The CPO Connect Origin Story

Last Thursday we held our first CPO Connect IRL event. It was good to meet so many members face to face. Nice venue, good conversations, generous hosts at Made by Many.

I opened the evening with the origin story. No slides. No notes. Inevitably, I missed half the points I wanted to make. So here’s the fuller version.

How it started

A year ago, I was out of work in a brutal market. I was lurking in a WhatsApp-based product community when someone posted asking if anyone wanted to join a Job Search Council. I’d heard of the book Never Search Alone but hadn’t read it. The premise was simple: form a group of five or six peers, all job hunting, and support each other through it.

I figured, why not. Gave it a thumbs up.

For the next ten months, six of us met every Friday for an hour on Zoom. At first, we followed the methodology closely. We worked on our value propositions, refined our role criteria, shared intel on the market. It was useful. We needed the structure and accountability to get ourselves organised.

But as weeks turned into months, the purpose evolved. Our needs changed.

What job searching actually feels like

Being on your own, scrolling job boards, filling out forms, tweaking your CV, sitting through protracted interview processes only to be ghosted afterwards. It’s exhausting. It’s demoralising.

You start to lose confidence. You worry about your career. You worry about money. You get angry at how dysfunctional the whole system has become. Useless platforms. Careless recruiting teams. The AI slop of it all.

No one in my world could really understand this. My wife tried. Friends asked out of kindness. But as time went on, they asked less. It just became too depressing to talk about.

But you’re still working at it every day. The grind continues. It gets lonelier the longer it takes.

So I really looked forward to those Friday calls. For that hour, I could be open and honest about what was going on. The wins and the losses of that week. I knew the other five people on that call understood and cared.

While everyone else gave well-meaning platitudes that left me feeling disconnected, I felt increasingly connected to these five people through a shared experience and understanding.

Spotting the opportunity

It was on one of those calls that we started talking about an opportunity.

The WhatsApp community where we’d met was changing. The owner announced a paid membership model. A gap had formed for a different type of community with different values.

Driven by our experience of finding and benefiting from quality peer connections, we developed a vision together. We reached out to three more people we considered vital. When the moment arose, we acted. CPO Connect grew from there.

Why the origin story matters

This backstory influences everything we’re trying to achieve with CPO Connect.

Regardless of what we want to achieve professionally, it will inevitably rely on insight, advice, support, referrals and collaboration with industry peers. We want to enable these peer connections.

We have no desire to become an events business or a membership business. We’re more interested in creating quality connections. That’s why we called it CPO Connect.

What success looks like

Since we launched, we’ve grown to 300 product leaders. We have excellent conversations happening daily across our various channels. The inaugural event was well received based on the feedback.

But for me, the real evidence of success is this: we now have eight functioning Job Search Councils and four peer-to-peer mentoring groups. That’s around 100 product leaders involved in small peer support groups, just like our original JSC.

Two members have also launched a new business venture together after meeting in the community.

This is the stuff that really matters. Not event attendance. Not membership numbers. Peer connections that create real value.

That’s what we’re building.

- Gregor