Velocity Partners provides fractional Chief Product Officer and advisory services for B2B companies building on AI and customer data. Founded by Chris Royle — 20+ years leading product across B2B SaaS and data-as-a-service — we help teams move from pilot to P&L.
Most AI initiatives die between the demo and the balance sheet. We build the bridge: business ownership, an experimentation framework agreed before the build, and an operational plan for what happens after launch — so AI investments show up as revenue, not as innovation theater.
Unifying your data is the easy half. We treat the CDP as a product, not just an IT project — with a value thesis, a roadmap, an adoption strategy, and an owner accountable for the revenue it's supposed to influence. Built on experience delivering a first-of-its-kind cross-tier CDP and operationalizing 800+ ML models.
New technology only produces returns when the organization changes around it — decision rights, budgets, roles, and frontline work. We treat readiness as the core of go-to-market strategy, not a change-management afterthought, so adoption is designed in rather than hoped for.
Whether standing up a product function from scratch or maturing one at scale, we install the discipline first — business case rigor, stage-gate decisions, voice-of-customer as habit — then build the team around it. Process before headcount; that's how a PM org grows revenue instead of roadmap documents.
Velocity Partners is led by Chris Royle, former EVP of Product Management & Strategy at FordDirect, where he built a first-of-its-kind cross-tier Customer Data Platform, launched a patent-pending AI-powered natural language platform on top of it, and helped grow revenue more than $100M over seven years while scaling a 50-person product organization. Earlier, at Polk (IHS Markit), he led teams operationalizing 800+ machine learning models, following product and data roles at General Motors in the US, UK, and Germany.
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