Average Team Size Benchmarks for Managers & Executives

Be wary of title inflation. Are your managers and execs properly leveled given your company’s current stage?

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As your company scales, job leveling and titling gets increasingly complex. For instance, maybe you hired a “VP” to build your product/marketing/sales/eng team from the ground up when you were a seed stage company. Do they have what it takes to be a successful VP once your company has 1,000 employees and their org balloons to 100 people?

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One way to answer this question is to evaluate the holistic health of your org chart. What are your company's average team sizes across M3 to E9, and how do they compare against market benchmarks?

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Let’s dive into some benchmarks in our analysis of 119,000 managers across 6,955 analyzed Pave customers.

Average Team Size Benchmarks

Let’s look at the average team size benchmarks (total reports within an org), including both direct reports and all indirect/recursive reports. We have analyzed “number of direct reports” (i.e. span of control) benchmarks previously, but this post is about total team size as a new way to analyze the health of your org chart.

Pave’s dataset skews heavily tech-focused, so the results may vary in other industries. That said, notice the big steps up from Director to VP to SVP to C-level at later stage companies with 3,001+ employees. Going from a team of 36 (Director) to 137 (VP) to 1,060 (CXO) is a nontrivial jump in reports. Running an org of 36 vs. an org of 1,000+ requires dramatically different leadership skills and experience. 

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On the other hand, the Director to VP to C-level jump in earlier stage companies (~15 to ~50 total reports from Director to CXO) is much easier to stomach. Upward mobility from Director to VP to C-level is seemingly an easier leap at early-stage companies than at later stage companies.

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The results also vary by department. For instance, an engineering director has different benchmarks and market norms compared to a sales director. Stay tuned for more analysis on this topic.

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