Product leadership that aligns your team, fixes your roadmap, and drives investor confidence without the cost or commitment of a full-time CPO.
Your Fractional CPO: The Product Leadership You Need to Scale
Here’s Who I Help
Your startup is growing fast, but your product team is stuck.
Investors are demanding progress, and internal chaos is slowing you down.
You’ve raised millions, but your product team is struggling to deliver.
Your FAANG hire is causing friction as their big tech experience isn’t working here.
The CEO is forced into firefighting product strategy instead of scaling the business.
Your roadmap has grown complex and unfocused, making it difficult to prioritize the features that deliver real impact
You feel the gaps in leadership, but a full-time CPO is too expensive and risky.
The Results Speak For Themselves
Rapid Scale
Scaled product teams from as few as 5 to over 260 in just 12 months, building agile methodologies and a growth-ready culture for Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group, British Airways, Unilever, P&G, and others.
Operational Excellence
Boosted development velocity by 300%, reduced rework and defects by 98%, and resolved years of technical debt for Teachers1on1, created methodologies and tools for $625M/yr program that united 8 business units for Lloyds Banking Group
User & Market Growth
Increased mobile user penetration by 16.3%, reaching 19.3M users for Lloyds Banking Group, and grew monthly active users by 20% within 3 months for Zippia.
Fundraising Impact
Crafted product visions that secured over $18M in VC funding at a 20x multiplier for FanAI, unlocked $100M+ in corporate investment for Lloyds Banking Group, and secured contracts worth over $150M for Publicis Sapient.
Marketplace Optimization
Reduced onboarding time by up to 95% for Teachers1on1, and successfully onboarded over 1,000 brand teams and agencies for Unilever, accelerating network effects.
Data-Driven Strategy
Delivered 100M+ pages of content for Zippia, launched 1,800 websites for Unilever and refined 1,800+ product interventions into $100M+ in critical initiatives, impacting 30M customers for Lloyds Banking Group.
What I Do Differently
Immediate Impact – No lengthy hiring cycles or ramp-up time.
Strategic & Hands-On – More than an advisor; a leader embedded in your team.
Transitional Support – Bridge leadership gaps, reorgs, and scaling pains.
Cost-Efficiency – Skip six-figure salaries, benefits, and equity dilution.
Reliable Flexibility – Scale leadership up or down as your needs evolve.
The Fractional Advantage
Well-validated strategies that position your business for success.
Roadmap Alignment – Keep teams paddling in the same direction with clear execution plans.
Proper Prioritization – Ensure pivots are proactive, not chaotic.
Strong Strategic Frameworks
High-Performing Teams – Structure teams with the right talent mix for scale.
Tooling & Process – Implement lean methodologies and AI-driven optimization.
AI Tooling – Leverage agentic tools, data, and automation to accelerate growth.
Capable Product Operations
Why Founders Choose a Fractional CPO
High-speed execution without the risks and costs of a full-time hire
Structured processes that enable scalable growth with your existing team
Stronger investor confidence with a clear product vision and a 25-year-validated presentation
Alignment across teams, reducing confusion and inefficiency
Deliberate strategic choices instead of reactive decision-making
Chris Dowell: Your Fractional CPO
Chris Dowell is an award-winning, four-time Chief Product Officer and former Founder with over 20 years of experience leading product innovation, scaling teams, and driving $100M+ business transformations.
As a fractional CPO, Chris partners with fast-growing startups and scaleups to bring AI-driven product strategies, structured execution, and investor-ready leadership - without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire.
A whistlestop tour of Chris’s background:
Scaled cross-functional product organizations from 5 people to over 250 in as little as 12 months, for multiple startups and clients—establishing robust delivery methodologies, tooling, and cultures that sustained rapid growth
Consistently brought order and clarity to product roadmaps across diverse industries—including entertainment, banking, telecoms, and retail—aligning stakeholders on clear priorities that accelerate time-to-customer-value by up to 30%
Across diverse companies, rapidly launched award-winning new products and features on tight timelines—delivering measurable wins such as enhanced user satisfaction (for example, an NPS increase of +3.3 pts), expanded customer growth (for example, reaching 19.3M users), accelerated deployment (for example, 1,500 websites in 18 months), and greater operational scale (for example, supporting $19T in annual payments).
Developed winning product strategies for diverse clients and startups by tailoring customer research to each challenge—from orchestrating large-scale 1,000-experiment incubators to executing agile guerrilla testing with paper prototypes—ensuring every initiative was optimally informed and positioned for success.
Developed compelling product visions and roadmaps that drove investment decisions—raising over $18M in venture capital at a 20x multiplier, securing $100M+ in corporate funding for a single initiative, saving $125M by avoiding unproductive investments, and locking down over $500M in total funding.
Built and scaled two-sided marketplaces across corporate and startup environments—optimizing B2B and B2C models to reduce onboarding time by up to 95% and successfully onboarding over 1,000 brand teams and agencies—accelerating network effects and operational efficiency.
Engineered expansive data architectures and built elite data science teams to harness semantic analysis, NLP, and early LLMs—delivering 100M+ pages of content, powering real-time transaction alerts at $600K per second, and analyzing 250TB of Twitter data on-demand as a top-4 global data customer.
Here’s what past colleagues say about Chris