By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 A senior IC has to unlearn three skills to lead: producing the work yourself, being the person with the right answer, and getting your reward from a same-day merge. Every one of them built your reputation as an engineer. Every one of them will quietly cap … Read more
By Robert Ardell, Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, KORE1 Building a product team from scratch means hiring in sequence, not all at once: one senior generalist product manager first, after product-market fit, then a product designer, then a small trio, long before you hire a VP. Order is the whole game. Get it right and each … Read more
By Tom Kenaley, Senior Partner and President, KORE1 A group product manager runs a small team of PMs while still owning strategy for a product area, and costs $190,000 to $285,000 base in 2026, or $310,000 to $560,000 all in at public tech firms. That double duty is the whole job, and it is also … Read more
By Kris Drouet, Engineering Executive, in partnership with KORE1 New engineering leaders get the same three decisions wrong in their first 90 days: they chase speed before the team agrees what “done” means, they become the human router for every priority, and they make themselves the approval gate for every decision. Each one feels like … Read more
By Gregg Flecke, Senior Talent Acquisition Partner at KORE1 Hiring a controller in 2026 means budgeting roughly $120,000 to $210,000, planning a six-to-ten-week search, and deciding first whether the seat calls for a hands-on close manager or a strategic finance leader. The pay band is not the hard part. Neither is finding résumés. What kills … Read more
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
