Today at Web Summit, A.Team—the world’s first team formation platform—announced the launch of a new CxO Network to serve as product visionaries, strategic advisors, and team leaders for its growing client roster of market-leading startups, growth stage, and enterprise companies. The network features industry luminaries such as former Walmart Chief Product Officer Meng Chee and former US Air Force CTO Jen Snow, as well as renowned product leaders like Jared Cocken and Martin Strutz.
A.Team’s platform is home to a broader network of over 7,000 top engineers, product managers, designers, and data scientists. These independent workers come together as Ocean’s-11-style teams on its platform to tackle high-order product initiatives.
As A.Team built teams for over 300 companies over the past two years, it noticed a common pattern amongst its most successful initiatives. “What we realized is that great teams need that ‘George Clooney’ element,” explained Raphael Ouzan, A.Team’s Co-Founder and CEO. “They had a CxO-level expert who served as the strategic lead to unlock the vision and mission, making it much easier to bring the right team together and build incredible products.”
Fractional CxOs have exploded in popularity in the remote work age, as startups and enterprises alike look to infuse their growth initiatives with c-suite-level expertise. Too often, though, the impact of fractional CxOs is limited to a Powerpoint deck that never gets acted on. A.Team’s CxO Network can not only set the strategic vision—it can deploy an expert team in under 10 days to bring that vision to life.
At launch, the CxO network is a small, exclusive group of 20 world-class leaders that were drawn to A.Team’s vision for reshaping the future of work through cloud-based product teams that accelerate the way companies innovate and develop transformative products. Some members of the CxO Network—like Chee and Snow—specialize as strategic advisors. Others, like Cocken and Strutz, also serve as functional leaders, building and leading the team hands-on.
Take Blank Street Coffee, the tech-enabled coffee shop: A.Team brought in a product leader, Martin Strutz—founder of and.co, later acquired by Fiverr—to craft the vision for a sophisticated order-ahead app that would allow Blank Street to deliver high-end coffee at a fraction of the cost, thanks to the operational efficiency the app created. Strutz then built out a full team to bring that vision to life — powering Blank Street’s rapid expansion from a single Williamsburg-based coffee cart to a beloved franchise with 60 locations across New York, Boston, Washington D.C. and London.
“Working with an expert product leader like Martin transformed our roadmap and vision,” said Issam Freiha, co-founder of Blank Street. “And then we were able to execute on that vision with our A.Team so quickly. Our A.Team is not a group of 3rd-party contractors. They are core members of our team and family, adding a level of expertise better than we could have found anywhere else.”
This model has also proved extremely powerful for enterprise companies pursuing digital transformation initiatives. Global education company McGraw Hill came to A.Team with a mission to take studying into the social media era. A.Team brought in Cocken, a renowned product designer, to help build the initial prototype of its “TikTok for studying” app before building out an A.Team of 27 to help build and launch the full product. That app, SHARPEN™, launched this past month with great fanfare, helping transform how thousands of students study.
“From the start, A.Team enabled us to prototype and iterate more efficiently,” said Justin Singh, McGraw Hill’s Chief Strategy & Transformation Officer. “Then ultimately, at the product development stage, they gave us the agility to quickly scale up and down with the resources needed to get to market sooner.”
