In this week's edition of the SPOT - the newsletter for PMs at small software companies — we talk about becoming a chief product officer, writing your own playbook, and SaaS metrics.

What Does It Take to Become a Chief Product Officer?

In this article, the Vice President of Product at Codecademy and the Chief Product Officer at Happy Money share their experience and advice for moving into a chief product rule.

They give some great advice on how to get into a chief product role — like demonstrating leadership & communication skills and understanding customer needs.

That being said — look at what both of them did (versus what they're saying) before their role. One had their own startup and worked at a variety of other roles. The other was technical and then became a product manager in a couple of different industries. Having a variety of experience is key for a role as diverse as CPO.

How Startups Plan For Billion-Dollar Success

It can be a lot of fun to read through the "playbooks" of successful startups to try to emulate what they did. And there's nothing wrong with that. Reading playbooks of successful startups is a great way to learn strategies and approaches that may come in handy for the future.

The thing is that these big successful companies aren't you (yet). You need to do you by finding the things only you're good at.

The author of this article covers how to write your own rough playbook. Start with what you're working on today, then include what your medium-term plans may be, and finally lay out what the whole journey will look like as well as how it will end.

SaaSy Math

Need to know how to calculate some critical SaaS metrics? This one is for you.

You've probably already seen most of these calculated for you somewhere (NRR, GRR, Churn, CAC). But this is the first time I've heard of Retention Margin surprisingly. Turns out it's kinda like how much money you get to keep per retained customer. TIL. Very cool.

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Have a great week! Go build some cool stuff.

Corinn @ Speckled & Roadvote.io