Mycube Safe: Hiring an Ecommerce Leader to Build a Conversion Engine
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Why a hands-on CRO operator was hard to find in Boston
Traffic was climbing and no one owned the website full-time. The founders and two outside agencies were making changes in parallel, which meant no one held the conversion number.
Mycube needed a structured A/B testing and funnel optimization program running across landing pages, product pages, cart, and checkout. One-off changes had already been tried.
Two constraints did most of the filtering. The role was hybrid out of Boston, which cut the national CRO pool down to commuting distance. And the candidate had to have run conversion work on products at a comparable AOV, because testing a $2,000 considered purchase behaves nothing like testing a $40 repeat order. On top of that: Shopify, a real experimentation track record, and comfort in funnel and cohort analysis without an analyst to lean on.
Mycube needed someone who would personally build hypotheses, run the tests, and pick up QA when dev resources ran thin. Candidates who expected a team and a dev queue to execute for them were screened out early, along with operators coming from food and beverage, where the purchase behavior does not transfer.
The hire: a CRO leader who codes his own tests
The profile we brought forward sat well outside the original spec. Mycube had scoped 3 to 8 years as an ecommerce manager or CRO specialist. The candidate we placed had 15+.
He built Converse's global experimentation program from scratch and worked daily in Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, GA4, and SQL. His most recent named result was a navigation test that lifted AOV roughly 3.5% with no offsetting revenue loss (candidate-reported, prior employer).
When a restructuring at his employer left him without dev resources, he coded and QA'd the test implementations himself using AI tools. He called himself a Swiss army knife and had the commit history to back it. That is the profile a lean team needs, because the alternative is a leader whose roadmap stalls the first time engineering gets reprioritized.
He also completed a take-home analysis on Mycube's own funnel data, product views, add-to-carts, purchases, and revenue by SKU, then presented it back to the team in writing. Mycube saw his analytical work before the final round instead of after the offer.
How we evaluated for execution, not credentials
Every submission came with a written brief covering culture and working style, comp expectations, specific CRO and attribution depth, and tooling. Mycube's two decision-makers could evaluate a candidate in one read instead of reverse-engineering a resume across three interviews.
The candidate carried a relocation retention bonus he would have had to repay if he left his employer inside a few months. We found it during comp discovery and put the $12K gap in front of Mycube before the offer went out. Deal-breakers like this usually surface at signature, when the client has no room left to move.
We had already placed Mycube's VP of Growth, the hiring manager for this role. That meant the profile was built with someone whose standards we knew, and we could calibrate against how she actually works rather than against a job description.
Throughout the search we fed market signal back to Mycube on where comp and location were costing them candidates, which is how the profile widened from 3 to 8 years into a 15-year operator.
Process
- 58 candidates interviewed
- 32 candidates submitted
- 4 interview rounds
- 2 client stakeholders
- 19 days to offer
- 100 days total interview timeframe
The process ultimately produced 2 finalists and 2 offers, with the client selecting the final hire.
A CRO Leader Built for Mycube's Next Stage
- Finalists: 2
- Offers: 2
- Time to offer: 19 days
He came in owning the full loop: reading the funnel, writing the hypothesis, shipping the test, QAing it.
His mandate is to stand up the testing program across landing pages, PDPs, cart, and checkout, and to move conversion on the core safes. Performance data against that mandate will be added once the first testing cycles close.
Positioning Highlight
Mycube's search turned on three things a generalist recruiter would have missed. Hybrid-Boston narrowed the pool before skills were even assessed, so we ran the search against commuting geography from day one. High-AOV considered purchases need CRO experience from comparable price points, which is why food and beverage operators were screened out despite strong testing backgrounds. And the $12K relocation clawback would have killed the offer at signature if we had not found it during comp discovery.
