How RightShip built its product function and a team that hit the ground running

RightShip is one of the most influential names in maritime safety and risk. Established in 2001, RightShip is backed by founding shareholders BHP, Cargill and Rio Tinto. Permira joined as a minority investor in September 2025 to accelerate investment in technology, AI, data and people. The mandate is clear: grow RightShip's relevance and reach, and deepen its mission of zero harm to people and the planet. Building a world-class product function is central to delivering on that ambition.

What made this mandate genuinely unique was what RightShip was not looking for. They were not hiring people to execute against a predefined roadmap, or to build towards a solution that had already been conceived. This was as greenfield as product hiring gets: a blank page, in every sense. The people they needed had to be comfortable living in that space: running user interviews, spending real time with customers and doing the patient work of understanding what problems were actually worth solving before a single feature was scoped.

That distinction matters enormously. The market is full of product people who can execute well once the direction is set. People who can genuinely discover, who know how to hold a problem open long enough to understand it properly, who build conviction through customer contact rather than assumption and who can separate the real need from the noise, are considerably rarer. Finding them, consistently, in a market with no existing familiarity with RightShip as a product employer, was the real challenge.

At the same time, RightShip was relocating its CPO to lead the function, a serious commitment to getting the foundation right. The hires needed to complement that leadership and be ready to operate in genuinely uncharted territory from the moment they arrived.

Executive Integrity was brought in to build out RightShip's product function across three distinct hiring areas: Product Managers, Product Designers and an AI Program Lead. Each search carried its own specialism, but all were held to the same underlying standard.

The brief was not to find people who could take a spec and build to it. RightShip wanted people who could live in discovery, who were energised by user interviews, comfortable sitting with a problem before reaching for a solution and capable of working with customers to surface what genuinely needed building. There was no predefined product direction to hand over. The expectation was that the people hired would go and find it.

That is a fundamentally different hiring challenge to most product searches. It requires looking past execution track records and into the way someone thinks: how they approach uncertainty, how they engage with customers and whether they have the intellectual rigour to distinguish a real problem from a perceived one. On the design side, the profiles required sat outside the typical range of what the market produces at volume, compounding the difficulty further.

This was not a search that could be solved by matching CVs to a job description. The EI team invested significant time upfront understanding not just the roles, but how RightShip operated, what they expected from product people at their stage of transformation and what would make someone thrive in that environment.

That calibration work, understanding the operating model, the culture and the type of mindset that would succeed, meant that by the time candidates were being presented, the quality was consistently high and the brief did not need to be reexplained each time. Feedback from each round was absorbed quickly, and within two weeks the shortlists were precisely matched to the need.

Over time the relationship shifted from the dynamic of external recruiter and client to something closer to an embedded part of the RightShip team. The EI consultants understood the type of person that would work well, not just on skills, but on chemistry and fit.

“Feedback was not only very well understood, but led to noticeable immediate improvements in candidate selection. After just two weeks the suggestions were perfectly matched to the need.”

Maik Lutze, Head of Product Design, RightShip

Across the Product Manager and Product Designer searches, every hire placed by Executive Integrity hit the ground running from day one. Despite being new to the maritime industry and facing a steep learning curve in an unfamiliar sector, the placed candidates performed in a way that made the transition invisible.

Several of the product hires entered genuinely open, whitespace areas of the business, with no established product and no clear roadmap. Within their first few months, they had identified the opportunity, worked directly with customers and taken new products to market. That level of early impact, going from blank canvas to shipped product, is unusual by any measure, and speaks directly to the quality of discovery-led thinking that the search was built to find.

RightShip now has a product and design function in London that is operating as a genuine engine for the business. Hires across product management, product design and AI program leadership are all in seat, all contributing and in several cases already having identified new opportunities, worked directly with customers and taken new products to market. The team feels embedded. Cohesive. Like it has always been there.

Part of what made this possible was how RightShip ran their side of the process. Structured, decisive and consistently clear in their feedback, they understood that attracting the best product talent requires the same rigour on the employer side as it does on the search side. Interviews were well organised, timelines were respected and the hiring managers invested the time needed to really engage with candidates rather than simply assess them. That commitment to doing it properly is not something every business brings, and it made a material difference to the calibre of people willing to make the move.

Perhaps the clearest signal of all is what happens after the hire. The people placed are not just performing. They are engaged, energised and by all accounts exactly where they want to be. In a talent market where the best product people have options, that says something real about the environment RightShip has built.

“After a while it felt much less like working with an external recruiter and more like having an extension of the team. They understood the type of person that would work well at RightShip, which meant the quality of candidates was consistently very high and we did not have to keep explaining what we were looking for.”

Marlon Grech, Former Chief Product Officer, RightShip

RightShip is at an inflection point. The maritime industry is changing, under pressure to decarbonise, to operate more intelligently, to make decisions based on better data. RightShip sits at the centre of that shift, and the product function it is building in London is central to how it delivers on that ambition.

Building that function with the right people, not the most obvious ones, but the ones with the mindset and the drive to solve real customer problems, matters more than most hiring exercises. It is the kind of investment that compounds. Every product person who truly understands the customer, cuts through complexity and ships something meaningful makes the next hire easier to attract and the next product easier to build.

That is what RightShip set out to do. And it is what the team they have built is already delivering.