Technology & Digital

Client – Global Product Leader powering digital experiences.

Role – Vice President Product Development

Location – Noida

Search Background:

Our client is a US based software product firm that focusses on building digital experiences for their clients. They have a large presence in India (over 4000 associates) predominantly across Product development, consulting and sales functions. They were in the process of ramping up the Product Development teams in India for their largest suite of products.

Need:

Our client was looking at a leader who could spearhead the development of the largest suite of products in India.

We had to identify a senior technology leader with demonstrated leadership experience in building and running large scale applications, enterprise software and distributed systems. The ability to hire, lead and mentor a large engineering team was key.

Search Challenges:

The most critical challenge in the search was to find a leader who was a culture fit. Client was ideally looking for a seasoned technology leader with prior Bay Area experience, who understood global enterprise level product development culture and at the same time had the agility of a startup to scale up the tech organization.

WalkWater Strategy:

WalkWater did an in-depth study and mapping of global product development leaders in India as well as the US from the following sub sectors:

• MNC Enterprise Software products
• MNC Internet Software products
• Large e-commerce/ internet start-ups

WalkWater presented 4 candidates (India and US) within a time frame of 4 weeks.

Result:

Our efforts led to the identification of the selected candidate who in his last role had founded a startup a couple of years back, raised initial funding and was in the process of winding up due to the inability to raise a large second round of funding. Prior to that he was the Chief Technology Officer for one of the largest ecommerce startups in India. Prior experience had been with enterprise software product companies and startups in the US.

He continues in this role and has been highly successful in building one of the largest product development teams in India.

Client – One of India’s largest players in the Online Travel space

Role – Chief Technology Officer

Location – Bangalore

Search Background:

Our client is one of the largest players in the Online Travel Space. They were in an interesting phase of growth and were significantly building a global presence. Having said that, their Chief Technology Officer had just left the organization and they were looking to get on-board a leader who would take up that role.

Need:

The client was looking for a disruptive and forward looking Chief Technology Officer. They were a Pre IPO company and were looking to hire a leader who could improve on the engineering capabilities by a couple of notches. The need was to identify a leader who would question the status quo, change things and look at disruption to drive innovation within the organization.

Search Challenges:

The most critical challenge in the search was to find a leader who was a culture fit. Client was ideally looking for a seasoned technology leader with prior global experience coupled with the experience of having scaled an Indian startup.

WalkWater Strategy:

WalkWater did an in-depth study and mapping of global product development leaders in India as well as the US from the following sub sectors:

• MNC Internet Software products
• Large e-commerce/ internet start-ups

WalkWater presented 4 candidates within a time frame of 4 weeks.

Result:

Our efforts led to the identification of the selected candidate who in his last role was the Chief Technology Officer of one of India’s largest ecommerce platforms. Prior to that he was the Chief Technology Officer for a growth phase ecommerce startups in India. Prior experience had been with enterprise software product companies and startups in the US. He continues in this role and has been highly successful in building a top notch product development team that has helped the organization to address challenges of scalability.

Client – Leading e-commerce product discovery startup

Role – Chief Technology Officer

Location – Bangalore

Search Background:

Our client is a leading e-commerce product discovery platform that applies advanced data sciences to connect shoppers to the products they are most likely to buy, while providing predictive actionable insights for merchandising.

Need:

The Client wanted to hire the SVP engineering for India. The leader would be responsible to run the Engineering and Data Science team globally. The need was to identify a phenomenal technical leader who could take the technical capabilities of the start-up’s product discovery platform to the next level.

Search Challenges:

The most critical challenge in the search was to find a leader who had a mix of being a deep technologist as well as someone who could play the role of a country leader for Engineering which involved managing budgets, people and operations.

WalkWater Strategy:

WalkWater did an in-depth study and mapping of global product development leaders in India as well as the US from the following sub sectors:

• Enterprise product MNCs & Startups
• E-commerce & tech MNCs

Given that speed of execution was very critical, we fast tracked the search and presented 4 candidates within a time frame of 4 weeks.

Result:

Our efforts led to the identification of the selected candidate who in his last role was the India Head and Chief Technology Officer of a technology startup. The candidate brought prior experience in enterprise software product companies and startups in the US. He continues to grow in this role and has been highly successful in building a top notch product development team that has helped the organization to address its challenges of scalability. He has now moved to the US and leads the global Technology team.

Client – Leading Social Media startup in India (Unicorn)

Role – Chief Product Officer

Location – Bangalore

Search Background:

Our client is one India’s leading social media platform that operates exclusively in Indic languages.

Need:

The founders of the startup were looking for a Product Leader who could build the road map for building new products, scale current products and lead a strong set of product management leaders. The startup was competing against global startups, and this was a very important hire for them. They were looking for a candidate who had a track record of building consumer products at very large scale. Experience around commerce, social, content etc was also important.

Search Challenges:

The challenge in this role was that there were very few product leaders in India who had built products at the scale that the founders were looking for. Getting someone with experience of building products for India consumers was even lesser. It was also essential to get a leader who believed that India could build a social media product and compete with the best globally.

WalkWater Strategy:

The WalkWater team executed a global search of Product Management talent across the Consumer Tech, Content and Ecommerce sectors followed by an in-depth and structured assessment of candidates. WalkWater presented 5 candidates (India and US) within a time frame of 8 weeks.

Result:

The search resulted in the joining of one of the senior product leaders of the largest ecommerce company in India. He had experience in building multiple products grounds up and scaling the same. In his last role he was leading the products that focused on the next 200m consumers.

Client – Leading D2C startup in India (Unicorn)

Role – Chief Product & Technology Officer

Location – Gurgaon

Search Background:

Our client is one India’s leading D2C brand for baby care, skincare, and hair care products with a vision – of creating tech-enabled products, that can set out to redefine the personal care industry.

Need:

The founders of the startup were looking for a Chief Product and Technology Officer who could oversee the overall product strategy and engineering and lead the product development and infrastructure teams.

Search Challenges:

The challenge in this role was to find the leader with the right mix of product management as well as engineering experiences in the consumer tech space. Since it was D2C brand, the business understanding as well as the alignment to building a brand was also important.

WalkWater Strategy:

The WalkWater team executed a search followed by an in-depth and structured assessment and the sectors we mapped globally were:

• MNC Internet Software products
• Large e-commerce/ internet start-ups

WalkWater presented 5 candidates within a time frame of 6 weeks.

Result:

The search resulted in the joining of one of the senior product and tech leaders of the country. In the most recent role, he had spearheaded the product management function at a leading Fintech Unicorn. In the past he had a strong mix of engineering as well as product management experience where he played a pivotal role in structuring and strengthening the product and technology verticals of organizations like Samsung, Airtel, Reliance Jio and Zomato.

Client – One of the largest Fintech startups globally

Role – Chief Technology Officer

Location – Bangalore

Search Background:

Our client is one of the largest players in the Fintech space building products in Payment gateway, BaaS, lending and more.

Need:

The client was looking for a seasoned technology leader to join the team as the CTO and would be responsible for managing the teams, translating business strategy into engineering requirements and focusing on the scalability of the products. The incumbent would lead the multiple acquisitions that were in pipeline from a technology integration perspective.

Search Challenges:

The most critical challenge in the search was that the CEO wanted a strategic leader who could build the technology roadmap and execute it on one hand but was also looking for someone who was still close to technology. It was also essential to look for a leader who had built systems that handled massive scale and complexity. Experience of leading teams upwards of 250 was also key.

WalkWater Strategy:

WalkWater did an in-depth study and global mapping of product development leaders in India as well as the US from the following sub sectors:

• MNC Internet Software products
• Large e-commerce/ internet start-ups

We presented 6 candidates within a time frame of 6 weeks.

Result:

Our efforts led to the identification of the selected candidate who in his last role was the VP Engineering of one of the largest ecommerce platforms globally. He was a seasoned technologist who had a track record of building systems that handled massive scale. He had over two decades of experience in driving digital transformation strategies and building next-generation software products. He had experience in building and leading large teams across India and the US. In the past, for a decade he was in technology leadership roles at Google and Microsoft.

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