Georgie Smallwood on the CPTO Role, Product-Led Arrogance, and Why Leadership Gets Harder

Georgie Smallwood is CPTO at Moonpig. Before that, she was CPO at N26 (scaling from 600k to 7 million customers in two years) and CPO at Tier Mobility across 520 cities. She studied history and sociology before ending up in product, and she leads 16 product teams today with full ownership of product, engineering, and data under one remit. This is a conversation about what it actually costs to hold that much accountability and move fast at the same time. We talk about the Jekyll-and-Hyde tension of being CPTO, using AI tools to argue with yourself when you own both sides of the product-engineering debate. We talk about why Georgie only understood what cross-functional collaboration really means after she moved to a company where technology was not the product being sold. And she makes an admission about her time at N26 that I think a lot of product leaders will recognise in themselves. We also get into operating models, why romanticizing one framework is always a trap, and what the trust equation has to do with AI transformation. At the end, Georgie shares what she believed five years ago that she has completely reversed on. Her answer surprised me. What you will hear in this episode: Why Georgie's history and sociology degree shapes how she thinks about product and AI The Jekyll-and-Hyde tension of being CPTO and the real risk of moving too fast The Weekly Rap: how Georgie communicates with 16 product teams every Friday and why The trust equation (credibility + reliability + intimacy / self-orientation) and how to apply it to AI adoption The dual CPTO role: what it means to be an executive first and a functional leader second Why Georgie says product leaders in product-first companies operate with quiet arrogance How romanticizing operating models burns product leaders out "If you have no dissent, you are not deciding" What she completely reversed on after 20 years in the role