Wally Haddick Has Spent a Career Making Complicated Products Matter

In a business career, the nouns tend to get the attention. Wally Haddick's nouns are unusually varied: oxygen equipment, surgical tools, 3D ear scanners, roof trusses, structural connectors, design software. The verbs explain him better. Ask. Measure. Travel. Teach. Sell. Build. Across more than 25 years of commercial leadership, he has kept returning to the work of translating intricate products into practical reasons for a customer to care.

Today Haddick is chief marketing officer at MiTek, the construction-technology company whose products sit inside a world most people inhabit without noticing. Roofs hold. Floors meet walls. Designs travel from screen to plant to jobsite. Somewhere behind those ordinary miracles are calculations, components, machines and people who need to agree on what happens next. Marketing such a company is less like unveiling a shiny object and more like drawing a map through a small country.

Haddick arrived with a useful education in consequential details. Before construction, his public career ran through large medical-device businesses and small technology companies. He led colorectal product sales at Medtronic and Covidien, handled international responsibilities at DeVilbiss, and later became chief commercial officer at Lantos Technologies and Allotrope Medical. The products changed, but they shared one commercial inconvenience: each demanded more than a clever line. A buyer had to understand a workflow, trust the equipment and see an advantage after the sale.

The customer leaves fingerprints on the strategy

A study Haddick discussed in 2015 offers a compact view of his instincts. DeVilbiss asked 29 homecare providers in Canada and Latin America to rank five attributes of a piece of equipment. Failure rate came first at 36.09 percent. Price followed at 25.53 percent, then warranty, energy savings and maintenance tools. In other words, buyers were looking beyond the invoice. They cared about what the machine might cost them in disruption later.

“We wanted to better understand the needs of customers and set out to identify which product attributes are most important to our customers.”Wally Haddick, on the 2015 customer study

The finding is almost comic in its plainness. A product that keeps working can be worth more than a cheaper one that does not. Yet whole marketing departments have been lost in the fog between those two facts. Haddick put the emphasis where an operator would: service costs, reliability in the field, and the customer's ability to keep doing the job. He also acknowledged the market's variety. At a 2017 industry exhibition, he said one product or price point could not meet everyone's needs. Segmentation, stripped of its consultant vocabulary, begins with admitting that customers are not clones.

That habit of finding the operational truth traveled with him into startup life. At Lantos, the commercial challenge was not merely to sell a scanner. It was to help practices adopt a digital process for capturing precise geometry and ordering custom products. During Haddick's tenure as chief commercial officer, Lantos announced deployments in the Washington and Chicago areas. A former colleague later described him as an action-oriented leader who would get on a plane, make the calls and do the work required to help customers try, then use, unfamiliar technology.

Startups are fond of disruption, a word that sounds grander from a conference stage than it feels on a Tuesday afternoon in a customer's office. The person being disrupted still has appointments, budgets and a system that worked well enough yesterday. Haddick's record suggests respect for that friction. The sale is partly an argument for novelty and partly a promise that novelty will not ruin the day.

Sell early, before urgency writes the pitch

In March 2019, Haddick joined a panel for ABCT, the Accelerator for Biosciences in Connecticut. Roughly 60 entrepreneurs, consultants and economic-development professionals came to hear about the business of moving an idea into the market. The group's lessons were brisk and practical: hire well, delegate, state business goals clearly, build the marketing foundation, share useful expertise, and keep promoting before the need for sales becomes an emergency.

There is a former athlete's affection for preparation in that list. Haddick played football at Fordham from 1987 through 1990. He later earned a bachelor's degree in economics there, then studied at Columbia Business School from 2007 to 2009. At Columbia he served on the Sanford C. Bernstein Student Leadership and Ethics Board and helped produce its inaugural white paper on executive-compensation design. The subject was governance, incentives and the questions boards should ask. Again: look beyond the attractive number on the first line.

Football returned in another form. From 2017 to 2020, Haddick served as communications director on the board of Newtown Youth Football & Cheer. He also coached. When families of the 2019 eighth-grade team wrote publicly to thank the staff, they praised the coaches for turning failures into teaching moments, using successes as building blocks, and reinforcing commitment, perseverance and community. It is a generous portrait of the entire staff, and a useful definition of leadership: raise the standard without lowering the person.

At MiTek, the product is also cooperation

MiTek puts Haddick inside a broader puzzle. The company spans engineered products, design software, manufacturing equipment and services. Its customers include designers, component manufacturers and builders. Each group sees a different piece of a building, works to a different clock and pays for a different kind of delay. The attractive proposition is collaboration. The difficult work is making collaboration concrete enough to buy.

For a global marketing leader, this means keeping a single company recognizable without pretending every market is identical. A truss plant manager may care about throughput and labor. A designer may care about avoiding rework. A builder may care about schedule certainty. A company can shout one slogan at all three, but the echo will be expensive. Haddick's earlier remark about products and price points applies neatly here. The useful story changes its emphasis while keeping its facts.

His own route to the C-suite mirrors that bridging job. Public profiles place him first in senior global marketing leadership at MiTek and now as chief marketing officer. Based in the New York metropolitan area, he works for a company headquartered in Chesterfield, Missouri, with operations and customers around the world. The geography demands the same habit as the portfolio: connect rooms that do not naturally share a vocabulary.

The useful story changes its emphasis while keeping its facts.

A children's book enters the building industry

One of the more revealing projects associated with Haddick contains no steel plate, production line or software dashboard. The House That She Built is a children's book about women working across the skilled trades. Its proceeds support workforce-development initiatives in homebuilding. Haddick introduced the project in Columbia Business School's alumni notes as part of MiTek's community work and its effort to create awareness among the largest underrepresented group in the industry.

The project is marketing in the older, more interesting sense: it enlarges a market by enlarging the number of people who can imagine belonging to it. In March 2025, Haddick publicly celebrated MiTek's partnership with Australia's Housing Industry Association to launch She Builds The Future. He praised the team for taking the work global and amplifying author Mollie Elkman's message.

That enthusiasm gives the career a satisfying turn. The executive who spent years making technical products approachable is helping make a technical industry approachable too. Construction has a labor problem, but it also has an imagination problem. A child who never sees a woman engineer, plumber or carpenter in a story may never place herself on the jobsite. The book gets there years before the recruitment campaign.

Haddick's public life does not offer the theatrical confession or polished mythology that usually powers an executive profile. It offers something sturdier: a pattern. He studies the customer. He crosses categories. He shows up in the rooms where founders need advice and young players need coaching. He links reliability to value, preparation to sales, and representation to the future workforce.

The nouns will keep changing. Construction itself is changing, pulled by software, automation, prefabrication and the demand to do more with scarce labor. The work ahead is full of elaborate systems and ordinary human resistance. Haddick has been preparing for precisely that combination. The pitch begins with a product. The durable part begins when someone believes it will make tomorrow's work better.