Issuu Expands Leadership Team with Key Hires and Promotions

Alexander Grosse returns to Issuu as CTO and Head of Product, Slack’s April Sandoval takes over as Head of Business Intelligence, and Audrey Vandenbroeck is promoted to VP of Customer Success

Issuu today announced a significant expansion of the company’s executive leadership team, including the appointment of Alexander Grosse to Chief Technology Officer (CTO), the hiring of Slack veteran April Sandoval as Head of Business Intelligence, and the promotion of Audrey Vandenbroeck to Vice President of Customer Success.

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Grosse will lead engineering, product management, and design in the newly-formed CTO role. From 2015 to 2017, Grosse was Issuu’s VP of Engineering, spearheading the company’s product evolution to become a category leader. Grosse is returning to lead a combined engineering and product design team and help compound Issuu’s accelerating growth.

Previously, Grosse was a Partner and Vice President of Engineering at BCG Digital Ventures and an active startup advisor and angel investor. Prior to his original tenure at Issuu, he served as Vice President of Engineering at SoundCloud, where he built the engineering team from 20 engineers to 100 in over four locations around the globe. Grosse was also a Research and Development Director for Nokia, where he built the Places Department and led Operations for Nokia’s Location Services. He is currently a Member of the Board of Advisors to The Climate Choice. Grosse specializes in building engineering teams, agile development, large-scale systems, QA, and technical recruitment.

“Issuu is in a high-growth phase, spurred on by the momentum of the Creator Economy and the explosion of content publishing and marketing during the pandemic,” said Issuu CEO, Joe Hyrkin. “Alex brings extensive experience in growing and leading world-class engineering teams back to Issuu at an exciting time when our platform is undergoing an evolution to meet creators’ and content marketers’ changing demands.”

“I’ve been watching Issuu evolve and I knew I wanted to come back to the company to take it into its next phase of success,” said Grosse. “I look forward to leading our engineering, product and design efforts during this period of rapid growth for Issuu—at such a pivotal time in the creator and content marketing industry.”

Issuu also recently hired Slack and Workday veteran April Sandoval to lead the business intelligence team and scale systems to provide context and analysis to Issuu’s massive data pool. Sandoval specializes in using analytics as a competitive advantage and creating data stories to inspire curiosity and inform decisions.

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As Data and Analytics Leader at Slack, Sandoval stood up the company’s first enterprise data team to support rapid growth before and during the pandemic. Previously as Sr. Director, Enterprise Analytics & Insights at Workday, Sandoval built the company’s first enterprise analytics strategy. Sandoval also spent almost 15 years at Cisco in various data leadership roles.

Further expanding Issuu’s executive leadership team, Audrey Vandenbroeck, formerly Issuu’s Senior Director of Customer Success, has been promoted to Vice President. She will continue to expand Issuu’s customer success, support, and inside sales teams to help customers achieve their goals and maximize the value of Issuu.

Vandenbroeck has led the customer success team at Issuu for the last four years. Prior to Issuu, Vandenbroeck was Senior Director of Customer Success for ReadyPulse, Inc. She was also a customer success lead at Redbooth Inc. and Sales Portal.

“I’m thrilled that April has joined our team. Her experience and knowledge with companies that have very large amounts of business data will be invaluable, especially as we continue to grow rapidly in the publishing, content marketing, and creator economy spaces,” said Hyrkin. “And I’m thrilled to promote Audrey into this newly-created VP role at Issuu. She brings care, tenacity and thoughtfulness to every opportunity and has earned this promotion through her efforts and success. I’m confident she will continue to bring exceptional talent and energy to her role in helping Issuu customers thrive.”

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