Every conversation about hiring in defense tech eventually gets to the same problem: Engineers. Cleared engineers. Firmware engineers. Embedded systems. AI. Autonomy. Cybersecurity.
But there is another hiring problem getting almost none of the attention.
Who decides what all those engineers should build?
THAT is the defense tech blind spot.
You Can Staff Engineering Without Solving a Problem
A defense tech company has to translate a military or government need into something a commercial team can build and a government customer can buy.
That role is Product Management, and it gets complicated quickly for a defense tech company:
- The person using the product may not be the person buying it.
- The procurement timeline may have very little relationship to the development timeline.
- Some customer requirements may be classified.
- A product may have both defense and commercial applications, with completely different buyers and buying processes.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that sits Engineering, waiting for somebody to make decisions.
- What are we building?
- For whom?
- What should get prioritized?
- What is a one-off customer request, and what belongs in the core product?
- What needs to exist before the next procurement window?
Those aren’t engineering decisions. They’re product decisions.
Canada Just Made This More Important
This matters everywhere in defense tech.
But right now, it matters particularly in Canada, because Canada is putting serious money behind building a domestic defense and dual-use technology sector.
BDC has allocated $1 billion across two defense investment vehicles: $500 million for investment into venture, growth equity and private equity funds, and another $500 million through StrongNorth for direct investment into Canadian defense and dual-use companies.
CIBC has committed another $2 billion over five years specifically to financing smaller Canadian defense and dual-use businesses.
All of this means Canadian defense companies are going to be hiring.
The Missing Leader
In an early-stage tech company, the founder usually owns Product.
The founder talks to customers, understands the technology, makes the trade-offs and sits beside Engineering. But defense tech creates a particularly difficult version of founder-led Product.
The founder isn’t just building the company.
- They’re raising capital.
- Navigating the government.
- Building relationships with primes.
- Meeting military stakeholders.
- Working through procurement.
- Being the lead salesperson in a sales-led GTM motion.
Eventually, that stops working.
The business needs someone else capable of making Product decisions.
A Solution to the Next Defense Tech Talent Problem
Here is where defense tech companies could make a mistake:
They could decide their next Product leader needs to come from defense.
But if the category itself is still being built, the total addressable market of experienced domain expert product leaders is a microcosm of the talent a company could benefit from.
Our recommendation is that Founder/CEOs of defense tech start-ups look for the Product leaders who have already solved the underlying problem.
They come from enterprise technology companies where the product can’t fail.
They have built and scaled complex platforms, infrastructure and systems that large organizations depend on to operate.
They understand security, reliability, integrations, data, compliance and technical complexity.
They have worked with demanding enterprise customers where buying committees are complicated, implementations are significant, and the consequences of getting the product wrong are real.
Most importantly, they know:
- How to put the customer at the centre of product decisions.
- How to uncover the actual problem underneath a requested feature.
- How to separate one customer’s requirement from something that belongs in the core platform.
- How to translate complicated customer needs into decisions Engineering can act on.
- How to prioritize when everything feels important.
- And how to build for the customer in front of them without losing sight of the larger market they are trying to create.
That is core, enterprise-grade Product leadership.
Hiring your first Product leader? We solve for THAT. Book a call with our team.