Chris Johnson

Rahul Abhyankar [00:04] Chris, welcome to Product Leader's Journey. I'm really excited to have you here.

Chris Johnson [00:08] Absolutely. Excited to chat about all things product leadership and executive recruiting.

Rahul Abhyankar [00:12] Right off the bat, I want to ask you about this role of Chief Product Officer at Slack that Slack is hiring for. If this were your search, how would you run that process?

Chris Johnson [00:23] That's a great question. It's a great opportunity that is going on right now, and there's a couple of ways to hit on it. From a background perspective, I think that's one aspect—what they are looking for and what are the outcomes that they need to drive with this hire. Historically, a lot of the Slack team has been there since Slack was Slack as a standalone company, and so now, as it's been integrated and scaled within Salesforce, that does change a little bit of the calculus in terms of the type of person that you'd be looking for.

So if I were leading the search, which I am not, I would approach it in a couple of ways. One is figuring out what are the must-haves versus the nice-to-haves. You can read the job spec; a spec is a spec for the most part.

My first approach to the conversation would really be centered around: Slack is ubiquitous. What do we need to do to continue to innovate and be different? Is that one of the outcomes, or is it: hey, just find a way to get this thing from X billion in revenue and tens of millions of users to the next billion? What does that look like? Obviously they just launched Slack AI. There's a lot of innovation that still can happen within that product. Figuring that part out, then you work backwards to: okay, what is the ideal background?

Whoever gets this job will have operated at a very large scale. That's first and foremost. This is not a startup. This is not a Series C or a pre-IPO VP of product that is going to get this job, because the stakeholder management, the larger company nature, the integrations to all the other parts of Salesforce—someone who, for lack of a better phrase, has done the political song and dance in a large company, because otherwise they would just get very frustrated very quickly. So bigger company, larger scale.

The next piece, I would imagine, is going to be a critical element: innovation, innovative products. It won't just be the person who has run large scale for large scale's sake. I do think that they will look at the Microsofts of the world and the Google suites and everything in that dimension, because that's where a lot of the innovation has happened. You could look at consumer-oriented people. I don't imagine that this person is going to have to walk in there and know how to do large, complex enterprise deals. They're going to have to know how to build a product that people love. Who does that better than anyone else? Consumer people.

So if you're looking at it from "would I qualify?"—well, if you've only worked at Cisco and HP, you're not going to qualify. But if you've managed large—I don't know how big the Slack team is, I imagine it's in the hundreds—this person will have to have some management scale, worked on products that have that reach of 50 to hundreds of millions of users, and have worked on products that people actually enjoy using. Slack is one of those that falls into the category of people are like, I use it every day for many hours a day. It's part of the daily workflow. I don't know that an analytics product that you use to build a dashboard once a month is the thing that this person will land.

So my thesis is that this person is going to come from a FAANG company, Microsoft, Google, in one of those collaborative suite type of products. That person, they know what they're walking into, which is: this is a piece of a larger company. But if you're just working on half of Google Suite and you can go work on all of Slack—it's a pretty household name, ubiquitous product. It's a pretty good gig.

Rahul Abhyankar [04:22] From a process standpoint, how long do you think a search like this would run?

Chris Johnson [04:26] I think it depends. I imagine this role reports to Denise as CEO. It's a question of: are they in a buying mode? Do they know what they want, and when they see it, they go get it? That's always the big question. It's what takes a search from six, eight, nine weeks to 12 to 18 weeks. There's not an unlimited supply of people who check the boxes that I just described, so I could probably show Denise the list of 25 people. You get three or four of them to run a process. You make a hire. You have to also 100% believe, just given the beast that is Salesforce, there are dozens of people that are raising their hands internally. They know how to work that machine. Just another piece that might actually make it longer than shorter.

Rahul Abhyankar [05:15] For the types of candidates that you talked about, at that level, people are fairly accomplished, they have a track record of success, they have demonstrated the ability to build successful products, scale businesses, inspire large teams. At that level, what really separates people from each other? How do people stand out from one another?

Chris Johnson [05:39] That's a great question. The first part is an intangible, but it's fit. There are different styles, different approaches, different communication methods. There are technical introverts who are geniuses, who can manage at scale, and there are people that probably could have been a head of sales somewhere because they're so good at communicating and being savvy and carrying a room. So I think fit is something that is heightened when it comes to that, because, you're right, everyone that team meets is likely going to check the boxes of on-paper experience.

So then the question is really peeling that thing even deeper into: what would you do with Slack? Who has that innovative spark that they're going to crisply articulate? Someone will stand out in that mix. They thought outside the box. It wasn't just what can be done with Slack, but what should and what has no one thought about doing with Slack. The finalists will be different. There will be three people who are all incredible accomplished corporate vice presidents of Microsoft and a VP at Google and some internal SVP at Salesforce. All of them have seen scale, worked on innovative products. People love working with them. Someone is going to be different in how they approach what they would do with Slack.

Rahul Abhyankar [07:07] There's an element of projecting yourself in that role for, say, the next six months to a year, and saying how would Slack be different with you here?

Chris Johnson [07:17] I tell people there has to be a moment during the course of the search where you do put yourself in the shoes of that job. You have to be able to draw a line in the sand and have a point of view. Even if it's different, you're putting yourself out there to make a bold bet, bold statement on here's what we can do. Here's—have you guys thought about this? Here's what I might try. It may work, it may not work. The people who lean into a process and who put their point of view into the conversation tend to have a bigger opportunity to succeed.

Rahul Abhyankar [07:57] You mentioned FAANG. There was, not too long ago, a point in time where a lot of high-tech companies were looking for people from FAANG companies. What are you seeing right now?

Chris Johnson [08:06] It's not the first place I'm going to recruit, unless that's just a critical element and we need someone from AWS or Azure or someone in the deep cloud infrastructure experience. The reason for that is, I think the last couple of years have made founders step back and pause on how successful have those people been coming out of the big FAANG long-tenured jobs. Not many of them have been super successful. A lot of them bounced into the big high-flying unicorns, but they bounced out quickly because there's a difference between a wartime leader and a peacetime leader.

What companies need during the massive run that we were in—rising tide floats all boats and there's opportunity for people at Google who are making $4 to $10 million a year. They're like, well, if we take massive unicorn X and we scale it to $100 billion, there's outsized opportunity there. Once the hatches get battened down and tightened and it's like, well, we're not growing at all costs anymore, we got to be strategic and thoughtful—do we really need that big-time Google or Microsoft or Meta exec? Maybe it's the team that they hired. Those are the people who are going to do the day-to-day grind work. That's been a common theme that I've seen, especially at the later stages, where historically we'd love to get one of those experienced VPs who has had an incredible career at a FAANG.

Rahul Abhyankar [09:34] You mentioned wartime and peacetime. Can you expand a little bit on that?

Chris Johnson [09:37] It just comes down to the person's ultimate motivations. Startups are hard. There's no always up and to the right. Even when money was flowing, it was a lot easier to hide any of the mistakes and you could fix it with throwing some money at it, throwing another couple of people at it. That's the peacetime person, where it's: hey, I know how to hire, I know how to recruit. People love working for me, I can motivate, and I can drive business outcomes. These are not no-op execs. They're very good at their job, but they're very good at just steering the ship. There's a lot of folks who have become very strong operators and leaders of people, but when it comes to we have to do more with less, we have to go cut this thing in half, you have to actually go start writing PRDs, you need to PM this new initiative versus hire two PMs—some people don't wake up excited to do that.

That's where wartime happens, when it's: do what you need to do at all costs. People who are comfortable and just want to focus on leadership—there are different opportunities for those people. You can be a peacetime startup person and not enjoy the hard grind of finding product-market fit and the things that you have to go do now.

Rahul Abhyankar [10:54] We talked about FAANG and non-FAANG. There's this other topic that always comes up, which is domain experience versus little to no domain experience. What are you seeing related to that?

Chris Johnson [11:06] It depends on the domain. The more technical, infrastructure-y, data-intensive, engineering-focused products, the tighter the domain spec is—the Databricks and the Snowflakes and Starburst and DBT and anyone that sits at that cloud infrastructure data layer. They're not hiring athletes anymore. They're hiring people that know the business impact, the buyer, why people need this product. On the flip side, companies like Anthropic or some of these AI companies, they can hire from consumer, they can hire from applications, they can hire from vertical SaaS, and it's less domain-relevant there. So for your applications, AI, you can have your pick of the litter—more athlete type. The more technical, deeper into the deep tech, you're getting more domain.

Rahul Abhyankar [12:02] The case study that we did of Slack—you did a nice deep dive into it. Obviously Slack is a company where it's not the first time that they are hiring a chief product officer. Let's talk about companies where this is the first time that they are searching for a chief product officer. What's the conversation you have with the CEO? Do you get into saying, do you really need to hire a CPO right now?

Chris Johnson [12:26] The first question I ask is: why are we here? Why do you need a CPO? Defining that for folks I think is important. Title doesn't really matter up until a certain stage. What I mean by that is whether you're a Series A to a $50-75 million Series D company, you may have a CPO, you may not. I kind of put it all into the bucket of head of product. You're the senior-most product leader at the company, reporting to the founder.

CPOs are needed once you are moving from single to multi-product. You are expanding into new geos. Your business models are a PLG motion, but you're layering in a sales-led motion. There's complexity that is beyond the scope of a pure functional VP of product who is great at taking the product that is existing and figuring out how to continue to sell that to more people. CPO—you've got maybe two VPs, one on the product that's been around for four years, one on the thing that you just launched last year that's the new AI initiative. You're scaling into new geos, you're thinking about new problems. The CPO role lends itself to when the complexity escapes one person to do one functional aspect of that. That's the high-level bit there.

When I talk to founders who are hiring their first CPO, it's really: what are the jobs to be done? What are the outcomes that you're looking for? Is it what I just described? Are you going from single to multi? You're focused now on the platform elements of things—whatever it might be. Being able to articulate that very clearly, because I have also spent much time with founders where they're like, oh, I need a CPO, and you spend an hour unpacking that you really just need a VP of product. All you've had is more of a director, kind of order-taker. You don't quite need some big strategic, change-the-business type of product leader. You just need a more experienced human leader, people leader, to scale the function. When the function starts to become broader and cross over into that business model, that's when you can get to the right answer.

Rahul Abhyankar [14:44] With respect to the founders, the challenges, are founders really ready to let go, because they've been the product leader right from the beginning up until this point? That creates a potential situation where there is dissatisfaction.

Chris Johnson [15:00] Absolutely. There are a lot of ways that I spend time with founders digging in there, and the founder says the right things and you make the assumption like, okay, yes, they are ready to give it up. And six months in, they're not. I get the phone call from the candidate and they're like, I'm not sure this is a long-term place. Founder X is still head of product and saying, hey, you just go do this. That's where it doesn't work.

It starts with: what is the expectation that this founder has for a head of product? If it is clear from the outset—I am the CEO and chief product officer. What I need is a person that can build the craft, how we create a culture of great product management, customer obsession. That's what I need you to focus on. I'll still be in every product review. I'll still lead the X, Y, and Z elements of the product team. Candidates will self-select out, and you will have a very clear understanding of the delineation of roles, who will do what, and how it will operate. Things change over time and you can only control so much. But if you set expectations clearly from the start, it sets up in a whole different way. That leads back to, even with Slack, the fit between the hiring manager and the person coming in the door.

Rahul Abhyankar [16:19] Let's switch to the candidate side of the search process and the interactions that you have with candidates. You mentioned fit. How do you start to form a baseline in your mind, when you're talking to candidates, whether a person is going to fit the environment, the culture? How do you assess that?

Chris Johnson [16:37] It's a very hard one, and I will say that I do my best to find nuggets of fit both from a company perspective and a candidate perspective. I will never hold a candidate back from being introduced because I'm like, oh, this person is just not the right fit, unless it's just glaring. The first couple of questions that they ask are like, what's work-life balance? Do I have to go into the office three days a week? If the company says we're five days a week and we work on weekends because we're grinding it out, the person is probably not the right fit. There are obvious ones.

Thinking about it in terms of how do decisions get made inside of these companies. Is it top-down? Is it by consensus? Disagree and commit? How do things happen within the culture elements of the organization? Some are very direct, and if you're working at an Israeli security company, you can figure out how they are as a company, how execs operate. You meet five of the different leaders that would be peers around this person, you get a sense. Then, if you meet the candidate and you can get into some of those nuances—have you worked in this type of culture before? How do you take feedback? How do you give feedback? What would your managers say about your ability to influence through different ways of decision-making?

What I typically do is I just spell it out for the client too. I'm not the one making this hire. You've been running this company for five years. I've known you for five months. I'm going to let you make the call, but here are my thoughts, here's my reservations, here's all the good things that they've done. They might be a little bit title-motivated, and you guys don't give out C-level titles. Feel that out. Being able to just push on some of those softer elements is how I suss that out.

Rahul Abhyankar [18:35] As you work with candidates, there is an element of hearing their narrative. What's your advice to say, here's how you should craft or structure the narrative of who you are, the experience that you've had? Do you have a good template that you can share with people?

Chris Johnson [18:54] Impact is the biggest piece. Clear and concise ability to describe what impact you had. What did the product and team and company look like when you got there? What did it look like when you left, and why did you leave? If you can do that in each one of the last two or three relevant companies and roles that you've been in, I think you've got a leg up.

One of the other things I tell people, and it may seem pretty obvious but it's not: don't talk for 25 minutes in a row. It's amazing how many times that's the feedback that I get when I get a call from a CEO. Unfortunately, the person did not do well. They weren't self-aware to stop and be like, is this helpful? I do call that out often in these things.

The articulation of what it is that you've done, who you've worked for, what you've learned, what you wish you would have done differently, any reflections—being self-aware enough to understand the things that you did well, but also the things that you may have not done well. There's nothing worse than getting the phone call that said the person did not use the word "we" one time, and it was "I did this, I did this, I did this." Some of the things that may seem obvious—that's how I generally talk with people about their narrative.

Rahul Abhyankar [20:13] I thought that was really powerful.

Chris Johnson [20:15] If you do that with the executive recruiter and ask good questions about why is this company hiring a head of product right now, what inflection point are they at, then you can loop that back into the narrative when you're speaking with the actual client. That's pretty powerful.

Rahul Abhyankar [20:33] Wonderful. I want to go back to this one thing that you said: use of "I" versus the use of "we." What's your advice for how should people balance how much they use "I" and how much they use "we"?

Chris Johnson [20:45] If the association is to the impact of the business in a team setting, it is a "we." If there is an "I" scenario—I came up with the one-pager that helped us launch this new business initiative, and I wrote it on a weekend, and I took it to the CEO, and we got funding and stood a team up inside of two weeks—that's pretty powerful. Now, you better make sure that that's truly a you thing, because it will be referenced, and the CEO you're interviewing with is going to pick up the phone, call the CEO from your previous role, and say, did this person write that narrative? Did they write the one-pager? Yes, they did. Okay, well, that's pretty impactful.

The distinction of what did you and your team accomplish as it relates to some broader outcome—business outcome, product outcome, customer outcome—but if there's a piece of that story that you defined, you crafted, invented, absolutely you should use "I." It's not that you can't use "I," but there is no "I" who scaled Slack to a billion. That's the part I'm trying to articulate. If it's an effect of an entire company, you are a piece of that, not the only piece.

Rahul Abhyankar [22:05] That's very good advice. And that requires a lot of reflection, that requires a lot of preparation, analysis, self-evaluation, and self-assessment. Do you see a lot of people having taken the time to do that?

Chris Johnson [22:25] Most of the people I talk with are busy in their day job. It is probably more a function of people who are looking for what is next, as opposed to: Chris called me with this really compelling opportunity. You tend to see people so busy and consumed by their day job that maybe they don't do as well on an interview. That's another balance. There are incredible interviewers, and there are people that just don't interview well but have so much substance. That's where you've got to be able to get the signal through the noise and find that fit, because there might be someone who on paper has good enough experience, but wow, they are really impressive because they have honed that narrative so clearly, versus the person who has great background but couldn't articulate why they made decision X, Y, and Z because their brain is just coming off of seven hours of meetings. There's some nuance to that, but it's just a thing that I see.

Rahul Abhyankar [23:27] Chris, what's your advice for how people should talk about weak spots on their resume?

Chris Johnson [23:34] With clarity, not sugarcoating it. To say that a different way, be able to own mistakes. There are different ways to do that, different scenarios in which things did not work. If it is a company thing, be very careful how you word it. Meaning: I got into company X after, hey, I spent five years here, built this business, I had the opportunity to go be the chief product officer of some Series C startup. I got in there and, wow, what a dumpster fire. CEO had no clue what they were doing. The board was a mess. Red flags right there, because nobody needs to hear you trash a previous employer.

But said a different way: you know what, I rushed my decision. I didn't do the diligence. I didn't talk to enough former executives that I should have. I should have seen the churn out of there, the culture. I met four execs. I should have asked to meet seven. I only met the four that they picked. I didn't do the right diligence. Understanding it's on you too, because you made the decision to ultimately join. That is a very powerful way to display that ability to be self-aware, as opposed to just, frankly, talking badly about the mistake that you were a part of making.

You can't control everything. You joined and the business that I was supposed to go run got defunded. You can't control that. But if you say, oh yeah, it just wasn't the right company for me, you keep it so vague that someone is going to find out—whether it's me, the recruiter, or the CEO, or whomever you're interviewing with—they're going to figure out why did it not work. Was that truly a you thing or a company thing or a business outcome thing? You should not be shy to talk about the mistakes and the failures, because I think it shows more about who you are as a human and an exec and your ability to be self-reflective than what could come out the other side if you try and be coy.

Rahul Abhyankar [25:43] This is great advice, Chris. There is a perception that executive recruiters will reach out to people; they will initiate the contact when there is something that they feel is right for a particular person. Flip that around: how do you recommend people establish relationships or network or connections with executive recruiters, even outside of an opportunity?

Chris Johnson [26:07] It's a very fine line, because we aren't candidate agents. We operate on behalf of our clients. We want to know who the best execs are, but sometimes we can't chat with all of them. Knowing that—and I do this probably five times a week—if I respond with, hey, it's so great to meet you, tell me what you're looking for next and we'll definitely keep you on the radar, that's not me trying to not build a relationship. I just don't have enough hours in the day for me to talk to all those folks.

Specifically for the question that you're asking, once you reach into that management ranks and you're a director, senior director, VP, etc., you're going to get outreach. There's no question. If you're working on technology that has parallels to a lot of other places that are getting funding and companies are investing in, there's a high degree of likelihood that you will be getting outreach. You should pay attention to who's reaching out. You should be able to understand and figure out what are your superpowers. Are you a big company person? Hey, I went from director to VP here. My next move is at a big company, but I want to be a GM and I want to run a P&L. Or is it: I've done the startup thing, now I want to go do a late-stage senior director. Whatever the roles that you're getting pinged on, that's the signal you should be looking for. Find the signal: okay, I got 10 outreaches, four of them are not relevant, two of them are from the same firm. Let's start pattern matching on what I want to do next with who's reaching out to me. Go follow up with those.

I tell people all the time: respond with even just a "not interested but great to meet you. Keep me posted on these types of roles in the future." That is high signal for me as an executive recruiter versus you just not responding. That's something that I tell people. You don't have unlimited time, but if you can respond to the relevant recruiters, they will start to pattern match on, okay, we're getting close. Let's just keep chipping away. I'm going to keep hitting him up with everything that looks and feels like this, because he was specific in telling me these are the types of things I want. So that's kind of the reactive to outbound model that I would describe.

The other piece is figuring out, talking to your peers, talking to other execs proactively, figuring out who does the search work for the companies and the roles that I want to be in. Maybe it's not this next role, but it's the one after that. I tell people all the time: play career chess, not checkers. The role you are in today, the one that is going to get you to the role—say you're a director today or a VP at a mid-size company, you want to be a startup chief product officer. Figure out who is doing those startup chief product officer roles and get on their radar. Again, you may not be right for their current searches, but you start to put yourself on their radar. It is better to be known than not known. I don't know if it's a dirty little secret or not a secret, but we find execs by using LinkedIn and figuring out who worked at the relevant companies. If you've worked at one of those relevant companies and you're getting outreach, you should just do it that way.

Recruiters for every different type, size, stage, domain, function—figure out where you want to be, what your ultimate aspirations are over the next one or two jobs. Figure out who does those and go get to know them. If you ask 20 of your peers around the tech industry, you're going to find out, hey, you know what, Chris Johnson does some of the highest-profile mid to late-stage venture-backed CPO searches. You want to be the next EVP GM for the Marketing Cloud at Salesforce? You're probably not going to need to get to know Chris because he's not doing that search.

Rahul Abhyankar [30:08] I think it's important advice to understand different types of recruiters, what they specialize in, and map your own journey to where you want to be—what's your next role and the role after that that could potentially get you to a CPO or a CTO role, and then figure that out. When you talked about chess, not checkers, can you explain that a little bit further? Where did that analogy come from? Because that sounds very interesting.

Chris Johnson [30:35] What's funny is I have two other brothers and a sister, all who play chess, and I have never played a game of chess in my life until last October. I just know the premise of the game. There are people who make career decisions in a short-sighted way, and many for good reasons. Hey, I've got young kids. I need comp stability. This offer is going to be better than this. There's only so many small jumping of different pieces that you can make, because if you do two in a row and your aspiration is to be the CPO in your third job, it's highly unlikely you're going to get there. You can't just make a short-term jump. You need to see multiple pieces, multiple moves ahead. You need to understand the different nuances.

Making this move will give me—it may look like a sidestep. Hey, I've been a VP of product of a company that went from two to 50 million. Well, why did they take a VP job at a bigger company? Because now they're going to go run a business that is 300 million and take it to 700 million in a bigger company. Now they've proven the ability to do a startup, do later stage. Now they have a better shot to be the CPO of that 50 or $100 million company. When if you've only ever done the VP of product from two to 25, and then 10 to 50, but you want to be a CPO of a pre-IPO $150 million company, you unfortunately aren't going to be on the right table for that. That's what I mean by chess versus checkers. It needs to be a thoughtful approach to get to where you want to get to, and not moving jobs just to get scope and influence and that sort of stuff. That's another pretty obvious thing that we as exec recruiters can feel out—the thoughtful nature in which you made those career decisions. It's pretty impactful.

Rahul Abhyankar [32:37] Do you find yourself having the conversation with candidates about where do they want to be, the next next role? Do you find yourself having that conversation?

Chris Johnson [32:48] A couple of times a week, actually, with people that I have gotten to know over many years, who are in these moments of transition and they have good opportunities, and they're like, I need your advice, Chris, I've got an offer.

A great example: I spoke with a woman earlier this morning who said, Chris, I'm sitting at this bigger company, done the startup. Big company is not the right long-term place for me. I've got this offer to go be a single-digit but cool AI company head of product, but I want to be the CPO of a Rippling or a Notion or a Figma or something later-stage and ubiquitous like that. I said, well, if you go back to the $2 to $25 million startup again, it's unlikely that you get those phone calls. I think that's the nature of how it plays out.

When we break here, I will pick up the phone and talk to a finalist that we're ultimately trying to close, who has bigger company into another acquisition of a bigger company. Done the growth-stage thing as a director, senior director. They're figuring out, hey, do I go be the number two to a CPO at this awesome $300-400 million growth-stage company, or do I just go back to the previous company that I was at post-acquisition? It's a safe job. I know the people. My hiring manager's the one that I used to work for. It's like, well, you need to understand from my vantage point, I don't care if you take this job offer, because I want the person to stick. What I want you to understand is, removing my hat as the representative of this company, if you go back to this other place, the chess moves on the board completely change. You've done acquisition and big company growth stage. Now you go back to big company. You're kind of telling the world like, hey, I'm comfortable right now. And that's okay. Maybe a moment in time. Hey, I've got a new kid coming. You need stability.

This isn't a blanket statement, but I talk with people. I'm like, if you want to do the VP as the number two, take it from 300 million, be there on the ride to a billion. That's the cast of characters that I call for the big high-profile product searches, not the person who went back to the big company safe job. That's where I actually enjoy that part of my job a lot, which is just the career navigation piece, because careers are not linear. You can't map it perfectly. Life happens. But giving people insights into what that might look like—it's not always 100% perfect science what I'm describing, but I try and give my best perspective on what the chessboard could look like over the next two, three roles.

Rahul Abhyankar [35:45] This is something that people can start to do at any point in their career and say, from where I am right now, what's the chessboard going to look like? How do I see my piece moving on that chessboard, and be a little bit more thoughtful about it. So if people have not done this up until this point, then there's no reason to be discouraged about it.

Chris Johnson [35:56] Today is a good day to start thinking about what the next five to 15 years of your career look like.

Rahul Abhyankar [36:01] The chief product and technology officer, this combined product and engineering head, C-level role—are you seeing more of that? What's really pushing those two functions together into one room?

Chris Johnson [36:18] Seeing it more and more, for sure, at the later stage, on the hundreds of millions of revenue, multiple product areas. CEOs are looking to consolidate direct reports. That is a big theme. The single-threaded model, the Amazon model, has now proliferated into the broader later-stage tech scene. It really depends on the business, the type of company, and the technology area. I'm seeing more and more of them is the long and short of it.

A lot of it has to do with figuring out the right work structure. I don't think it's some crazy new way of going about it, but the ease of putting it together has just become more apparent because engineering leaders—they're not just focused on delivery, they're thinking about business outcomes. Your product leaders are thinking about the technical challenges and the scale of humans that it takes to manage at those large scales. There's different schools of thought for different stages and types of tech in the domain, but generally speaking, I'm seeing more and more of them in the hundreds of millions to late-stage, pre-IPO and post-IPO.

Rahul Abhyankar [37:37] On the other side, CPOs are increasingly expected to own the design function as part of their organization. Are you seeing a C-level role for design, or do you see design continuing to be under product?

Chris Johnson [37:54] Mostly under product. But I will say that the companies where your competitive advantage is how the product is used, consumed, interacted with—design has a much bigger seat at the table. Notion just hired a head of design. They are separate. So now there's an eng, product, and design leader. Apollo.io is another sales tech, sales enablement company, just hired a head of design. It's separate from the CPO. It's a deal-breaker for some, but others, some CPOs are like, I have to own it. But at the same time, there are stories to be told, and the people who don't have egos about it, they're like, you know what, that makes sense. It depends on the type of company and the type of product. Long story short, 75-80% of the time it still rolls up under product. But there's this new wave of companies where design is so important to the success of the business that they create a separate direct report to the CEO.

Rahul Abhyankar [39:00] Let's talk about diversity, equity. What are you seeing in terms of CPOs, CTOs, and what advice do you have?

Chris Johnson [39:09] In a whole lot better place than we were three, five years ago, and I think because of the conversation at the time, which is: we need to put women and people of color and diversity into these leadership positions. We are bearing the fruits of that labor. I still think we have a long way to go, but the way I articulate it to clients—because it is a thing that I bring up in every pitch—I can't create candidates that check the boxes that you just described, but what I can do is I can show you ones where you want four out of five boxes checked. Maybe these only have three. My job as an executive search partner is to show you a representation of what I believe the market to be.

If you are a CPO and I'm doing a CPO search for a next-gen security company, it is a high degree of likelihood that it will be somewhere in the one or two out of every five that check all of the boxes that you're looking for. But if you're willing to give on location and now we can look on the East Coast, or you're willing to give—maybe this person doesn't have to have managed 15 people, but they managed seven—we can increase what that looks like.

The way I ultimately say it is, if I do my job correctly, the diverse slate will be crafted based on what I believe the market and what I know the market to relatively look like. So if you've got 10 candidates that you interview over the course and you're in security, if we have three CPOs who check all the boxes the same way, that's a pretty good number. Now if it's your general SaaS application company, it's probably more like four to five, because companies like Salesforce have done an incredible job of putting diversity folks into the right roles that give them the legs that they can go earn these other opportunities. The domain is another element. But walking into every pitch that I have with every CEO, the opportunity to have that is basically a representation of the market.

Rahul Abhyankar [41:17] I was speaking with a woman CEO and she said that women don't feel comfortable applying for a job unless they meet 100% of the job spec, whereas men don't even read the job spec.

Chris Johnson [41:30] Very true.

Rahul Abhyankar [41:31] I'd love to hear your advice on that. And then in general, when there is a job spec, how far outside that job spec are you willing to look?

Chris Johnson [41:41] From a diversity lens, my advice is, if you understand the role that needs to get done and you have enough of that experience, you should absolutely go chase it. My view is also the best person for the job will get the job. But you have to be able to articulate, hey, here's how I would go about this. Hey, I know I don't have this, but here's how I would handle it. That's how I would answer the first part of that.

In terms of the job spec question, good, bad, indifferent, I don't even really write job specs anymore. I think they're a dime a dozen. I can literally copy and paste this Slack one that's publicly available and put any other company logo on there and it will have 80-plus percent of the same characteristics. For me, it's domain relevance, it's scale, it's: have they done a startup, have they not? Is that a requirement?

How far we go outside is really depending on what the CEO is willing to give on. If location is one of the top things and they need the person in the Bay, until we have fully exhausted the local candidate supply, would we have to give on that? You can cast wide nets. I describe it in concentric circles. Every search I start: here's the bullseye, here's the companies that this person has worked at, here's their career progression, boom, this is what we're looking for. Maybe there's 15 to 25 of those people for each given role. And then, okay, what is concentric circle one and what is concentric circle two? Which one are we willing to give? Okay, you know what, we're willing to give on location. Let's just look at West Coast. Is this concentric circle one? Okay, well, we're willing to give on management, and it doesn't have to be managed 20 people with managers of managers of managers. Let's just say 10 people with managers. Being able to go into that mode is really how I think about specs.

Rahul Abhyankar [43:42] You worked with some amazing companies. Any conversation with a CEO or a founder that really left a deep impact on you?

Chris Johnson [43:52] A lot of them. I learned something new in each search that I take. Doing the Rippling CPO search was a recent one. As an exec recruiter, I pattern-match on, okay, you're hundreds of millions of revenue, you need to go to the billions, you're in a SaaS application, let's go get the CPO who has done that, and that's your candidates. In reality, that doesn't solve all problems. Sometimes just because you've done it doesn't mean you were the person that did it, and you were on the boat and the tide was rising.

Parker, as the founder and CEO, is a relentless recruiter who does not ascribe to pattern matching. He's like, listen, I'll take the CTO of this kick-ass company to be the chief product officer if they're willing to do it. If you ultimately look at Isar's background, who we placed as the CPO—incredible run at JP Morgan, EVP, GM at Lyft, VP at Google—it doesn't scream like director, senior director, VP of product, chief product officer. That was just a good learning for me. It's not always about the patterns, it's about the people and the impact that they've had and the role and the job that they want to do.

Rahul Abhyankar [45:14] On the flip side, you've worked with some amazing candidates that you've placed in some very senior executive roles. Any conversation that has stayed with you for a long time that you really look back on and say that was an amazing conversation?

Chris Johnson [45:31] How I would articulate that maybe a little bit differently is the relationships that I build with candidates. That is my biggest currency: the success of the people in the roles that I put them in, along with the companies, and then building those relationships for now a decade-plus.

I did the chief product officer search at ServiceNow and put CJ Desai in there. It's probably been eight or so years, and he and I still talk all the time. He is a great friend, and he is one of these people who has had just the most unbelievable journey. ServiceNow was trading at 75 bucks and 10 billion market cap. Now it's the most important enterprise software company around. Just the humility, but also what he's been able to accomplish. He'll text randomly every December or so and be like, thank you for putting me in all these years ago.

Long story short is the relationships and the long-term build is why I do what I do, and those are the conversations that stick with me. Being invited to have conversations like this—that's why I do what I do. It's not the transactional piece. Search is the farthest thing from it. It's all about the relationships.

Rahul Abhyankar [46:50] It's fantastic, Chris, and you've peeled the onion so many layers into this topic of executive search and recruiting. Just fantastic. I want to ask you one more question. I see a green jacket on the wall behind you there, like a Master's jacket. What's the story behind that?

Chris Johnson [47:06] It is a Master's jacket, and there's a lot of other baseball memorabilia and other sports. I'm obviously a big athlete—through college played baseball, and I've got a lot of signed jerseys and memorabilia, baseball bats, baseballs and helmets and everything in between. I'm also a big golfer. I hope my 40th birthday dream of going to the Masters will come true here soon. I had the opportunity at a charity auction. I saw a signed Master's jacket, a replica, and I was like, well, that is something that will be fun, at least for probably like two weeks a year—the week of the Masters and the week after the Masters. Everyone is like, oh, that's very cool. So yep, signed Phil Mickelson Masters replica jacket.

Rahul Abhyankar [47:53] Oh, wow. Nice. So you were probably watching Scottie Scheffler win the Masters.

Chris Johnson [48:02] Absolutely. It was my pick to win, and that was a good finish.

Well, Chris, really appreciate you taking the time. The long-term relationship for us, and your audience and the people that I can hopefully help and place and get to know and build relationships—will be long-lasting.

Rahul Abhyankar [48:28] Fantastic. Thank you so much.