Discover what makes a great CPO, their key responsibilities, necessary skills, and innovative hiring models for your business's growth.
Vicky Volvovski
Product strategist & consultant | former Head of Product @ Zapier | Founder in climate tech
I'm Vicky Volvovski, a seasoned product strategist, operator, and team leader. Throughout my 15+ year product career, I've worked across a number of different industries (healthcare tech, workflow automation, media, climate) and company stages (startups, growth stage, and enterprise).
I've seen wild success, like heading up product at Zapier – growing from $10M to $100M ARR over my 5+ years. I've also learned just as much from my failures – most recently selling my 2 year old climate te…
Testimonials
Anybody looking for a product leader should jump at the chance to work with Vicky. Her no-bs approach and wealth of experience will up-level your product strategy, operations, and team within a matter of weeks. But she's also not afraid to get in the weeds and execute faster than just about anybody I know.
Jorge Mir Alvarez
Associate Director of Product, PostlightVicky is one of the most intentional and systematic thinkers I’ve worked with. At Zapier, I watched and learned as she led dozens of teams toward smart solutions to complex problems. I got to see her use the same skills on a different scale at Canopy. Vicky’s biggest strength is her ability to identify highly impactful work and rally her teams accordingly. She sifts through ambiguity to find opportunities, working with peers to understand challenges and create genuinely empathetic solutions.
Adam Baumgartner
Senior Product Designer, ZapierVicky is a stellar combination of product strategist, product manager, and executive partner to engineering. She has an innate ability to strike the right balance between vision and practice. She is thoughtful, methodical, and pragmatic when it comes to tackling large, intricate problems. She has an incredible work ethic and naturally up-levels the people around her. Finally and most importantly, she's fun to work with.
Doug Gaff
VP Engineering, ZapierVicky has everything you'd want in a product strategist: clear vision, keen attention to detail, and a highly collaborative disposition. In two months with us, she (a) managed a full newsletter redesign and HTML template project, (b) led the development of a lifestyle guide product, and (c) helped us put the pieces in place for the transition to a permanent product solution. (For the record, we tried to keep her around!) Highly recommend her services to anyone with a hard problem to solve.
Ryan Alberti
Co-founder and COO, The Cool DownVicky was the lead PM and main point of contact with our development agency when building and launching Puck. She was an integral part of the team and brought discipline and creativity to our product development and GTM strategy. She is an all around fantastic human and would add value to any team. I hope to work with her again in the future.
Max Tcheyan
Co-founder & Head of Growth, PuckVicky is an excellent product manager and team member and I would gladly work with her again. She is a strong and fast executor - she's highly organized, works well across teams, is a good communicator and drives action. She also thinks strategically, always has great feedback, and can connect higher level goals to the product roadmap. She's customer focused, great at user research, thoughtful and works well with others.
Lauren Fraser
Co-founder + Head of Partnerships, Canopy ConnectVicky is one of my all time favorite folks to work with. She's a product thinker that doesn't get lost in the theory, but also ensures that the team delivers value to customers that wows them. You know that when Vicky's on it, it's going to get done, and she gets the best from the teams around her. If I were hiring her as a fractional leader, I'd be excited for my full time folks to see what good looks like across both product strategy and execution.
Stephen Levin
Head of Business Ops, Zapier
Work
Zapier's Workflow Automation Product
https://zapier.com/Zapier automates workflows by connecting your favorite apps and services, allowing you to create automated tasks with no code.
Zapier's Developer Platform
https://zapier.com/developer-platformZapier's platform allows third-party developers to connect their APIs to Zapier, which gives their users the ability to connect to 6,000+ apps.
Canopy
https://canopyclimate.com/Canopy helps homeowners transition their home from running on fossil fuels to clean, electric technology by providing personalized guidance and connecting them with local contractors, rebates, financing, and more.
Probable Futures Professional
https://probablefutures.org/probable-futures-professional/Probable Futures Professional is a mapping platform where users are able to upload their data and visualize it on top of climate change maps. The platform can upload, process, and place ~1M data points, and includes a user-friendly UI that allowed users to manipulate and customize the visualizations, and more.
Puck News
https://puck.news/Puck News is a subscription based media company. Their platform included a CMS, a subscription and paywall service, personalization, BI capabilities, integrations with email, marketing tools, and more.
Experience
The Cool Down
Fractional Head of Product
Jan 2024 - Present
The Cool Down is America's mainstream climate brand, empowering people from all walks of life to help themselves while helping the planet.
- Defined product strategy for turning successful top-of-funnel media content into engaged community product, working on bringing it to life
- Redesigned mid-funnel newsletters to drive more engagement and retention
- Act as strategic partner to founders on all things product
Canopy
Co-founder & CPO
Jan 2022 - Jan 2024
Canopy is focused on reducing the 35% of US greenhouse gas emissions that come from the residential sector. Our product helps homeowners transition their home from running on fossil fuels to clean, electric technology by providing personalized guidance and connecting them with local contractors, rebates, financing, and more.
- Built product from the ground up, finding early signs of product market fit at ~14 months.
- Led two major pivots of our strategy, the second of which resulted in a ~14x increase in sales close rate and ~1.5x increase in user activation and conversion.
- Did all the things. Lots of user research, a decent amount of design, wrote a bit of code, owned product marketing and customer support, recruited and managed key employees, led sales demos, and generally filled any gap that needed filling.
Probable Futures
Fractional Product Strategist
Jun 2021 - Mar 2022
Probable Futures is a non-profit climate literacy initiative that makes practical tools, stories, and resources available online to everyone, everywhere.
- Hired as consultant to define strategy for PF's Professional offering, a climate risk mapping and visualization tool
- Worked with design and engineering to build a tool used by journalists, academics, and consultants to assess risks that affect their communities or organizations
Puck News
Fractional Head of Product
Apr 2021 - Mar 2022
Puck is a subscription based media company focused on the inside story at the nexus of power, money, and ego.
- Hired as consultant to define the strategy and build the initial MVP platform, which we launched in 4 months
- Defined optimization strategy to help Puck double down on it's growth after initial launch
- Acquired ~200k subscribers and ~$2M ARR in its first year
Zapier
Head of Product (and various roles leading up to it)
Jul 2015 - Dec 2020
Zapier is a SaaS company working on democratizing automation by building products that allow users to connect web/mobile apps in order to automate workflows.
- Helped grow the company from 30 people to 300+, the user base from 500k to 3M+, the platform from 500 apps to 3000+, and ARR from $10M to >$100M
- Built the company strategy as part of the exec team, created a product vision that would help us achieve the strategy, and then empowered the product teams to deliver
- Consistently charged with taking on Zapier’s most strategically critical programs and opportunities by the CEO
Epic
Product Manager
Feb 2009 - Aug 2012
Built healthcare solutions for large hospital systems, focused on revenue cycle products.
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