You are Inés Roigé-Castell, head of People at Cardumen Software, a Barcelona B2B SaaS scale-up that just sold the board on a 55% revenue plan. Three leadership seats are unfilled and the calendar is unforgiving. Build, buy or borrow — and for which seat — is the year's most consequential decision you own.
The situation
Cardumen Software S.L. Barcelona-based B2B SaaS for supply-chain optimisation in mid-market manufacturing, founded in 2020 by two ex-Glovo engineers. FY2025 revenue €4.2M, 38 employees, EBITDA-neutral. The Series A from Kibo Ventures closed in March 2025 at €18M post; the plan you signed up for is €6.5M revenue and 60 employees by Q4 2026 — a 55% top-line jump and 58% headcount growth in twelve months. The board reviews the operating plan in October.
You joined nine months ago, in August 2025, from Wallapop where you spent three years as Director of People Ops, after four at Glovo as Head of HR Business Partners. You are thirty-nine and you have lived through exactly this transition twice before — the second time properly. Marc Tort, the CEO, has given you until 30 September 2026 to have three seats filled and onboarded. The seats are the structural unlocks for the plan, in this order of urgency:
- Senior Engineering Manager — the engineering team scales from fourteen to twenty-four ICs. The current Lead can't run a thirty-person org and Marc knows it.
- Head of Customer Success — the CS function goes from four to twelve in twelve months. Net Revenue Retention is currently 104%; the board model needs 118% to make the plan work.
- Chief Revenue Officer — Sales (currently five AEs reporting to the CEO) must become fifteen with formal segmentation, comp, and forecast discipline. Marc wants out of the seat by Q4 2026.
For each seat you have three theories of how to fill it: build (promote internally, train into the role), buy (recruit externally, full-time), or borrow (fractional, advisor, or operating-partner arrangement). The next screen lays out the nine cells. Then the trade-offs.