Morgan Bruce VP Engineering, Maze

Company

Maze are building the ultimate rapid testing platform that enables anyone to test and learn at speed. It aims to remove all the guesswork from building digital products by gathering insights from users every step of the way through product design and development, testing after ideation, design, content creation and release. The Maze platform enables users to test and gain insights at anytime, anywhere, answering every project need from usability tests to user surveys. To enable this Maze have partnered with the world’s biggest design tools, including Adobe XD, Figma, InVision, Sketch, and Marvel.

Founded in 2018 in by Jonathan Widawski and Thomas Mary, the company has attracted clients ranging from B2B SaaS companies to more traditional organizations such as Walmart and Porsche. Other notable clients include IBM, Logitech, Pipedrive, Uber and Greenpeace.

The Maze team raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by top growth investor Emergence Capital in February 2021, building on their Seed round led by Amplify Partners. Headcount has grown to 60 people operating fully remotely across 21 countries.

Search Background

With an ambitious growth trajectory and a fantastic platform to build upon, Maze were looking to bring in a VP of Engineering. Until this point, the function had been led by the CTO and Co-Founder Thomas Mary. The Engineering organization at the outset of the search consisted of approximately 15 but was growing quickly and doubled within a few months. The aim was to bring in a seasoned VP of Engineering to take on responsibility for the professionalization and scaling of the Engineering organization.

Requirements

The ideal candidate was someone who had previously gone into an early-stage business like Maze either at Seed, Series A or B and helped scale an Engineering organization to 80 people and above. The successful candidate needed to have experience of working in a B2B SaaS environment.

Maze were open to exploring different shapes of profile to find the best fit. The company being fully remote with a centre of gravity across the US East Coast and Europe meant that whoever came into the role needed to be comfortable running a global organization remotely. It also meant that there was an openness and opportunity to engage talent across any of these geographies. Beyond that Maze were keen to see what quality of candidate could be found at different levels. This meant engaging not just people who had held full ownership for engineering going through growth but also those who had seen what good looks like from a more junior position.

Result

The key to this search was helping Maze through its thinking about the ideal hire. With the Founders eager to know what shape of profile existed in the market, Erevena introduced a range of candidates situated on the West and East Coast of the US as well as Europe and a mix of seasoned candidates who had held VP Engineering level roles previously as well as up and coming candidates for whom this would be a step up.

From these candidates, Morgan Bruce ultimately proved to be the perfect fit for the business. Morgan had been with Onfido for the last 7 years, leading their Engineering organization, taking it from 5 to 130 people across 5 countries. From the first conversation, Morgan immediately got on with the Founders and at each stage of the process further proved why he was the right fit by building ever better rapport with the people at Maze. Eager to join an early-stage SaaS journey there was clear alignment between the Founders of Maze and Morgan not just in terms of skillset, but culture and approach as well.