Two people who have already done this.

Twenty years in software, from product management into commercial, then finance, strategy and running the business. He has held the commercial seat in more than a dozen technology companies, in-house and embedded, which is where most of what he knows came from.

Before that, running New Zealand for Datalicious and for Experian, and product, key accounts and partnerships across the United Kingdom and Europe for Hitwise.

He teaches Export Essentials for New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and coaches founders through Startup Aotearoa. MBA from Otago. He's also building a sports science measurement product of his own, which keeps him honest about how hard all this is when you're the one holding the bag.

Coming up through foster care in an unglamorous corner of London left him with an unusually high tolerance for chaos. Turns out that's handy in this line of work.

Product and design leader. One of the first designers at Duo Security in Michigan, years before Cisco bought it. It is where she learned to build product for a United States market that does not care where you are from, which turns out to be most of what our clients need.

Later, Design Team Lead at Trade Me, running a dozen designers on the marketplace the entire country uses. She started out as a software developer, which is why her work tends to survive contact with an engineering team rather than starting an argument with one.

Her thing is the hard problem. Taking something nobody can quite articulate, researching it properly, and making it obvious. She builds the practice as well as the product, so teams keep doing it well after she's gone.

Having started over from scratch in three countries, she's very comfortable with the part of this job where nobody knows the answer yet.