Short answer: Three things are happening at once. The job posting stopped working because applying now costs a candidate nothing, and the average posting draws over 250 applications, many of them AI-generated. Canadian early-stage funding has been in sustained decline since the start of 2025, so every hire is being made against a tighter balance…
Six weeks from search kick-off to signed offer and the VP Product was out of the country for two of them. This is the timeline of the search: Date What happened May 26 DM from a Head of People. Their VP Product had asked her to contact us about a critical search May 27 Our…
Short answer: A VP Product in Canada earns a base salary of $190,000 to $280,000 CAD, most commonly $225,000 to $260,000. A Chief Product Officer earns $275,000 to $350,000 CAD base, with the market midpoint at $300,000 to $325,000. Total compensation for a CPO, including a 20 to 35% bonus and equity, frequently lands between…
Short answer: A super IC is a senior individual contributor with no direct reports who is hired for what they can personally build. For a frontier AI company, this hire is harder than a VP hire, because the job does not exist anywhere else yet. This article is built from a live search we ran…
This search began offering a base salary range of $130K to $150K. The hire closed at a $140K base. Our client is a founder-led B2B SaaS business, under 15 employees, selling into a regulated market. They had recently taken private equity growth capital, which resulted in the opportunity to begin to expand the business into…
Hiring your first product leader is the most consequential hire you will ever make. Most founders we speak with already know this. What they are less likely to know is how to evaluate candidates, when it seems everyone talks about the same themes: product strategy, product delivery, leadership, AI, organizational effectiveness and nurturing cross-functional alignment…
Short answer: There are two types of interviewers. One is looking for reasons to hire. One is looking for reasons NOT to hire. Interviewers looking for reasons not to hire run longer searches, exhaust their interview panel, and are more likely to lose the right hire to a competitor. By contrast, interviewers looking for reasons…
You have a leadership role open and three search firms in your inbox. Their decks look the same, their client logos overlap, and every one of them says quality over quantity. Choose an executive search firm by verifying four things: that they specialize in your function, that the person pitching you is the person working…
You raised a round, and everyone from your board to your engineering lead is telling you it is time to hire a real product leader. They are probably right. The part they are not telling you is that this hire fails more often than almost any other executive hire, and it fails for reasons that…
You are writing a job description for a Chief Product Officer, and the working assumption behind the draft is that it will attract candidates. Let go of that assumption. The leaders you want are not reading job boards, and when they do see your posting, forwarded by a recruiter or a board member, they are…
You are hiring your next product leader, and the title question has come up. Maybe a board member suggested a CPO. Maybe your best candidate is asking for the C-title as a condition of the offer. Before you decide, understand what each title is actually built to do, because they are different jobs, not different…
You have a senior role open. Three recruiting firms are in your inbox, each describing their model in different words, and at least one is telling you that you only pay if you hire. Before you pick, you should understand what each model is actually built to do. Retained search is an exclusive engagement where…
Hiring in 2026 is not challenging because talent is unavailable; it is challenging because the cost of getting an executive hire wrong has increased materially. For most founders and leadership teams, this remains an employer-led market. Senior roles attract interest quickly. Inbound volume is rarely the issue. The difficulty lies in determining which candidate will…
What Growth-Stage Founders Must Know for Q4 2025 B2B SaaS sales hiring for leadership and AE roles has fundamentally shifted. What worked in 2023—posting a job, screening for quota achievement, and hiring for potential doesn’t cut it anymore. As someone who has helped over 200 SaaS founders build their GTM teams, I’m seeing a clear…
As we start Q4, the aftershocks of the downsizing that defined much of the previous year are still being felt. While the layoffs of 2023 are behind us, the consequences of eliminating key leadership roles like the Chief Product Officer (CPO) in the pursuit of profitability have left many companies grappling with the resulting voids. …