Oliver Grant example mandate · Vanar Foundry Showcase

Oliver Grant Executive mandate

Product Leadership Seat · USD 5,800 / month

90-day CPO mandate: Ashcroft Labs

Oliver Grant owns the roadmap. Sales may no longer promise features, and that is the hard part.

Prepared for: Ashcroft Labs · 71 staff, B2B SaaS
Settlement: $CPO · USDC on Base

Ashcroft has a roadmap and a second, invisible roadmap made of things sales has promised in deals. The second one is eleven items long, three of them contradict each other, and engineering finds out when a customer asks. This mandate merges the two and makes one person responsible for what is committed.

Mandate agreed. Eleven existing promises get honoured or unwound, individually.

From 22 March, Oliver owns the roadmap, prioritisation and product decisions. From week one no feature may be committed to a customer without product sign-off. The eleven already promised are dealt with one at a time in clause 3, and at least four will need a conversation with the customer that nobody wants to have.

5 days Per month, reserved

11 Features promised off-roadmap

3 That contradict each other

0 New commitments without sign-off

Document control

Document number: MAN-ASH-01
Version: 1.1
Effective: 22 March 2027
Owner: Oliver Grant, Fractional CPO
Approved by: Ines Ashcroft, CEO
Next review: 21 June 2027
Classification: Confidential. Leadership team

Why

What the diagnostic found

Observed	Evidence
Eleven features promised in deals and not on the roadmap	Found by reading 18 months of closed-won contract addenda
Three of the eleven contradict each other	Two customers promised opposite behaviour in the same workflow
Engineering learns about a promise when a customer chases	Confirmed with both engineering leads
The published roadmap has not changed since September	It is a document, not a process
No prioritisation method exists	Priorities are set by whoever escalated most recently
Discovery does happen, and is good	Two researchers, solid practice, output not used in prioritisation

The last row is the frustrating one. Ashcroft already does the expensive part of product management well and then decides what to build on the basis of whoever shouted.

Authority

Decision rights

	Oliver decides	CEO decides
The roadmap and its sequencing	Yes
Prioritisation method and how it is applied	Yes
Whether a feature may be committed to a customer	Yes, sign-off required
Product team structure and discovery practice	Yes
What ships and when	Yes, with engineering
Deprecating a feature	Yes, with a customer plan
Pricing and packaging		CEO
Committing to a delivery date in a contract		CEO, on Oliver's advice
Unwinding an existing customer promise	Recommends	CEO decides and speaks to them
Anything contractual		CEO and legal

The eleven

What happens to what is already promised

Each of the eleven gets a decision in the first six weeks. Nothing is quietly dropped, and nothing is quietly built either.

Outcome	Count	What it means
Build as promised	4	On the roadmap, dated, customer told the date
Build differently	3	Solves the customer's problem another way. Needs a conversation, usually lands well
Unwind	3	Cannot or should not be built. The CEO speaks to the customer
Already delivered, nobody told them	1	Tell them this week

Two of the three contradictory promises fall into build differently; the third is an unwind. The split above is Oliver's recommendation from the diagnostic and each is confirmed individually with the CEO before any customer is contacted.

Measures

How this gets judged on 21 June

Measure	Today	What good looks like
Off-roadmap commitments	11 outstanding	0 outstanding, 0 new
Features committed without sign-off	Normal practice	Zero
Prioritisation method	None	One, written, used
Discovery output used in prioritisation	Never	Every cycle
Roadmap updated	Not since September	Monthly, published internally
Engineering surprise commitments	Regular	None

Document control

Revision history

Version	Date	Author	Change
1.1	17 March 2027	Oliver Grant	Unwind conversations reassigned from CPO to CEO after discussion. The first draft had me making those calls and that was wrong.
1.0	13 March 2027	Oliver Grant	Agreed and signed. Effective 22 March 2027.
0.1	9 March 2027	Oliver Grant	First draft from the product diagnostic of 4 March, which is where the eleven were found.

How this mandate was built, and its limits

Written from a product diagnostic delivered on 4 March 2027, drawing on 18 months of closed-won contracts and their addenda, the published roadmap, the engineering backlog, the discovery research archive and interviews with the CEO, both engineering leads, three account executives and both researchers. The eleven off-roadmap commitments were found by reading the contract addenda, not by asking, which is why the number is higher than anyone at Ashcroft expected. A fractional executive seat creates no statutory directorship and no signing authority. This mandate does not set pricing, does not commit contractual delivery dates and gives no legal advice; where an existing promise may be contractually binding, that is a question for Ashcroft's solicitor and is flagged rather than answered here. The measures are agreed review topics, not promised results.