For many teams, the Product Owner (PO) is seen as the central force behind a product’s success. It sounds logical: the PO is the voice of the customer, the bridge between business stakeholders and the cross-functional team, and—as many experts describe—a “purple person” blending business insight (red) with technical understanding (blue).

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:

👉 Many products still fail even when led by outstanding POs.

Why? Because product success requires more than excellence in one role. It requires alignment and leadership across the entire product life cycle—and that life cycle is long, complex, and continuously evolving.

Why a Great Product Owner Is Not Enough

When we talk about products here, we mean commercial products (“product products”), not limited-scope deliverables from a single project (“project products”). The life of a commercial product stretches across multiple phases, involving multiple releases, strategic shifts, and business model updates.

A PO plays a crucial role—but only for a slice of that journey.

Product Owner → Responsible for the Release

The PO ensures the team delivers not just a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), but true Business Increments and Minimum Marketable Releases (MMR) that carry the highest business value for customers and end users—ensuring every release is valuable, usable, and impactful.

But…

Product Manager → Responsible for Benefit Realization

A strong Product Manager oversees benefits across phases, not just releases. They ensure the product generates measurable value throughout its evolution.

Understanding the Product Life Cycle

A typical product life cycle includes four phases: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline. Each phase requires different leadership skills, different investments, and different decision-making logic.

The Left Side (Introduction & Growth) requires a “Blue Product Manager” with strong technical understanding and calls for:

• Heavy investment
• Multiple experimental projects
• Rapid feature expansion
• Strong technical and data depth
• Goal: Find solution-market fit and product-market fit

The Right Side (Maturity & Decline) requires “Red Product Manager” with excellent business insight and demands:

• Focus on profit
• Business model adjustments
• Competitive positioning
• Operational efficiencies
• Goal: Maximize revenue before decline

So, yes:

• Product Owner = Purple → a blend of business (red) + technology (blue)
• Product Manager (early phases) = Blue → technical depth + analytical rigor
• Product Manager (later phases) = Red → commercial focus + business-model optimization

But even this is not enough.

The Missing Piece: The Chief Product Officer

Even when you have:

• Purple Product Owners (delivery excellence)
• Blue Product Managers (growth acceleration)
• Red Product Managers (commercial maximization)

The product still faces risks without strategic, end-to-end leadership.

This is where the Chief Product Officer (CPO) becomes essential.

CPO → Accountable for the Entire Product Lifecycle

• Owns the product vision
• Governs the enterprise product roadmap
• Connects market trends, customer feedback, and organizational strategy
• Ensures coherence across releases, phases, teams, and funding cycles

A strong CPO ensures that product decisions are not just good for the next sprint or the next release, but for the next three years.

Without this role, even outstanding POs and PMs operate in silos—leading to fragmented priorities, inconsistent customer experience, and ultimately, failed products.

From PO to PM to CPO: A Product Track with PMxAI™

This topic aligns directly with the Product Track in the PMxAI™ Certification Roadmap, where AI elevates product roles from execution to strategy.

• PMxAI™ Product Owner (PO): Define product backlog and deliver customer value with AI-driven prioritization. AI supports backlog refinement, insight clustering, and dynamic prioritization to help POs deliver higher-quality increments faster.
• PMxAI™ Product Manager (PM): Leverage AI for portfolio prioritization, roadmap optimization, and faster time-to-market. AI enables PMs to validate assumptions, run scenario simulations, and optimize investments across product phases.
• PMxAI™ Chief Product Officer (CPO): Shape enterprise product strategy, governance, and innovation with PMxAI™. AI empowers CPOs to integrate market signals, customer feedback, operational metrics, and financial models into a unified strategic view.

Final Thoughts

An outstanding PO is valuable—but not sufficient.

Product success requires the right leadership at every level, across every phase of the product life cycle:

• PO → Delivering value
• PM → Realizing benefits
• CPO → Owning product strategy end-to-end

When all three operate together—and when AI enhances decision-making across the board—organizations unlock the full potential of their products and accelerate value in ways traditional models cannot match.

(PMxAI™ and the PMxAI™ Certification Roadmapthe PMxAI™ Certification Roadmap are trademarks of IMT Project Management Corp.)