Chief Product Officer Executive Search

A venture capital-backed autonomous vehicle start-up, founded to solve the unique challenges stemming from an imbalance in access to mobility within the backdrop of increasingly congested cities and towns, engaged N2Growth for their first Chief Product Officer executive search. Inspired by rapid growth and strategic roadmapping after completing their Series B capital raising round, the company’s founder and CEO took the strategic initiative of developing this pivotal role to take the company’s product development and product strategy to the next level with a formal product leader for the organization.

Our client, a technology-focused autonomous vehicle start-up, with a mission to transform cities through autonomous technology to create a safer, greener, more accessible world, required the addition of a Chief Product Officer to enable them to meet post-Series B capital raising 18-month growth and scaling deliverables. Given the company’s stage of growth, they needed a Chief Product Officer who would be able to come in and oversee and direct all of the product development, product strategy, brand strategy and management, and market research. In working to find the client’s first Chief Product Officer, N2Growth played a pivotal role as thought partners in helping the client to envision an optimal organizational design to enable the client to continue solving the toughest engineering challenges in mobility while providing the highest level of customer service.

The specific insights we drew and the alignment we found in the early days of the recruitment process created clarity and little need for specification iteration as the search developed. Our team rigorously mapped the market for candidates whose attributes aligned to the needs of our client. After tens of interviews, we submitted a total of twelve candidates for consideration within four weeks. By week eight, our client had three finalists. Despite COVID-related slowdown, we worked with our client to co-create an innovative solution for finalist round presentations given the pandemic. Our client executed an employment agreement with a candidate introduced in the first round of candidates only three weeks into the search.