Chief of Field: Resourcing Traction

Context

History

In 2024, senior GTM and product marketing executive, Suzanne Rabicoff, created the Chief of Field role to address a persistent capacity constraint in how organizations execute Field Product Marketing. As leaders focus on product development, operations, and internal alignment, the external work required to keep strategy grounded in live market behavior is often fragmented or deferred. Without a clear owner in the field, market intelligence, stakeholder relationships, and feedback critical to traction are captured unevenly, if at all.

This gap has accelerated the emergence of what Rabicoff describes as “connective tissue roles.” These roles do not fit neatly into traditional org charts. Instead, they link Field Product Marketing to execution by connecting internal teams with external markets and translating strategy into outcomes. As organizations run leaner and markets move faster, such connective functions are becoming foundational rather than supplementary.

The Chief of Field does not replace executives or core hires. It extends their capacity by providing senior, judgment-driven field leadership, ensuring that Field Product Marketing remains continuously informed by real-world engagement and that strategy converts into traction where it matters most: in conversations, events, and relationships that shape adoption.

Traction

Traction is measurable evidence that the market cares enough to engage, adopt, or pay. It reduces uncertainty and guides where to invest next.

The Chief of Field is most valuable in early, ambiguous, and pre-scale situations, including:

  • New companies: Translating initial problem framing into qualified interest and pilot demand

  • New verticals: Adapting positioning to unfamiliar markets and confirming commercial viability

  • New products: Turning launches into high-intent engagement that reflects real demand

Purpose

Organizations struggle to gain traction when they build the wrong product, target the wrong audience, or rely on disconnected teams to execute externally. The fractional Chief of Field exists to reduce that risk.

By owning in-person market presence and feedback loops, the role delivers clearer signals, stronger relationships, and faster learning than traditional full-time hires or siloed consultants. The result is higher-impact decision-making with lower organizational and financial risk.

Several market realities are driving the need for this role:

  • In-person effectiveness: Intimate, real-world interactions remain critical for trust, differentiation, and momentum in digitally saturated environments.

  • Executive-led market presence: Vision, product, and strategy must be communicated consistently and credibly by leadership, not delegated entirely to junior teams or automation.

  • AI-driven transformation: As automation commoditizes baseline execution, the value of human judgment, market expertise, and trusted relationships increases.

Without a Chief of Field or an equivalent connective tissue role, organizations miss signals, misallocate resources, and underutilize the relationships that drive revenue and adoption.

Modus Operandi

The Chief of Field consolidates ownership of market-facing work that typically falls between product, marketing, and leadership teams. Designed to support Field Product Marketing, the role operates as senior, accountable leadership embedded in real-world environments, with responsibility for capturing live market intelligence, activating high-impact relationships, and translating external signals directly into product, positioning, and go-to-market decisions. By maintaining continuous alignment between strategy and market behavior, the role reduces wasted effort, shortens learning cycles, and improves the efficiency of traction.

Fractional by design

  • Provides senior field leadership without the cost or rigidity of a full-time hire

  • Lowers hiring risk while enabling faster deployment in ambiguous or transitional phases

  • Benefits from cross-portfolio pattern recognition across companies and markets

Embedded in the field

  • Maintains consistent presence in customer environments, competitive settings, and industry gatherings

  • Engages directly with clients, prospects, partners, advisors, investors, industry communities, media, and other core stakeholders

  • Surfaces signals that rarely appear in dashboards or formal research

Executive capacity extension

  • Complements product-focused, technical, or internally-oriented leadership

  • Takes ownership of external work that founders and/or specialized executives often lack capacity to sustain

  • Feeds validated insights directly into roadmap, positioning, and GTM decisions

Intelligence and Top-of-Funnel pipeline accountability

  • Measures success by signal quality, learning velocity, and relationship depth

  • Prioritizes durable understanding over activity volume or vanity metrics

  • Introduces higher-quality Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) to the pipeline

Accountability

Unlike consultants, who operate episodically and deliver recommendations, a fractional Chief of Field is accountable for outcomes over time. The role embeds directly into the business, operates in live market environments, and carries responsibility for whether insight is translated into traction. This structure provides senior judgment and continuity without the cost or rigidity of a full-time hire, while ensuring field activity produces durable learning rather than one-off analysis.

Core responsibilities include:

  • Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) generation Top-of-Funnel (TOFU)

  • Sustained stakeholder discovery across priority audiences

  • Market-validated messaging and positioning architecture

  • Strategic relationship mapping and activation

  • Systematic capture of competitive and buyer intelligence

  • Formal market-to-product feedback loops