By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor at KORE1 Hiring a head of engineering starts with one call: whether you need a hands-on builder, a pure people-leader, or the first executive who owns all of engineering, then budget $200,000 to $450,000 and give the search two to four months. That single sentence hides the whole … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 Engineering organizations grow afraid to refactor legacy code when years of small, reasonable changes pile up into load-bearing spaghetti, where every piece is quietly holding up another and nobody can predict what a fix will break. The fear is rational, not weak. It is an information … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor at KORE1 To hire a COO, first name why the seat exists, scale, turnaround, succession, or covering what the CEO cannot, then budget $250,000 to $700,000 in total compensation and give a real executive search three to five months. That is the honest version. The trap is not … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 An Encompass integration realistically takes four to six months and costs well past the vendor quote, because certification, field mapping, event re-architecture, and testing against a real loan file are never inside the number you are shown. The six-to-eight-week figure from a sales cycle prices a … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 A product team is built around trios of a product manager, a product designer, and an engineering lead, each trio owning one outcome, and those trios roll up to a head of product or a Chief Product Officer as the company scales. The org chart under that … Read more
By Mike Carter, Director of Partnership Success, KORE1 Tech salary benchmarking is the practice of pricing a role against several live market sources at once, adjusted for level, location, and stack, instead of trusting one published average that started aging the day it went out. A number is not a benchmark. A method is. What … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A promoted IC usually needs two to three quarters to find real footing as an engineering manager, and closer to a year before the team feels it. Washing out runs on a faster clock. You can lose a team in a single quarter, and that asymmetry … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Hiring a principal product manager in 2026 means budgeting $210,000 to $300,000 base, or $350,000 to $700,000 total at large tech firms, and understanding you are buying a top-of-the-ladder individual contributor, not a manager. That last part is where most of these hires go sideways. A principal … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 An engineering manager becomes the bottleneck when nothing ships without their review, their approval, or their opinion. The fix is not learning to move faster through the queue. It is moving decisions out of your head and into a system your team can run without you. … Read more
By Mike Carter, Managing Director, KORE1 To hire a Chief AI Officer, decide first whether the seat is a strategist, an operator, or a governance owner, budget $400,000 to $800,000 in total compensation, and plan three to five months for a genuine executive search. That range covers most of the market. It hides the thing … Read more
