Chief Product Officer.

The exchange had grown by adding product surfaces faster than it had added product leadership, and the institutional roadmap had reached the point where that approach no longer scaled. Spot, derivatives and the new prime stack were each being run by capable functional leads with different views on sequencing, pricing and the institutional client experience. The CEO wanted a CPO who could own the product strategy across all three surfaces and present a single coherent institutional product to the market.

The constraints were unusual for the seat. The CPO had to be senior enough to be credible with the institutional clients the prime stack was being built for, technical enough to hold their own with the exchange's protocol and matching engineers, and operationally fluent enough to land roadmap commitments through three different product organisations. Compensation reflected a board-facing executive role. Geography was open across the firm's three major hubs.

The bench of people who have actually been CPO at a digital assets exchange is small, and most of them are already in seats they are not leaving. Below that tier sits a wider group of senior product leaders who have owned one surface — typically derivatives or spot — at a tier-one venue, and a separate group of institutional product leaders from prime brokerage who understand the buy-side workflow but have not yet run product at exchange scale.

Our read was that the right person would come from the second of those two groups: a prime-brokerage product leader stepping up into exchange-scale ownership, or a senior surface owner from a competing exchange ready for the full product mandate. We anchored the search on operators who had already managed across spot and derivatives in some form, on the grounds that the third surface — prime — could be apprenticed into more easily than the first two. Craig led the first conversations and the board joined assessment earlier than usual.

The shortlist drew from senior product leaders at competing exchanges who had owned more than one surface, and from prime-brokerage product leaders with substantive crypto exposure stepping up to a board-facing seat. Every introduction came from Craig.

• Surface owners from tier-one venues stepping up to consolidated product leadership.
• Prime-brokerage product leaders ready to move into exchange-scale ownership.
• Senior product executives from regulated brokerage with documented institutional client traction.
• A small set of crossover candidates from market-maker product organisations.

The hire came from the prime-brokerage tier. They had run institutional product at a major regulated broker, spent two years inside a crypto-native firm building the institutional surface, and held the kind of buy-side relationships the prime stack was being built to serve. What made them right was the way they framed the consolidation question in the second board meeting: not as a re-organisation but as a sequencing decision about which institutional client the firm wanted to serve first, with everything else following from that choice.

The close was carefully managed. The candidate's existing equity package was structured to vest into a competing event, so the offer had to absorb both the buy-out and the institutional credibility the seat conferred. The exchange's board agreed a structure that aligned the CPO's outcomes to institutional product revenue specifically, rather than to firm-wide metrics. Offer signed on the thirteenth week.

“The lesson was about reading the seat correctly before reading the bench. The temptation with a CPO search at an exchange is to default to exchange product leaders, on the assumption that exchange experience is the load-bearing requirement. Here the load-bearing requirement was institutional credibility, and that pointed the search at a different bench from the start. Spectrum's role was to hold the brief to that framing through the first two months, when the easier path was to widen toward functional fit.”

— Craig Oliver