Interim Chief Product Officer
An interim CPO steps into the product leadership seat you just lost, with real decision authority, steadies the strategy and the team through the gap, and hands over to whoever comes next. It is the answer when a product leader has left or the search is still running. Measured on continuity, retention and roadmap progress.
This engagement fits a funded B2B SaaS company between $2M and $15M ARR that has just lost its product leader, or knows it is about to. If three of the four lines below describe your quarter, the fit is strong. The hardest version of this is when the product co-founder leaves.
Stage
Series A or B, with a product team that has just lost the person it reported to.
Revenue
$2M to $15M ARR, where a stalled roadmap costs real revenue this quarter.
Symptom
Decisions are queuing, your best product managers are updating their profiles, and the board wants a plan.
Decision
The permanent search will take months and you need the seat held properly until it lands.
Not for you if you want an adviser rather than someone with decision authority, you need a full-time executive in the building, you are hiring for a role you have not yet defined, or the seat emptied and nothing actually stopped. Sometimes a product leader leaves and the work carries on. If that happened to you, do not fill the seat. Retire it.
Interim work is judged on whether the machine kept moving. The figure below is from an interim engagement: at Metapraxis, a London financial analytics SaaS, I came in on a scoped contract and took over as interim Product Director. The client's mid-engagement review reads "the product team are aligned, focused and productive."
Measured inside the interim engagement itself, a 724 hour client contract at Metapraxis. My later fractional CPO engagement at "TouchStay" measured the same figure. The same seat effect, measured twice.
Sivan Kadosh · Fractional CPO. 18+ years leading product, in CPO and CEO roles, across B2B SaaS, TravelTech, real-estate tech and fintech. You work with me, not a bench.
See all case studies →An interim CPO holds the seat itself for a defined period, with the authority to decide, manage the team and own the budget, rather than advising from beside it. A permanent CPO costs $260,000 to $400,000 in base and cash plus equity, and takes up to eight months to hire (Sifted). That is the gap this covers.
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| Interim CPO | Waiting it out | |
|---|---|---|
| Who decides in the meantime | I do, under authority agreed in writing | The founder, on top of everything else |
| Speed | Starts in 2 to 3 weeks, in your rituals in week one | Up to eight months before the permanent hire starts |
| Typical cost | One published monthly price, 25 hours, on the pricing page | Free on paper, a quarter of roadmap in practice |
| What happens to the team | They get a leader who drives the KPIs and upgrades the product process | Your best product managers start answering messages |
| Ends when | The permanent hire is onboarded | Unclear, which is part of the problem |
An interim seat is not a caretaker job. The team can tell within a week whether the person in the chair is actually deciding or just keeping it warm, and that is what determines whether they stay. I take the decisions, carry the outcomes, and leave the next leader a product organization better than the one I walked into.
If the need is ongoing rather than a defined gap, read fractional CPO vs interim CPO, or go straight to fractional CPO services.
One senior product executive holding the seat for about six hours a week, accountable for a named set of outcomes rather than a document. The work is hands on: I do whatever the gap needs, from executive decisions down to the unglamorous cleanup nobody owns.
Six hours is not much, so it is scheduled rather than floating:
I hold the pen on roadmap prioritization and on what enters the quarter. You hold a veto, always. A veto used once a quarter is healthy. A veto used weekly means one of us is wrong about something basic, and we have that conversation in month one rather than month three.
Adjacent engagements: fractional CPO, product management consulting and product strategy consulting.
The price is published on the pricing page: the same seat, one plan, 25 hours a month, three-month minimum, then monthly. What the hours contain and how the number compares with the market is there too.
01
Thirty minutes on the gap you are covering. You leave knowing which queued decision cannot wait for the permanent hire, whether or not we work together.
02
A one-page engagement note, then I am in your standups and your reviews the same week. When a seat is empty, speed is worth more than ceremony.
03
Roadmap re-committed and the team steadied first. Then role definition and candidate screening for your permanent hire.
Measured across quarters of product ownership. Where you start determines how far these move.
Sivan is an excellent product manager, product leader and team member. He cares passionately about delighting customers... I would recommend him 10/10 to any company - you will be lucky to have him.
As part of his role as VP Product, he identified creative ideas, developed sharp strategies and built the road map while focusing on customer experience and business needs.
Nothing was added without a clear scope of development... and a clear way to measure the success or failure of this feature.
Leading by example, empowering, mentoring, and growing his product teams, he created great product culture and set us Product Managers up for success.
If the seat is empty and decisions are queuing, thirty minutes will tell you whether interim coverage fits.
18+ years leading product, in CPO and CEO roles, across B2B SaaS, TravelTech, real-estate tech and fintech. Two of my recent clients hired me in this exact seat. At TouchStay, a TravelTech SaaS, I held the fractional CPO seat from 2024 to May 2026: trial-to-paid went from 35% to 49%, and mobile trial-to-paid from 8% to 30%. At Metapraxis, a financial analytics SaaS, I held it from October 2022 to July 2023: planning and spec cycle time fell 60%, and the CTO's review is below.
About Sivan →