for who will sit in the corner offices of tomorrow. Roots in finance or sales? So yesterday.