Industrial & Field Operations Executive Search
Software for People Who Work on the Front Lines
The person using this software did not choose it, does not work at a desk, and has no patience for a bad interface.
A shop owner with a car on the lift. A maintenance technician whose day is measured in machine uptime. A water utility superintendent proving compliance to a regulator. A rental yard manager at the start of a busy weekend. None of them evaluated the product, none of them will file a feature request, and all of them will route around it if it slows them down.
That inverts how these companies have to be led. Consumer and enterprise software both optimise for the buyer. Here the buyer is an owner or an operations director, and the user is someone on a floor who was told to use it. A product leader who has only ever built for the person signing the cheque will ship things nobody adopts.
The commercial side has the same shape. These markets are finite and reputation travels through trade associations, distributors, and word of mouth rather than through a funnel. A revenue leader whose entire experience is outbound into a wide market finds there is no wide market to work.
We screen for people who take the trade seriously before they try to change it. In practice that usually means someone who has sold into or built for an operational buyer before, and who is comfortable spending a day in a plant or a shop rather than reading about one.
SELECTED ENGAGEMENTS
REPRESENTATIVE PLACEMENTS
Chief Product Officer
L2L
Product leadership for a company whose buyers and users are rarely the same people.
Head of PRoduct
Tekmetric
Product leadership for a platform whose users are shop owners and technicians, not software buyers.
Senior Vice President of Engineering
RosNET
Brought a 27-year-old restaurant platform to growth-equity cadence without disrupting what customers relied on.
Vice President of Marketing
SwiftComply
Category credibility with municipal water authorities, where the buyer is a public authority with a procurement process and a regulator.
Executive Vice PResident of Product
Field Nation
A two-sided marketplace where buyers want coverage and technicians want good work and fast payment.
Related practices
33eleven Partners places VP through C-suite leaders at software companies serving manufacturing, field service, and the trades.