The Leadership Playbook for AgTech Growth: Who to Hire, When to Hire, and What to Look For

Introduction: Scaling Your Team Isn’t a Checklist—It’s a Commercial Strategy

If you're leading an ag or food tech startup through a growth inflection point, chances are you're thinking about hiring. Maybe you’ve secured your next round of funding or are pushing into new markets. Maybe you're building your first commercial team—or wondering why your current one isn’t gaining the traction you expected.

In moments like these, it’s tempting to treat hiring as a checklist. Raise capital, hire Sales, then Marketing, then Ops. But real-world scaling doesn’t follow that playbook—especially not in agtech. We've seen it time and again: companies stall not because they lacked talent, but because they hired for the wrong stage, in the wrong sequence, or without aligning roles to how the business actually grows.

The truth is, most growth problems are leadership problems in disguise. You’re not just hiring to fill seats. You’re building the muscle that will drive adoption, generate revenue, and move your innovation out of the lab and into the market.

And here’s the catch: what works in SaaS or general tech often fails in ag. The timelines are longer. The decisions are more complex. The buyers are more skeptical. A high-flying software exec may flounder in a season-bound, field-tested, relationship-driven market like agriculture.

At 9 North, we believe scaling innovation takes more than adding headcount. It takes leaders who understand the terrain—people who can navigate complexity, move across functions, and build systems that perform under pressure. Because in this space, leadership isn’t just support for growth. It is growth.

What’s Different in Food and AgTech: Hiring for Complexity and Credibility

Ag and Food Tech startups don’t scale like other tech companies. And the sooner you embrace that truth, the faster you can build the kind of team that actually drives traction.

For starters, you're not selling to a single, well-defined buyer. You're engaging with growers, distributors, co-ops, consultants, agronomists, and retailers—often all at once. Decisions are made across a web of relationships, not a funnel. So when you're hiring sales, marketing, or product leadership, you need people who can map entire decision ecosystems and understand what moves each layer.

You also need to respect the clock—and it’s not ticking on your terms. In ag, the calendar belongs to the crop. Your sales team might be world-class, but if your launch misses a planting season, you're not getting another shot for 12 months. Leaders who are used to fast pivots and rapid-fire sprints may struggle to pace themselves for the long-game cycles this market demands.

And then there’s trust. If you’re selling into farming or food production, you're likely talking to people who’ve heard a dozen empty promises. They don’t buy the hype—they buy what works. That means your commercial and technical leaders must be comfortable building credibility in the field, not just the boardroom or the lab. Trial results, side-by-side comparisons, TCO models—these are your tools, not just pitch decks or demo videos.

Financing brings its own complexity. Ag innovations often require more capital and longer runways than other verticals. That’s not because the market is soft—it’s because adoption takes time, infrastructure is expensive, and real-world validation doesn’t happen overnight. Your finance leader needs to understand that nuance. Cash flow modeling, milestone-based raises, and capital efficiency matter more than flashy growth graphs.

And don’t forget: many agtech products are hybrid by design. They’re not just software—they’re also sensors, machines, microbes, genetics. Scaling that kind of offering takes leaders who understand how to move hardware through supply chains, how to support biological claims with data, and how to navigate the intersection of science and systems.

Finally, there’s go-to-market execution. In ag, distribution isn’t an afterthought—it’s your moat. You’re not just hiring someone who can sell direct. You’re hiring someone who knows how to plug into legacy systems, build channel partnerships, and earn the trust of entrenched networks.

These aren’t minor wrinkles. They’re the core reasons why the right hire in agtech looks very different than the right hire in general tech. And if you miss that early, you’ll waste time, burn capital, and lose seasons you can’t get back.

Your Leadership Build: Stage-by-Stage Breakdown

Role-by-Role: What Great Looks Like in AgTech

Hiring the right roles at the right time is only part of the equation. Just as critical is knowing what expertise and profiles will be most successful. Titles alone don’t tell the full story—especially when so many leaders come from outside ag or bring assumptions from faster-moving sectors.

That's why we've broken down the key leadership roles that drive agtech growth, sharing what to look for, what to avoid, and where founders often get tripped up. Whether you’re building from scratch or upgrading for scale, this is your lens for hiring with clarity and confidence.

Head of Product

• Field-informed, customer-facing, and MVP-minded  

• Balances science/tech with commercial readiness  

• Avoid perfection paralysis—deployability matters

Head of Sales / Commercial Strategy

• Capable of building the motion from scratch

• Fluent in ag channels and long-cycle selling

• Avoid glam-resumes with zero ag field time

• Experience bringing new innovations to market

• Broad commercial expertise

Finance Lead  

• Milestone-savvy, investor-ready, cash-efficient

• Comfortable with slower monetization curves

• Avoid “SaaS-only” experience with no exposure to hard costs or capex

• Understands the realities of cost to commercialize an innovation

Marketing Lead

• Customer-savvy, data-driven, creative problem solving

• Translates field performance into commercial storytelling

• Avoid brand-only marketers without pricing, channel, or GTM experience

• Sees the full commercial picture—how marketing supports sales, operations, and customer success

• Relentlessly focused on driving measurable business outcomes

Operations Lead

• Built for messiness—trials, logistics, hybrid service models

• Aligns support, supply chain, and deployment with commercial goals and seasonal business cycles

• Proven ability to build scalable systems from the ground up

• Pragmatic—open to off-the-shelf solutions when they accelerate progress

• Process-driven, with a focus on embedding operations early to enable growth

People & Talent Leader

• Shapes and scales culture as the team grows beyond 20+ FTEs

• Commercially aware—not just compliance-focused or HR-bound

• Bonus if experienced hiring across distributed or hybrid teams

• Thinks ahead to ensure the right talent is brought in at the right stage

Regulatory Lead (If needed)

• Navigates complex regulatory environments with a bias toward speed and clarity

• Builds proactive strategies—not just reactive compliance plans

• Understands how regulatory decisions impact go-to-market timing, pricing, and positioning

• Collaborates cross-functionally to align R&D, legal, and commercial priorities

• Bonus if experienced across multiple regulatory domains (EPA, USDA, FDA, etc.) or international markets

Where Teams Go Wrong: Common Leadership Pitfalls

Even when you’ve identified the right roles and skillsets, it’s still easy to get hiring wrong—especially in fast-moving or high-pressure moments. Founders often default to familiar resumes, flashy titles, or impressive big-company experience, only to realize those hires can’t deliver what’s needed at this stage.

Here are a few common pitfalls to watch for:

• Too many execs, too soon
  Title-heavy org charts can slow decisions and inflate burn. Skip the C-suite bloat. Early-stage companies need leaders who execute, not just strategize.

• Leaders who won’t roll up their sleeves
  If they’re too senior to get on the phone with a grower, ride along for a field trial, or troubleshoot a launch, they’re too senior for this stage.

• Managers, not builders
  Some hires have only managed systems built by others. You need people who know how to create those systems—scrappy, scalable, and from scratch.

• Functionally siloed thinking
  Avoid candidates who optimize for their own lane but don’t see the bigger picture. In agtech, marketing affects ops, sales drives regulatory strategy, and product lives or dies by field performance. You need cross-functional athletes.

• Founders who don’t trust the team they’ve hired
  Hiring great people doesn’t help if you can’t let go. We've seen growth stall because founders stay too deep in every function, bottlenecking progress instead of empowering their team to lead. Trust is a critical unlock.

Being intentional about who you hire—and when—can save you from painful missteps that cost more than just time. In this market, every season counts.

The 9 North Approach: Scaling with Purpose, Not Bloat

At 9 North, we work with founders to build the kind of teams that drive adoption, fuel revenue, and unlock market leadership. We don’t just help you hire—we help you scale with intention. That means:

• Aligning hiring decisions to commercial milestones

• Prioritizing executional leadership over org chart optics

• Avoiding premature scaling that slows down real momentum

Ready to Scale Smarter? Your next phase of growth doesn’t just need more hands. It needs the right leaders—at the right time—with the right experience. Let’s build your leadership roadmap—together.