What differs here

What a scorecard for this sector has to account for.

Every search we run starts from the outcomes the role has to produce. These are the things that, in this sector, a generic process reliably misses.

You cannot evaluate the architecture, but you can evaluate the decisions

A board hiring a CTO usually cannot judge a technical choice on its merits. It can judge the quality of the reasoning: what alternatives were weighed, what the constraint actually was, what the candidate got wrong and how long it took them to notice. A structured protocol extracts that reliably from people whose work you could not otherwise assess.

Technical leaders have two distinct failure modes

Those who never stopped being individual contributors and still want to make the decisions themselves, and those who stopped being technical so long ago they can no longer tell when they are being managed by their own team. Both are common at vice-president level and both interview well.

Pedigree is the most misleading signal in this sector

A name-brand employer tells you someone passed that company's hiring bar some years ago, inside a system that may have done most of the heavy lifting. It is the proxy buyers lean on hardest and the one with the weakest relationship to subsequent performance.

Build-versus-buy judgment is where the money actually goes

The decision to build something that could have been purchased, or to buy something that needed to be owned, is the most consequential repeated call a technology executive makes. It is rarely asked about directly, and candidates rarely volunteer the ones that went badly.

Missed deadlines are usually a decision problem, not a talent problem

Strong engineers miss dates all the time. What makes a team deliver is how decisions get made and what happens when someone disagrees — and a leader carries those habits from job to job. So we ask about the last thing that slipped: what the call was, when they knew it was slipping, and who they told. That answer tells you more than any account of their technical approach.

The common failure

Hiring an engineering leader out of a large platform company into an organization that must build revenue-generating product with a tenth of the resource. Operating inside abundance teaches habits — headcount as the answer, platform investment ahead of demand, long horizons — that do not survive constraint. Some people adapt quickly. The point is to find out before, not after.

How we work here

Four engagements, one method.

The method does not change between sectors: a scorecard agreed before we start, the same questions for every candidate, and the evidence written down. What changes here is what we look for, and who we call to check it. How we choose the right assessment for a role →

Engagement	What it is
Executive Search	Retained executive search in which the assessment is the product. A written assessment of every finalist against an agreed scorecard, with the evidence behind each rating and a stated confidence level.
Leadership Diligence	Pre-close assessment of a management team against the operating model at close. Fixed fee, three weeks from access, no placement obligation and no contingent element.
Bench Review	Assessment of your own leaders against the roles the plan requires. A readiness map written so that it can be shared with the people named in it.
Market Mapping	A standalone map of the addressable population for a role: how many exist, how many are reachable, and what your compensation band actually buys. Fixed fee, three weeks, credited against a search.

Before a transaction

Technical diligence usually covers the stack and stops. We assess the people who built it: whether the team scales with the thesis, who the genuine single points of failure are, and what it would take to replace them. How human capital diligence works →

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Executive search for Engineering & Technology.