The Balderton CPO Summit 2025

Last month, we had the pleasure of inviting Product leaders from across the Balderton portfolio to London for our biennial CPO Summit. We kicked off proceedings with an evening of food, drinks, and networking, followed by a day of talks, workshops, and panel discussions.

We started the day with a fireside chat with Rhiannon White, CEO of Clue. Rhiannon discussed the CPO / CEO relationship with Balderton’s Head of Product Keshvi Radia, reflecting on both her own transition from CPO to CEO, and how this has changed her perception of both these roles, and the relationship between them. Over an insightful hour, the discussion touched on:

• The importance of both the CPO and their teams understanding the commercial reality of the business
• The value of the Product leader owning the P&L, or NRR in a SaaS business
• That in comparison with the stated strategy (with which it is hopefully aligned), the P&L is the revealed strategy, the actual truth of what makes the business work, and where the real value is
• The transformational clarity that flows down through the Product org when they map P&L / NRR to Jobs To Be Done
• The impact and leverage of speaking the language of revenue to the CEO, the commercial teams, and the board
• The importance of making the CEO feel heard, and empathising just as much upwards, as you do with customers, colleagues, and your team
• That a lot of management is knowing when to do nothing, and just listen

A couple of key recommendations really stood out for me:

• Find a best friend in finance who can help you deeply understand the commercials of the business, and build a revenue-backed case for your strategy.
• “Numbers up, People down”: When communicating upwards, lead with the numbers (business impact) to capture their attention, but when communicating downwards, lead with the human factors so that you remain approachable and empathetic.
• If you have ideas you would like to share with the team, but you want to avoid disrupting their momentum or diluting their focus, share them in writing first. And when doing so, clearly stress that this is not a new priority, but just you thinking out loud.

Next up, Dave Killeen, Field CPO of Pendo, joined us to lead a workshop on the impact of adopting AI tooling to turbocharge your own workflows as a Product leader. Dave began with a whistlestop tour of his favourite tools, including Superwhisper, Sunsama, Claude, and Gumloop, along with his tips and techniques for getting the most from them. Then we all got stuck into drafting a requirements doc using Claude, and then building it in Bolt.

It was amazing to see how many working prototypes we had by lunchtime, and a real eye opener of how product prototyping and development is changing, and how Product Managers can benefit, with a little experimentation and practice.

Having spent an hour with the robots, we regrouped after lunch for a more human session with Executive Coach, Flora Devlin, on how to develop world-class product teams through active coaching. 

Flora began by sharing the foundational components of world-class Product teams, and emphasised how coaching is a force multiplier across these dimensions:

• Clarity
• Autonomy
• Accountability

What particularly stood out to me was the value of coaching to you as the coach:

• Builds independent thinkers in your team, who bring solutions, and not just problems 
• Drives ownership of the strategy across your team, and follow through on execution
• Surfaces fresh ideas you’d never think of yourself

Flora explained that the key to coaching is giving your team the space to do their best thinking first, which requires that you:

• Listen with the same passion that you want to be heard 
• Ask questions that encourage and deepen their thinking

And as a final tip, Flora highlighted that you can use AI to generate coaching questions ahead of a meeting, to help you avoid the temptation to go straight to feedback.

We then broke out into pairs to practice coaching, with a two part challenge. Firstly, listening to your partner speak for 3 minutes without interrupting them, which felt like a surprisingly long time for both the person speaking and the person listening! And then reflecting what you had heard back in your own words, without judgement or solutioning.

After a final break, I had the pleasure of wrapping up the day by moderating a panel on scaling product teams with Elina Churilova, CEO of Cino and former Product Lead at Bumble, Georgie Smallwood, CPTO of Moonpig, and former CPO of N26 bank, and Dave Wascha, Product advisor and former CPTO at Zoopla, Photobox, Travelex, and moo.com.

In a wide-ranging conversation, we discussed:

• What it means to “scale” in the age of AI, when the discourse seems to be shifting away from adding people as the goal, to removing people as the goal
• Why the glamorisation of having a large team is unhealthy, and you should resist the temptation to add people until it’s absolutely necessary
• The importance of hiring well, and all the pain that not hiring well brings
• How to maintain alignment, both strategically and culturally, as your organisation grows, through constant overcommunication, and a weekly brain dump 
• The importance of building a team you trust and have confidence in, given that you can not stay in the details of every team as they increase in number 

It was fantastic to see such great engagement from all the Product leaders who joined us, with plenty of insightful questions and lively discussions across all sessions. We hope that everybody who attended built lasting relationships, and look forward to many more opportunities to bring the community together in future.