A year ago, a VP of Product spent most of their week managing people. Today, the same title might spend most of the week writing PRDs.
That shift came up repeatedly in our July 8 session on product compensation at venture-backed companies, with Martyn Bassett, Heidi Ram, and Andrew Shaw. It’s not a minor trend. It’s changing who gets hired, what they’re paid to do once they’re in the seat, and how founders are defining “leadership” in the first place.
The line that explains it
Heidi Ram, our Product Practice Lead for The Product Recruiter, put it in one sentence:
“We don’t want the person who was in the room when it was being built. We want the person who was building it.”
That’s the filter founders are applying right now, at every level, up to and including CPO. Process managers and coordinators, the people who used to run the room, are losing ground. Hands-on operators who can still sit with engineers, write specs, and ship are winning it.
What this looks like in practice
Andrew Shaw, who leads Martyn Bassett Associates’ search practice, described it as compression: leadership titles taking on individual-contributor characteristics.
“Companies aren’t looking for people who’ve managed people. Even if their team is 24 product professionals that they support, the title is, ‘I’ve managed this team, and we’ve delivered X.’ That vernacular has changed. They are closer to the build.”
Heidi shared a real example: a CPO in the Bay Area, comfortably in the millions in compensation, described his own working style this way: “I’m writing PRD stuff. I’m trying to get it as far as I can before I involve others.”
That’s not a founder or an early-stage operator. That’s a CPO, choosing to do the work himself before handing it off.
The same pattern is showing up in reverse moves. Andrew and Heidi are both seeing CPOs step into IC roles, and CTOs moving into individual contributor positions with titles like “technical staff.” It’s not a demotion. It’s a recognition that the most valuable thing some leaders can do right now is build.
Why this is happening now
A few forces are converging:
AI collapsed the distance between product and engineering. Andrew’s take: “The role now touches technical depth that it never touched before. I think founders need to recognize that they’re competing against research and engineering compensation, and what that looks like with an AI-fluent product manager.”
Speed matters more than coordination overhead. When product roadmaps change weekly instead of quarterly, a leader who has to route every decision through a team of specialists is slower than one who can just make the call and build the thing.
Founders have fewer people to spread work across. Multiple panellists pointed to the emergence of the “CPTO” persona, one person doing the job that used to take two, as a driver of the comp increases we’ve seen since 2020.
What it means if you’re hiring
If you’re writing a job description for a VP or CPO role right now, ask yourself honestly: are you hiring someone to run a team, or someone to build alongside one? Those are different searches, with different comp expectations, and candidates can tell within the first interview which one you’re actually running.
What it means if you’re the candidate
If you’re a product leader who’s spent the last few years mostly in meetings, this is worth sitting with. The market isn’t asking whether you can manage. It’s asking whether you can still do the work yourself when it counts. If the honest answer is that you’ve drifted away from hands-on building, that’s a gap worth closing before your next search, not during it.
Knowing which search you’re actually running, manager or builder, changes everything downstream: comp, sourcing, even who says yes. Book a time with us and we’ll help you get that call right from the start.
This post is drawn from our July 8, 2026 live session, “What Venture-Backed Companies Are Actually Really Paying for Product Roles,” with Martyn Bassett, Heidi Ram, and Andrew Shaw. Watch the full recording at hs.mbassett.com/product-salary-webinar.