The founder has been carrying product.
It is time for a first product leader, and the company needs to know what good looks like before it hires, or needs someone in the seat while it searches.
Nautima Group · Columbus, Ohio
We help promising companies become scalable ones.
Product strategy, go-to-market execution and the operating discipline that turn a funded company into a durable one. Fractional executive roles, board and advisory seats, focused engagements and selective investment, from Columbus, Ohio.
Who we help
The board is asking for more than the company is giving.
Capital raises the bar. After a Series A or B the questions change: where the product is going and why it will win, whether go-to-market is a system or a set of heroics, and whether the company can run at the next scale without the founder in every decision. We work with the people who have to answer.
The product leader needs to level up.
Strong at shipping, thinner on strategy, pricing and the board conversation. A few quarters of coaching alongside them, then a clean hand-off.
Growth is outrunning the operating model.
Finance, hiring, process and metrics have to mature ahead of the next round, not after it. Every month the operating model lags is money the company already spent.
Ownership is changing.
Private equity owned, just acquired, or preparing to sell to it. The value creation plan needs an operator who has lived one from the inside, on the management team.
How we work
Four ways in. The same operator either way.
Every engagement starts with a decision the company is stuck on and ends with something different happening on Monday. The format follows the situation.
Fractional and interim executive roles
Chief Product Officer, or product and go-to-market leadership, embedded with the team on a part-time or interim basis and accountable for outcomes. Where the situation calls for it, a temporary management seat until the permanent hire is made.
Board and advisory positions
A standing seat for product, go-to-market and scaling questions, for companies that want the perspective on call rather than on a project. Structured for equity, cash or both.
Focused engagements
Defined work with a defined end: product strategy, positioning, pricing and packaging, roadmap, aligning product with marketing and sales, and the product narrative a board expects to hear.
Selective investment
Principal investment and operating roles in special situations. When a situation calls for more capital than our own, we work alongside partners including Sanguine Partners and Bambu Capital.
Why Ohio
Built in Ohio, by design.
Ohio has the ingredients to become a much larger force in technology: deep capabilities in manufacturing, engineering, logistics, healthcare and financial services, and a culture of building real things and real businesses. Capital is arriving to match, and the funds and studios behind it are addressing the first half of the problem.
The second half is what happens after the money lands. A Series A or B is a large amount of capital, and a company needs people who know how to turn a promising product into a scaled business: finding the market, building the right product, aligning product with marketing and sales, and putting the operating infrastructure around the founder that can carry what comes next.
That is the expertise Nautima Group was founded to contribute. Since 2020, Ohio has gained operators who spent decades scaling technology companies on the coasts and chose to live here. Nautima Group exists to put that experience to work for Ohio companies, and we direct our own banking, legal, accounting and investment toward Ohio firms and institutions whenever we have the choice.
About
Darin Archer
Darin Archer founded Nautima Group after 25 years building, transforming and taking technology businesses to market. He has served as Chief Product Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Strategy Officer at venture-backed software companies, led product at Intel, IBM and Adobe, and operated inside Gap Inc., a $16 billion enterprise.
He helped raise a $32 million Series B at Elastic Path as CMO, revived a nearly $400 million portfolio at IBM, fixing its economics and returning signings to growth, and most recently led product at a web performance company through a rebuild around AI and a recent exit. He has worked through reinvention, venture-backed growth, private equity ownership, Fortune 500 transformation and fundamental shifts in technology and business models, from experience-driven commerce and IoT to personalization, SaaS and AI. The recurring lesson: a great product is only part of the equation. Companies last when the product, the market, the money and the people pull in the same direction, and usually one of them is not.
He lives in Columbus, Ohio, by choice. The full record, sources linked, is at darinarcher.com/my_work.
Contact
Tell us where the company is stuck.
A short note is enough. We read every one and reply within two business days. If a call is easier, book one directly.