Interim Regional Chief Product and Technology Officer — Product Funding Renewal

Funding products on economics and engineering truth

Product funding in technology businesses tends to follow momentum: last year's allocation, the loudest roadmap, the most persuasive sponsor. The Interim Regional Chief Product and Technology Officer is appointed, reporting to the Technology Committee Chair, to replace momentum with two tests that every product must pass. The first is economic: what the product earns or saves, measured in a way finance would recognise. The second is technical: what the product costs the platform to build, run and change, including the consequence of the shortcuts taken to ship it. A product can look healthy on the first test and be quietly expensive on the second, and the reverse is also common.

The seat carries executive authority for 12 months. You will agree the regional thresholds held by local leaders and decide the evidence that every product must present when it asks for money or engineers. Each inherited product commitment is re-funded, held or closed on your ruling. You can stop a proposal that slides cost or technical risk onto another team without its consent, decline investment whose value case is silent about real usage, platform dependencies or the downside, and approve the leadership structure along with the way disputes rise.

The leader we want learned technology and digital platforms by owning decisions personally, one of them a commitment without backing that was halted before it did harm. You have worked where the product, data and engineering platform had to stay live through a handover of leadership, in businesses no smaller than $275 million in revenue, 400 people and six countries. The board weighs buy-side M&A, digital transformation and professionalisation; acquisitions in particular bring inherited products whose economics nobody has tested. Risk judgement at level 4 leads; data and AI governance, product delivery and architecture built to scale are each wanted at level 3. You have withheld money from products that could not name their users or their downside, then rebuilt the capacity the remaining products needed.

Criteria, verdicts, then a funding rhythm

By the close of the first ninety days, funding criteria linking measurable economics to technical consequence should be agreed with the Technology Committee Chair. Around month nine product commitments should have been re-funded, held back or ended against those criteria, and the technical consequence of each decision recorded so it can be revisited. By month 12 product funding should run on a renewed cadence, with economics evidenced for each product and technical consequence weighed before any approval.

Applying both tests in front of the board

Selection spans seven weeks. First, in week one, a first conversation, in confidence and by video, with the Technology Committee Chair. Then, in week three, a session with the Board Chair in which you apply both tests to a sample product. Week five is a face-to-face session with executives who head the company's functions, and week seven a discussion with the full board of directors. Each stage is answered in writing within 2 working days.