MitchelLake · The CPO seat
Chief Product Officer Executive Search
The Chief Product Officer decides what the company builds next and is accountable for the organisation that builds it. MitchelLake appoints CPOs and heads of product for venture-backed, scale-up and enterprise technology companies across four regions.
We run product and technology searches from London and Barcelona as well as across APAC.
What the seat does at Series B to D, and in a scale-up
At Series B the first Chief Product Officer takes the roadmap off the founder's desk: one voice for what the company builds next, accountable for discovery, prioritisation and the product organisation that follows. By Series C and D the seat runs a multi-team product group, owns pricing and packaging with the commercial leadership, and is measured on retention and expansion rather than on launches.
In a scale-up the CPO's first year is organisational before it is strategic: product managers by surface or by customer, a design function with its own leadership, and a planning cadence engineering can build to. The companies that get the hire right treat it as the start of a product operating model, not the arrival of a product visionary.
What the market is doing
In October 2026, the last settled month on the wire, 16 strategic-hiring signals named a product leadership seat, up from 11 in September 2026; 1,445 product launches were recorded against 829.
- CPO & Product: 10 of 1,256 executive appointments in October 2026 (0.8%), +0.4 points on the month before.
Live signal wire, settled calendar months only. The appointment mix is the Talent Market Index monthly movement rail; the wire itself is at strategic hiring and product launches.
AI product
Product leadership for companies whose product surface is changing with the model layer: chief product officers and heads of product for AI companies, and the AI product seat inside companies that are not AI-native. Part of AI executive search.
What the record shows
- MitchelLake's delivered record holds 7 ai product leadership mandates, 2014–2024.
- 4 of those 7 were delivered in Oceania.
- They span 7 client organisations, each with its own engagement record page.
- 2,259 of the 22,093 market signals in the live window (2026-03-20 to 2026-10-27) carry an AI marker — 10%.
- Product launch is the largest AI signal type in that window at 1,477.
- Americas carries the largest share of AI signal flow at 1,074 signals (48%).
Computed from the delivered engagement record and the live signal corpus at build time, not written.
- Applied AI LabEMEA · 2024Head of Product
- PAMOceania · 2024Head of Product
- Longtail UX Pty LtdOceania · 2023Head of Product
- Upflowy Pty LtdOceania · 2023Chief Product Officer
- PulsantEMEA · 2022Product Director
- AnsaradaOceania · 2015Head of Product
- Ampush, Inc.Americas · 2014Role: VP of Product (Illya Brown)
Comparable mandate
We have run this search for this kind of role.