When CPO Becomes CMO: The Expanding Role of Product Leaders | Karen Chao (Flowspace)
Karen Chao, CPO and Head of Marketing at Flowspace, explains why product and marketing are converging, and how AI-enabled teams can move faster while staying aligned on customer understanding.
TL;DR
In this episode of LaunchPod, we’re joined by Karen Chao, Chief Product Officer at Flowspace, where she also leads marketing — a dual role that reflects a growing trend in how product leaders are being asked to operate.
Karen shares:
How she became both CPO and Head of Marketing, and why combining the two improves alignment between product and GTM
How Flowspace’s product team uses AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and coding agents to accelerate discovery, prototype faster, and ship small bug fixes
Why product leaders need to prepare for AI-powered go-to-market automation, and how marketing functions will evolve as AI takes over more operational and analytical work
1. Use AI to improve discovery, not just delivery (3:48)
Karen’s team doesn’t treat AI as a feature add-on. They use it from the first moments of discovery, from competitive research, early ideation, to pressure-testing product thinking before getting engineers involved.
“We’re using Cursor and Claude hooked up to our code base. They help us ask questions we might ask our tech lead.”
By interrogating the codebase directly through AI, PMs enter engineering conversations with clearer requirements and fewer blind spots.
What product leaders can do: Treat AI as your first reviewer. Run PRDs, problem hypotheses, and early ideas through AI agents before any refinement meeting. You’ll reduce churn and increase decision clarity.
2. Let AI handle the tiny things engineers shouldn’t (6:57)
Flowspace’s PMs now use coding agents to handle the “microfixes” that traditionally rot in the backlog: missing fields, copy inconsistencies, small logic tweaks, etc.
“Some folks on my team have gotten really into these coding agents and are actually starting to push out code fixes. Obviously it goes through the typical development cycle, but those are things we can do instead of sending it to the engineer.”
These are changes too small to distract engineers with, but meaningful enough to remove friction from the product.
What product leaders can do: Create a category of AI-owned quick wins. Let PMs use coding agents to ship tiny fixes that unblock customers without pulling engineers out of flow.
3. When product leaders get asked to “do more with less” (15:11)
Karen’s marketing leadership role came to her because Flowspace needed tighter alignment across product, messaging, funnels, and customer understanding. This reflects a broader shift: product leaders being asked to absorb more GTM responsibility.
“Marketing seemed like an opportunity to bring product and marketing closer. Taking over marketing is only gonna make me a better product leader.”
What surprised her most was how naturally product thinking transfers to marketing: customer insights, funnel logic, problem-solving, and data-driven decision-making.
What product leaders can do: Increase collaboration between product and GTM. Even without owning both, run shared funnel reviews, shared customer interviews, and shared alignment rituals.
4. Marketing’s next transformation will be AI-powered (17:56)
As Karen dug deeper into marketing, she immediately saw the next frontier: AI-driven automation across lead qualification, funnels, and operational tooling.
“I think every person in their function and every function needs to be thinking about how AI can help them be more effective going forward in this new way of working.”
She also encountered the “spaghetti” of today’s marketing tooling — many systems, loosely connected, creating operational drag.
What product leaders can do: Treat AI as marketing infrastructure. Adopt agentic lead qualification, automated segmentation, funnel diagnostics, and smarter multi-tool orchestration.
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
Links
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