Equity-Only CPO: Lead Remote Fan Tech Platform

Chief Product Officer (Equity Only) — Plyaz

About Plyaz

Sports and entertainment are being rewritten. The relationship between athletes and fans, once mediated by broadcasters, clubs, and agents, is going direct, and the platforms enabling that shift are still being built.

Plyaz is a fan engagement platform connecting athletes, clubs, and their communities through tokenized experiences, crowdfunded campaigns, and premium memberships. We give fans a real stake in the journeys they care about, and we give athletes and clubs a direct line to the people who believe in them most. From grassroots talent to global stars, from local clubs to international federations, we are building the infrastructure that will power the next era of sports and entertainment.

We are currently in pilot with a controlled release to our first users. This space is moving fast, and the product decisions made now will define how millions of fans experience sport for years to come.

The Role

We are looking for a CPO who genuinely believes that the intersection of sports, community, and digital ownership is one of the most exciting product spaces of this decade, and who has the skills and ambition to build at the frontier of it.

This is a hands-on role. You will be the day-to-day product owner as well as the person setting long-term direction: writing specs, running discovery, joining sprint planning, and presenting the roadmap to leadership while aligning it with company strategy.

You will work closely with the CEO, CTO, Lead Designer, and wider engineering and commercial teams. You are expected to be a full participant in leadership decisions, not a passenger who receives context after the fact. You will help shape not just what we build, but what Plyaz stands for as a product and a platform.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the product vision and multi-year strategy, aligned with business objectives set with the CEO and CTO.
• Lead quarterly planning and translate business goals into a prioritised roadmap with clear outcomes, not just a list of features.
• Own the long-term product timeline: what we are building this quarter, next quarter, and what we are deliberately not building yet.
• Present roadmap and progress to the leadership team on a regular cadence, flag risks early, and surface trade-offs clearly.
• Contribute to fundraising and investor conversations with a credible and compelling product narrative.
• Act as product owner for the engineering team: write specs, define acceptance criteria, and review delivered work against intent.
• Prioritise the backlog continuously, not just at planning time.
• Be the decision-maker when engineering, design, and commercial needs conflict.
• Own the release cycle: what ships, when it ships, and how it is communicated internally and externally.
• Triage bugs and incidents from a product perspective, and distinguish what needs fixing now from what can wait.

Product Ownership

• Run ongoing user research: athlete interviews, fan behaviour analysis, session reviews, and support ticket analysis.
• Monitor core metrics such as activation, retention, campaign conversion, and subscription churn, and connect the numbers to product decisions.
• Track the competitive landscape across sports tech, the creator economy, and fan engagement platforms.
• Identify opportunities to expand into new verticals such as clubs, leagues, and federations, new geographies, and new monetisation models, and build the case with evidence.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with the Lead Designer to ensure what gets built feels considered, not assembled, from early wireframes through to final QA.
• Partner with the CTO and engineering leads to ensure the roadmap is realistic and technically coherent.
• Collaborate with the CEO, CTO, and other senior stakeholders on company strategy, ensuring product is never siloed from business direction.
• Work with commercial and marketing leads to align product launches with go-to-market efforts.
• Coordinate with other leads across the organisation, including operations, growth, and partnerships, to ensure cross-functional dependencies are visible and managed.

Team & Process

• As the team grows, recruit and manage product managers and designers within the product function.
• Establish product processes that match the pace of the company, lightweight enough to stay fast and rigorous enough to avoid repeated mistakes.
• Foster a product culture where engineering, design, and commercial teams feel informed, aligned, and included.

What We Are Looking For

• 5+ years in product, with at least 2 years in a senior or lead role.
• Proven experience owning a roadmap end-to-end, not just contributing to one.
• A genuine passion for sports and entertainment; you understand the culture, the emotion, and why this space is unlike any other.
• Experience with marketplace, creator economy, or sports tech products; you understand multi-sided platforms and the tension between supply and demand.
• Strong technical literacy; you do not need to write code but you understand what is hard, what is fast, and why architectural decisions matter.
• Comfortable running quarterly planning cycles and presenting strategy to leadership and investors.
• Data-driven but not paralysed by it, and comfortable making calls with incomplete information.
• Experience in early-stage environments where the job is frequently undefined and priorities can change quickly.
• Excellent written communication; your specs, briefs, and strategy docs could credibly be shared externally.
• Bonus: exposure to Web3, tokenisation, or digital collectibles. This is not required, but you should be curious about where ownership is going.

What is not

This is not a role for someone who wants to run standups and update Jira tickets. The platform is technically ambitious, the team is small, and we move at a pace that requires genuine ownership. If you need a fully formed team around you before you can produce output, this is not the right fit.

If you want to build something that changes how athletes and fans connect, at a moment when this space is genuinely up for grabs, this is the role.

Location:Remote (worldwide)

Compensation:Equity only at this stage. We are pre-funding; there is no salary yet, and compensation will be structured around a meaningful equity stake. Paid remuneration will come with the funding round. We want someone who believes in what we are building and wants to be part of it from the ground floor.