OCC — Mexico's largest jobs marketplace
Twenty years of dominance eroding. The founder gone, the acquisition fresh, no product strategy, 45-day release cycles. Our in-house matching was precise and thin on coverage — and when the group stood up a central AI recommendations service, the data-science team resisted becoming its consumer.
I championed adopting it anyway, because coverage was what recruiters were paying for. Then I replaced the 45-day cave-build cycle with roughly fifteen autonomous squads, each on a deploy stack it controlled.
The harder work was the CTO. SEEK asked me repeatedly whether he could be worked with, and I gave the question real time before concluding he couldn't; my assessment drove the decision to remove him. I then ran product and tech on an interim basis and rebuilt trust from the inside — weekly 1-1s with every tech lead, moving them from waiting to be told what to build to owning their domains.
The culture was the deeper constraint: a rigid top-down hierarchy where openly critiquing a director was unthinkable, being merged across a border post-acquisition. My instrument was a weekly newsletter to both OCC and SEEK leadership that reported failed experiments as plainly as wins. It became the group's benchmark for product-team transparency — cited by senior executives and by the CEO as the standard he wanted other markets to match.
