When CPO Becomes CMO: The Expanding Role of Product Leaders | Karen Chao (Flowspace)

Today, we’re joined by Karen Chao, Chief Product Officer at Flowspace, an ecommerce logistics platform, where she’s also taken on a role as head of marketing. Previously, Karen held product leadership roles at Apple, Replicon, Innit, and more.

In this episode, Karen shares:

• How she ended up running Marketing on top of Product, and how bringing these two functions under one leader has improved go-to-market for Flowspace
  
• The biggest surprises she’s uncovered running marketing as a product leader, from chaotic tool stacks to the next wave of AI-powered go-to-market automation
• And how Flowspace’s product team uses AI tools like Cursor and Claude to accelerate discovery and prototyping, and even ship small bug fixes straight to production without Engineers involved

Links

Karen's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karen1chao/
Flowspace: https://flow.space/

Resources

(Ethically) cheat your way to $250M+ | Mikal Lewis, Product Exec. (Whole Foods, Nordstrom): https://youtu.be/5txeT2U_YQo

Chapters

00:00: Intro
02:06: Karen's career highlights
03:59: How Karen and Flowspace are using AI in their team workflows
15:11: The intersection of product and marketing
22:13: What's surprised Karen most about transitioning from product to marketing
29:12: Conclusion

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