The Executive Scorecard for Product Health

Most CEOs can read a P&L in five minutes. But ask them how healthy their product organization is, and you’ll often get a shrug. And it’s not for lack of effort. Boards are asking. Investors are pushing. But the typical dashboards and OKR check-ins don’t tell the complete story. They may show motion but not meaning.

In my fractional CPO work, I’ve found that most executive teams lack one critical tool: a simple, shared mental model for understanding whether their product team is healthy and positioned to win.

That’s where the Executive Scorecard for Product Health comes in. It’s not a KPI spreadsheet. It’s not a velocity tracker. It’s a conversation starter, built to expose what matters and highlight where leadership needs to lean in.

Let’s walk through it.

1. Clarity of Strategy

What to ask:

Can your PMs and squads explain the “why” behind what they’re working on, and how it ties to your company’s biggest bets? When product teams lack clarity, they default to shipping what’s asked of them. That leads to a flurry of activity with little impact. A healthy product organization operates from a strong product strategy that clearly connects company-level objectives to the initiatives on the roadmap.

Signs of weakness:

• Teams can’t articulate the goal behind their work.

• Prioritization feels reactive or political.

• Stakeholders constantly ask for “status updates” because they don’t trust the plan.

As an executive, your job is to ensure the product organization isn’t just busy, but aligned.

2. Roadmap Risk Profile

What to ask:

Is your roadmap a balanced portfolio of “defend,” “expand,” and “explore” work, or are you playing it safe? Too many roadmaps are overloaded with incremental optimizations and tech debt. That’s survivorship thinking. A healthy product roadmap includes growth bets and initiatives with real upside with required learning. This approach isn’t about being reckless. It’s about ensuring your product org is taking calculated risks that could unlock disproportionate value.

Signs of weakness:

• Nothing on the roadmap is uncertain, which means you’re not innovating.

• The roadmap is entirely driven by stakeholder asks.

• No meaningful discovery work is happening.

Strong companies don’t scale safe roadmaps. Instead, they scale smart risk.

3. Learning Velocity

What to ask:

Are product teams consistently testing assumptions, running experiments, and course-correcting based on real insights? The best product teams don’t treat discovery as a phase. They treat it as a muscle. You don’t want teams who only ship. You want teams who learn quickly and often. Healthy product organizations make decisions based on evidence, not gut feelings or HiPPOs.

Signs of weakness:

• A/B tests are rare, and learnings aren’t shared.

• Teams don’t talk to customers regularly.

• Roadmaps are locked down quarters in advance.

Your competitive advantage isn’t just how fast you build. It’s how fast you learn.

4. PM Empowerment

What to ask:

Are your product managers empowered to say no to low-leverage work and make real decisions, or are they glorified project coordinators? In unhealthy product organizations, PMs are overloaded with intake, coordination, and appeasement. By contrast, in healthy organizations PMs operate as product leaders: identifying opportunities, setting priorities, and driving outcomes. Empowerment isn’t a cultural perk. It’s a business imperative. Disempowered PMs can’t deliver results.

Signs of weakness:

• PMs don’t own outcomes, just timelines.

• Every stakeholder request becomes a roadmap item.

• PMs escalate every tradeoff instead of making calls.

Want better product outcomes? Give PMs the room and support to lead.

5. Customer Understanding

What to ask:

When did the product team last surprise you with an insight about your customer? The best PMs are obsessed with their users. They seek out friction, dig into nuance, and bring back learnings that move the business forward. Customer insights aren’t just for researchers or designers. They’re the fuel for great product decisions.

Signs of weakness:

• Customer interviews are rare or outsourced.

• Personas are dated and generic.

• Customer problems are assumed, not validated.

If your product team isn’t surfacing new insights regularly, they’re probably building on outdated assumptions.

How to Use the Scorecard

This scorecard is not something to be filled out quarterly and forgotten. Its purpose is to anchor regular, honest conversations about what’s working and what’s not. Use it in:

• Executive offsites

• Product leadership 1:1s

• Board or investor updates

Better yet, give it to your product leaders and ask them to self-assess. The uncovered gaps will tell you everything you need to know about where your product organization needs support.

Final Thought

You don’t need to be a product expert to know whether your product organization is healthy. You need the right lens. As a fractional CPO, this is one of the first conversations I have with executive teams. Because until we’re aligned on what good looks like, we’re just guessing.

If your product org is shipping a lot but delivering too little, maybe it’s time to step back and ask the right questions.