- ProductCPO
Discover what a Head of Product does, how much they earn, and what skills they need for success. Learn how to hire a flexible, fractional product leader.
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…
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.
Vicky 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.
Vicky 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.
Vicky 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.
Vicky 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.
Vicky 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.
Vicky 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.
Zapier automates workflows by connecting your favorite apps and services, allowing you to create automated tasks with no code.
Zapier'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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Product Manager
Feb 2009 - Aug 2012
Built healthcare solutions for large hospital systems, focused on revenue cycle products.