The Rise of the Chief Product Officer in Accounting Firms
You ever notice how the titles get fancier when the work gets fuzzier? That’s what’s happening across firms right now.
Titles like Chief Innovation Officer or Chief Transformation Officer keep popping up in accounting firms. My last post discussed why these words don’t mean anything as they are a priori when it comes to business.
However, I think there are constructive alternatives that should be considered.
Technology Should Serve Two Masters at Firms
Best definition I have ever heard of technology is = The use of non-life to enhance life.
At the end of the day, technology serves people. In an accounting firm, there are only two groups that matter:
- The firm’s customers.
- The firm’s team.
Tech’s job is simple: make it easier for clients to do business with you, and make it easier for your team to do the work on their behalf.
If technology is doing its job, two things are true:
- The product you deliver to clients keeps getting better, not worse.
- The experience for your team gets less frustrating, more seamless, and more empowering to add value.
That’s it. Everything else is noise.
CIO/CTO vs. CPO: Two Distinct Roles
I still see the CIO and CTO as critical roles in firms. But they should be focused on the base layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: keeping the lights on, keeping systems running, and keeping the firm out of the news for leaks, breaches, or outages. That’s the bedrock. You can’t do anything meaningful without it.
Above that comes product and experience. Here’s where I think firms need a Chief Product Officer or Chief Experience Officer. Their mandate? Push the top end of the hierarchy: create a client experience that ties directly to revenue, and create a team experience that unlocks growth.
The reporting lines should reflect this distinction:
- CIO/CTO → COO or CEO (operations, stability, security)
- CPO/CXO → Managing Partner, CEO, or Head of Growth (experience, product, revenue)
Why the Distinction Matters
The job is simply too big for one leader to own both sides of the coin. You can’t expect a head of technology to be both the guardian of security and the architect of client delight. One lives in ops, the other drives growth.
Clear roles, sharper mandates. It’s time we stop chasing buzzwords and start building roles that serve people, and tech that actually serves people—that’s where the future is and to me this is driving by the business needs and not 'tech people'.
Both tech - and the people who work in tech - should serve the people of the firm and their customers.
Having a title of CPO or Chief Experience Officer names and claims their aim.
Titles like Chief Innovation/Transformation officer are power point buzz terms - real movers and shakers never have meetings on transformation or innovation because that indeed is the point of having a business.
