What Does a CPO Do at a Consulting Firm?

Most people associate the title with a SaaS company, a product backlog, and investors to report to. Yet Devies, an IT consulting firm in Gothenburg, has just hired a Chief Product Officer. Simon Arvidsson and Linn Treutiger explain why, and what it signals about where the entire consulting industry is heading.

Most consulting firms are built to sell time. Devies is rebuilding itself to sell outcomes. The first visible step: hiring a Chief Product Officer.

Simon Arvidsson has never been a true believer in the time-and-materials model. As CEO of Devies, he has operated in an industry built on it while quietly constructing something different.

– Half of our revenue is already fixed price and packaged engagements. We need to package what we do and make it clear what we actually deliver, while continuing to build deep client relationships, he says.

The paradox nobody talks about

The hourly billing model has its own internal logic, and for a long time it worked. But it also contains a paradox that AI has now made impossible to ignore: the consultant who works slowly bills more. The efficient one punishes herself.

– Clients don’t want more hours. They wake up with a problem they want solved, says Linn Treutiger, who joins as the company’s new CPO with a background from SaaS companies Realforce and TimeEdit.

When a senior consultant equipped with the right AI tools can produce what an entire team once needed, the business model has to follow. Either revenue shrinks, or you find a fundamentally different way to charge for value.

Devies calls their answer a product mindset in a consulting world. Clear deliverables. Fixed scope from day one. The client knows what they are buying. The goal is not to replace long-term client relationships but to give them a stronger foundation.

Owning your offering

One of Linn’s first observations as an outsider to the consulting industry is that consultancies are, surprisingly, bad at communicating what they actually do. Reference cases stay internal. Solutions never get packaged. Offerings cannot be explained at a dinner table.

– There is enormous untapped potential in simply starting to talk about which problems we actually solve. But that requires the courage to genuinely promise to solve them, instead of hiding behind ‘it depends.’ Real products and lasting value are built over time, and that requires both us and the client to know what we are aiming for from the start, she says.

That is the commitment Devies is now formalizing. The CPO role is not about building a product in the traditional sense. It is about owning the offering, the client journey, and how the firm communicates what it can deliver. The target is long-term partnerships where the client knows what they get and Devies knows which problem they are actually there to solve.

– Our offering is our product. And a product needs to be owned by someone, Linn continues.

Building collective capability

Simon has a clear view of what happens to firms still waiting for a rebound in demand for traditional consulting hours.

– The ones saying the market is about to turn, they won’t be around. The market itself may not come back. While you sit and hope, you need to be building collective capability, automating, and productizing. That is where you win.

The market is already polarizing. Large global players are buying their way to breadth. Specialized boutiques own their niches. Everyone in between, without a clear position, is being squeezed from both directions.

Small and mid-sized firms running purely on CV-based staffing will struggle, Simon argues. Having talented people is not enough if nobody understands what you actually solve.

A new consultant profile

The shift toward outcome delivery also changes who you hire. Devies now looks for commercial drive at least as much as technical seniority.

– I would rather have a junior who understands the business and wants to join client meetings than a senior who is not curious about the problem they are solving. Experience matters, but mindset is decisive, says Simon.

Linn sees the same from the product side.
– The consulting firm of the future needs people who can move between technology and business, who understand what the client is actually buying, and who can take ownership of the fact that the delivery genuinely solves the problem. Clarity from the start is not the opposite of long-term relationships. It is the prerequisite for them.

Devies is starting to look a lot more like a product company than a staffing agency. That is entirely the point.