Mandate premise
The company is moving from selling technology to governing a portfolio of products, integrations and recurring customer obligations. The Board seeks an NRC and strategy contributor who understands that growth capacity is determined as much by leadership architecture and product discipline as by sales opportunity.
The director will help the Board decide whether the executive structure is fit for the next stage: which decisions belong with product, engineering, commercial, risk and geography; where founder or key-person dependence remains; and whether the second line can challenge releases, contracts and client promises before they become irreversible.
Decisions on which this director will be tested
- Succession beyond names. Build emergency and medium-term succession for the chief executive and leaders responsible for product, technology, security, finance and enterprise sales. Each plan should identify capability gaps, development evidence and transition risk—not simply nominate a deputy.
- Incentives that respect recurring obligations. Review whether reward design distinguishes bookings from cash, implementation from adoption, launch from stability, and customer acquisition from renewal quality. Deferred consequences such as service burden, concentration and security debt should influence long-term reward.
- Product and market portfolio. Challenge adjacency and expansion proposals for customer problem, distribution advantage, implementation capacity, required integrations, data rights and the cost of maintaining another product line. Strategy should include explicit stop or exit conditions.
- Leadership operating model. Examine spans, duplicated authority, escalation, technical career paths and the organisational position of security and risk. The Board must know when performance depends on heroic coordination by a few individuals.
- Board renewal. Maintain a forward-looking skills matrix covering software economics, cyber and data risk, international commercial judgement, capital allocation and customer trust. Independence, capacity and conflicts should be tested with the same seriousness as credentials.
The first 180 days
The appointee will conduct a strategy-to-capability review rather than a conventional induction. Management will identify the five choices most important to the next three years; the director will help the Board determine the leadership, decision rights, talent, capital and risk capacity each choice consumes. The NRC calendar will then be rebuilt around those dependencies. A parallel incentive review will test how current measures behave under delayed implementation, poor renewal, cyber interruption and high employee attrition.
Person specification
The Board will consider former CEOs, business presidents, product or technology leaders, CHROs and commercial executives who have scaled a software or technology-enabled enterprise. Applicants should have made hard portfolio, succession and organisation-design decisions, including stopping initiatives that remained superficially attractive. Prior NRC experience is preferred but not essential where executive governance experience is substantial. Candidates require independent-director databank compliance by appointment and sufficient capacity for Board, NRC and annual strategy sessions.
Registration on the IICA Independent Directors Databank is required before appointment. A DIN is not needed to apply: where an appointee does not yet hold one, it is obtained through the appointing company at the point of appointment.