Chief Product Officer

JOB DESCRIPTIONChief Product Officer — Enterprise AI ProductsRole Overviewis seeking a Chief Product Officer (CPO) to own the strategy, innovation, market relevance, and productcredibility of its enterprise AI product portfolio. The CPO defines what the company builds, why it matters to customers,how it is differentiated, and how product investment translates into adoption, intellectual property, and long-termenterprise value.This is a hands-on product leadership role for an AI product company — not a services delivery role. The CPO isexpected to have personally built and commercialized enterprise technology or AI products before, and to bring thatcredibility directly into the company's product decisions, market positioning, and investor narrative.The CPO works closely with the CEO and leadership team on portfolio priorities, and partners with a separate ChiefRevenue Officer (CRO) function on go-to-market execution. The CPO equips Sales and Business Development withproduct truth, evidence, and narrative — but does not own a sales quota or revenue target. Revenue accountability sitswith the CRO organization.Note: This role is deliberately scoped without quota or revenue ownership. Product credibility and commercial enablementare the mandate; carrying a number belongs to the CRO role, hired separately.Role Allocation & Primary OutcomesA. Product Strategy, Innovation & Portfolio Leadership — 50%

• Own the enterprise AI product vision, portfolio strategy, product roadmap, and investment priorities in alignmentwith company strategy and target markets.
• Define clear product theses: which enterprise problems Cortexa will solve, for whom, why the problems matter,and where the company can establish sustainable differentiation.
• Continuously assess developments in GenAI, agentic AI, LLMs/SLMs, domain models, RAG, enterprise AIplatforms, AI governance, evaluation, observability, and orchestration; determine their relevance to the portfolio.
• Maintain a structured view of competitors, substitutes, cloud/platform capabilities, customer build-vs-buydecisions, and market white spaces; translate these insights into roadmap choices.
• Establish a continuous product-discovery process using customer interviews, market evidence, competitiveintelligence, and experiments — rather than feature development in isolation.
• Sponsor rapid prototypes, technical spikes, and proofs of concept to test product hypotheses quickly; defineexplicit go, pivot, partner, or stop criteria before larger investments.
• Drive product architecture and capability principles with Principal Architects/Engineering leadership to keep theportfolio scalable, reusable, and technically differentiated.
• Build and govern an IP pipeline: identify patentable ideas, sponsor invention disclosures, support patentdevelopment, and connect the IP portfolio to product differentiation and investor narrative.
• Establish product metrics covering adoption, usage, customer value, quality, time-to-value, and differentiation;use evidence to guide roadmap decisions.
• Own product lifecycle decisions, including incubation, launch, scale, repositioning, partnership, consolidation,and retirement.B. Market Insight & Commercial Enablement — 30%
• Act as the executive bridge between Product and the market — maintaining direct engagement with customers,prospects, partners, analysts, and industry stakeholders to understand evolving enterprise AI requirements.
• Partner closely with the CRO, Business Development, Sales, and Marketing to convert market signals, pipelinepatterns, objections, and competitive wins/losses into actionable product strategy.
• Participate in strategic customer discovery and executive conversations to understand business priorities, AImaturity, buying criteria, and expected value — in support of Sales-led opportunities, not as the deal owner.
• Shape product positioning, packaging, solution propositions, target customer profiles, and differentiated salesnarratives for each product or product family.
• Assess strategic opportunities for product fit, roadmap implications, customization risk, and technical feasibility,at the CRO's or Sales leadership's request.
• Support priority pre-sales engagements as a product expert — customer workshops, product demonstrations,technical/product Q&A, and proof-of-value definition — without personally owning deal outcomes or quota.
• Ensure Sales and Business Development have strong product assets: solution briefs, competitive battlecards,demos, architecture narratives, FAQs, and ROI/value narratives.
• Work with Marketing to develop technically credible product marketing, thought leadership, white papers, andresearch-led content.
• Represent Cortexa externally through conferences, customer forums, and industry publications to build marketand investor credibility around the product.
• Identify strategic partnerships, OEM opportunities, and ecosystem integrations that can accelerate product reach.
• Create a closed feedback loop from CRO/pipeline insight to roadmap, and from roadmap/releases back to Salesand Marketing.C. Product Execution & Delivery Governance — 20%
• Translate portfolio strategy into clear product priorities, roadmaps, and release objectives for Product,AI/Research, Engineering, and Delivery teams.
• Establish product governance across discovery, prototype, MVP, productization, launch, and scale — whileavoiding unnecessary process overhead.
• Review major architecture and technology decisions with technical leadership for alignment with productstrategy, scalability, security, and enterprise readiness.
• Ensure customer-specific work does not unnecessarily fragment the core product; identify what should becomereusable product capability versus one-off configuration.
• Guide strategic PoCs and early customer implementations to validate product-market fit and reduce risk beforewider commercialization.
• Track product execution risks, dependencies, and release readiness; intervene when strategic product outcomesare at risk.
• Ensure product feedback, telemetry, and delivery learning are incorporated into subsequent roadmap andinvestment decisions.Executive Accountabilities / Measures of Success
• Clarity and quality of the AI product portfolio strategy and roadmap.
• Evidence that roadmap priorities are driven by market need, customer value, and differentiation.
• Speed from market insight or research hypothesis to prototype, validation, and product decision.
• Creation of differentiated capabilities, research outputs, and defensible intellectual property.
• Demonstrated product contribution to pipeline quality and win rates — measured jointly with the CRO, notowned as a revenue target by this role.
• Product adoption, active usage, customer value realization, and time-to-value.
• Reduction in one-off customer customization through reusable product capabilities.
• Quality of product positioning, sales enablement, and market/investor-facing thought leadership.
• Effective alignment across Product, AI/Research, Engineering, CRO/Sales, Marketing, and Delivery.
• Disciplined product investment decisions, including willingness to stop or redirect initiatives that don'tdemonstrate sufficient value.