Independent Director

Strategic setting

The company provides software that helps organisations discover, retrieve and synthesise information across internal repositories and connected systems. Its platform may index confidential documents, permissions, conversations and structured data, then use search and AI-assisted responses to support employee decisions. The strategic opportunity is significant, but an apparently helpful answer can expose restricted information, invent unsupported content or cite a source the user is not authorised to see.

The Board seeks a General Management-oriented Independent Director who can guide the transition from growth-stage product company to trusted enterprise platform. The role will shape market focus, product boundaries, customer value, global delivery, leadership depth and capital allocation while ensuring that speed does not outrun permission integrity, factual grounding or operational resilience.

Scale decisions

1. Choose the problem worth owning. Define where the platform creates defensible value—discovery, support, workflow, research or decision assistance—and where it should remain a tool rather than become the accountable decision maker.
2. Make permissions non-negotiable. Ensure indexing, retrieval, summaries, citations and cached outputs respect current source permissions, user identity, tenant boundaries and deletion. Convenience cannot broaden access.
3. Govern answer quality by consequence. Measure grounding, unsupported claims, omission, stale sources and user correction by use case. High-impact domains require stronger validation, human review and visible uncertainty.
4. Control connectors and data ingestion. Review authorisation, source ownership, scope, update frequency, deletion, malware or prompt-injection exposure and failure handling. A connector should not become an invisible route around customer controls.
5. Create enterprise-grade deployment. Strengthen architecture, observability, service levels, residency, encryption, incident response, change management and customer-controlled administration without turning every implementation into a bespoke product.
6. Build durable customer economics. Track adoption by permitted use, renewal, expansion, support intensity, inference or infrastructure cost, implementation effort and collected contribution. Usage growth must be separated from uneconomic compute growth.
7. Protect product-market discipline. Evaluate verticalisation, custom development, services, channel partnerships and geographic expansion against reusable capability, liability, sales cycle, customer concentration and leadership bandwidth.
8. Govern third-party models and infrastructure. Understand dependency, data terms, model change, availability, price, portability, fallback and customer disclosure. Maintain credible alternatives for critical components.
9. Develop leadership for institutional scale. Review succession across product, engineering, security, sales, customer success, finance and responsible AI. Incentives should reward renewal, trust and repeatability, not bookings alone.
10. Preserve strategic optionality. Allocate capital among core platform, security, model capability, international scale, acquisitions and liquidity. Avoid strategy built around a presumed financing or exit event.

Product-trust compact

The Director will ask management to define claims the product will and will not make; data it will and will not access; decisions it will and will not automate; and evidence required before a capability is released. Serious permission leakage, cross-tenant exposure, fabricated high-consequence output or covert use of customer data must be directly escalatable to the Board.

General Management decisions

The appointee will contribute to enterprise and geographic focus, major customer commitments, pricing, customisation thresholds, model partnerships, acquisitions, new AI capabilities, regulated-use entry, data architecture and financing. Each proposal should disclose repeatability, trust risk, compute economics, customer obligations, exit cost and leadership capacity.

Board view of performance

Reporting should include adoption by workflow; renewal and expansion cohorts; collected contribution; compute and support cost; implementation cycle; custom code; answer-quality measures; permission and connector incidents; critical vulnerabilities; service availability; customer concentration; model dependency; employee turnover in critical roles; and liquidity runway.

Candidate profile

Candidates should bring at least 22 years of senior leadership across enterprise software, information management, search, AI, cybersecurity, global product businesses or technology-enabled services. Former CEOs, COOs, product executives, enterprise technology leaders, customer-success leaders and experienced scale-up directors may be suitable.

The Board seeks broad enterprise judgment rather than a specialist model researcher. The candidate should have made market, platform, organisation and capital choices at scale and should understand how product trust becomes part of competitive advantage.