- Almost every agency sells strategy, but agencies make their money on development work, so their incentives quietly push every conversation towards more build.
- That isn't dishonesty. It's structure. When the invoice grows with the scope, "you should build this" is the advice the business model rewards.
- A fractional CPO isn't selling you a build, so it can sit on the founder's side of the table and advise purely on the right product outcome.
- For an early-stage founder, the right outcome is often to spend as little as possible: experiment, test the cheap way, and avoid paying to build the wrong thing. That is advice an agency can rarely afford to give.
Look at almost any agency pitch and the first slide is strategy. Discovery, product thinking, a workshop or two, a narrative about being a partner rather than a supplier. It is genuinely well meant, and the people delivering it are often very good. But there is a question worth asking before you hand over the brief, and it is not about their talent. It is about their incentives. How does this business actually make its money?
For a development agency, the answer is almost always the same: it makes money when it builds things. Strategy is the front door. Build is the house. And once you understand that, you understand why the strategy an agency sells so often arrives at the same conclusion, no matter the question you walked in with.
The tell is in the invoice.
Follow the money and the pattern is obvious. An agency's revenue grows with the size of the build. More features, more screens, more integrations, a bigger v1: all of it is more invoice. So when a founder asks "should we build this?", the business model has a strong opinion before anyone in the room has thought about the product. The honest, structural answer an agency is set up to give is "yes, and here's how much."
I want to be fair about this, because it isn't villainy. Most agency people are not rubbing their hands and overselling. They have simply been conditioned, over years and hundreds of projects, by a system that rewards saying yes. The account grows when the scope grows. Nobody hits their number by talking a client out of work. Over time that shapes what feels like good advice, and "let's build it properly" starts to sound like diligence rather than what it often is: the option that happens to pay.
"Strategy" that always points at more build.
The result is a particular flavour of strategy. It is real work, but it bends, gently and consistently, towards the thing that gets sold. The rebuild is recommended over the patch. The platform is recommended over the prototype. The comprehensive v1 is recommended over the scrappy test. Each individual call might even be defensible. But the direction never changes, and the direction is always: spend more, build more, start now.
What a founder almost never hears from someone who bills for build is the sentence that would have saved them the most money. You don't need to build this yet. Or at all. Or not like this.
On your side of the table.
This is the whole case for the CPO Piece, and it is simpler than it sounds. A fractional CPO is not selling you a build. There is no development invoice waiting at the end of the strategy, no account to grow, no scope that pays better the bigger it gets. That single fact changes where the advice can come from. It can come purely from the product question: what is the right outcome for this business, this founder, this stage, this pound of runway?
Sometimes the honest answer to that question is "build it, and here's why." A good CPO will say so without hesitation. But sometimes the answer is "don't", and a CPO is one of the few voices in a founder's orbit that can afford to say it plainly, because saying it costs them nothing. They are on the same side of the table as you, looking at the same problem, with the same interest in not wasting your money.
The best answer is often don't spend.
For an early-stage founder this matters more than almost anything else, because at that stage money is time and time is survival. I wrote a whole issue on not spending, and the CPO Piece is how that discipline gets into the room. Faced with a problem, the reflex a good product leader brings is not "what shall we build?" but "how little can we get away with to learn whether this is even worth building?"
That usually looks like the opposite of an agency engagement. A landing page and some ad spend instead of a product. A concierge test done by hand instead of an automation. A prototype in front of ten real users instead of a v1 in front of the market. A clear "no" to the feature that three loud customers asked for but the numbers won't support. None of these carry a big build invoice, which is exactly why the people who live on build invoices rarely lead with them. A CPO on your side leads with them every time, because for you they are usually the right call.
But isn't a CPO just another cost?
It's the fair objection, so let me meet it. Yes, a fractional CPO is a fee. But it is a small, bounded fee bought precisely to stop a large, unbounded one. A few weeks of senior product judgment sits in front of the six-figure build decision and asks whether it should happen at all, and in what shape. The maths only looks like a cost if you assume the build was always going to be right. Most aren't. The Sanity Check exists for exactly this reason, and the CPO Piece is the ongoing version of the same idea: someone senior, on your side, between you and the expensive mistake.
How we use this at Product Pieces.
The CPO Piece is senior product leadership you can plug in without a full-time hire, and without a development invoice quietly shaping the advice. It starts with the free Diagnostic: twenty minutes to work out whether the piece your product function is missing is that independent, product-first voice on your side of the table. Sometimes the answer is that you're fine and don't need one. That's the sort of answer we can afford to give, because we aren't trying to sell you a build either.