Confidential mandate
Board Adviser — Product Engineering GCC
Planned Hiring / New
A global industrial-software company needs an adviser to ensure its Bengaluru GCC becomes a product-engineering owner rather than a remote delivery pool as scale accelerates.
The mandate
Directors keep asking what must change for the India centre to own product outcomes instead of accepting decomposed tickets from overseas teams. Rapid hiring has increased capacity, but architecture authority and customer context remain concentrated elsewhere.
Three days monthly comprise an engineering-operating-model review, leadership mentoring and Technology Committee attendance. A major scope-transfer or leadership proposal receives acknowledgement within forty-eight hours and a considered recommendation within five working days.
This twelve-month appointment covers two product-domain transfers and the next talent plan and carries no renewal option. The adviser has no line authority, delivery ownership, hiring power or executive responsibility in either global or India teams.
The adviser may support two other non-rival organisations. Roles with competing industrial-software vendors, engineering-service providers or recruiters working on this centre must be disclosed, and confidential design information must remain ring-fenced.
Why the board wants this voice
Global executives agree on the aspiration but differ on how much authority to move. India leaders have scaled teams without yet earning full product mandates. The committee wants counsel from someone who has built distributed ownership rather than merely distributed capacity.
What you will own
- Test whether selected domains contain coherent customer, roadmap and operational accountability.
- Challenge dependency structures that leave India teams responsible for delivery but unable to decide.
- Press product leaders to fund customer access, discovery and production support alongside engineering roles.
- Shape governance for architecture exceptions, roadmap conflict and cross-site prioritisation.
- Examine talent ladders for principal engineers, product managers and engineering directors.
- Guide the committee on metrics distinguishing ownership, leverage and quality from headcount growth.
- Advise when a product-domain transfer is sufficiently prepared to proceed.
Candidate qualifications
- 22–28 years in global product engineering, including CTO, CPO or Engineering Director responsibility.
- Direct leadership of a GCC that owned global product roadmaps and live-service outcomes.
- Evidence of transferring architecture and product authority across geographies without fragmenting accountability.
- Experience building senior technical and product leadership in Bengaluru.
- Board-level skill in explaining distributed-engineering economics and organisational risk.
- No conflicting interest in a rival product company or bidding engineering-services provider.
Non-negotiables
- Three Bengaluru days each month through both product-domain transfers.
- Disclosure of software-rival, engineering-provider and recruitment interests.
- No recruitment fees or commercial introductions arising from this appointment.
- Acknowledgement that global executives retain all delivery and people decisions.
- 49 words maximum. Which GCC gained end-to-end product ownership under your leadership, and what authority actually moved?
- 49 words maximum. Which software, engineering-services or recruitment relationships could compromise independence on this mandate?
- 49 words maximum. Can you commit three days monthly through two domain transfers and the annual talent plan?
This mandate is confidential. The client is named only under a mutual NDA, and your own record is never listed, sold or shown to a company under your name until you release it for this specific mandate.