Client: MetaLab
Position: CTO
MetaLab helps companies build simple, beautiful, and easy-to-use products. It is one of the few agencies in the world that takes a product idea from beginning to end. Building the best global products means hiring the best teams.
Opportunity
At a certain growth point, MetaLab’s design capabilities couldn’t keep up with their clients’ needs, who began requesting more and more development work. This is when MetaLab got in touch with srch to recruit a vice president of engineering/chief technical officer, a position that had been open internally for 12 months without a successful candidate.
For this role, MetaLab needed a thought-partner on the executive team with a deep appreciation for collaboration to evolve their engineering capabilities. Someone who would build a foundation for the engineering team’s success, land new business opportunities, and ensure the overall quality of the work.
Diversity of thinking and design is a core tenet at MetaLab. As such, MetaLab felt they were underrepresented in the engineering organization as a whole and were committed to changing that.
Solution
MetaLab needed a partner they could trust to recruit the ideal candidate for the executive level role–who could find someone with 15+ years experience leading product engineering teams, ideally in both agency and in-house environments with 20+ person teams; expertise in building relationships with teammates and clients alike; and the ability to fluently transition from technical to business speak to meet different audiences.
The right person for the job had to enjoy taking complex problems and turning them into elegantly simple solutions. And true to MetaLab’s culture, they needed someone who was not an asshole.
Results
MetaLab needed not only a leader who could collaborate and create, but who got their culture and vision for growth. They turned to srch to make sure they hired the right person for the job, without compromise. Srch ran an exhaustive, multinational search, interviewed dozens of technical executives, and helped MetaLab hire the ideal CTO.
With srch as their partner, they found a CTO who could build new teams, expand functional capabilities, and be a visionary for the future.
Within the first 2 years, the CTO has:
Launched 8+ products to market on behalf of MetaLab’s clients.
Hired over 22 new team members in Engineering, almost doubling the team in two years (in a rough market!).
Increased MetaLab’s capabilities to include a full-stack engineering service.
Started a Product Department from nothing to now a 12-person team.
Been a keynote speaker at the Collision Conference and SXSW.
Wrote several thought-leadership pieces.
Thorough. Thoughtful. Customized. At srch, no two projects are the same. We carefully craft a strategy for SMBs to grow via a talented, ambitious leadership team that focuses on profitability.