The best fractional leadership team in hardware

If you’ve been following the informal blog for the past year, you’ve probably noticed us ramping up the number of articles we’ve posted that feature advice and how-to content related to building hardware companies. From our invaluable resource, the Hardware Handbook, to expert guest posts about selling into retail, we’ve been focused on producing practical, actionable content that helps hardware founders and teams find their way in the often opaque and challenging world of building a hardware company. Hardware is hard, after all. 

But what’s really cool is that you can actually hire the very practitioners contributing their expertise to these posts — and countless others in the informal network who aren’t content contributors. From engineering and operations to brand and marketing, we’ve spent the past few years cultivating a team of the best fractional leadership pros in hardware. Here’s a look at four of them.

Engineering: Bill Carter-Giannini

If you’ve worked in hardware in the San Francisco Bay Area, you’ve probably heard of or worked with Bill Carter-Giannini at some point. When it comes to engineering and manufacturing, he’s done it all: high-precision robotics systems for the Navy, high-volume consumer electronics for Amazon, and high-growth engineering and product development for hardware companies of all shapes and sizes with the agency he started, Ronin. Today, Bill is a hardware engineering leader for hire who has helped informal clients like Aescape scale their engineering teams and R&D efforts. 

Operations: Sean McBeath

Sean McBeath started his career as a mechanical engineer at Synapse (now part of Capgemini) before joining forces with other Synapse alumns to start their own engineering consulting firm, Igor Institute. At Igor, Sean led the mechanical engineering team and, over time, developed their program-management practice that helped them grow and impart operational rigor on hardware companies to help them succeed and scale. Now as VP of Hardware at informal client Harbor and a fractional hardware product development consultant, Sean helps hardware teams and hardware agency teams alike with manufacturing, quality, and other core operational components of building a hardware company. 

Brand: Faraz Warsi

Faraz Warsi has been building brands and leading teams as a Creative Director since 2011, both from an agency and in-house perspective. Most recently, he developed and oversaw every part of the brand for 3Doodler, a 3D-printing pen that lets you draw in 3D, from its successful Kickstarter campaign that raised $2.3 million in 2013 to the 5+ subbrands it includes today. He even lived in Hong Kong and worked directly with the product and manufacturing teams for part of that. Today, he’s a freelance Creative Director helping informal clients who are building innovative consumer technology products of the future. 

Marketing: Lindsey Gideon

If you’re trying to figure out how to make your hardware company cut through all the noise and reach your target customers, Lindsey Gideon is the person to help you do it. She’s had a notable career in marketing and PR, and has led marketing teams at 3Doodler, littleBits (now Sphero) and VEX Robotics. Today she supports informal clients like Mola and Tomorrow on PR & go-to-market, helping them acquire new customers and develop processes and infrastructure to continue scaling. 

That’s just a sample of the 50+ fractional leaders in the informal community. Whether you’re looking to build a hardware product, brand, or an entire company, the leader you’re looking for is just a click away.

informal is a freelance collective for the most talented independent professionals in hardware and hardtech. Whether you’re looking for a single contractor, a full-time employee, or an entire team of professionals to work on everything from product development to go-to-market, informal has the perfect collection of people for the job.