Who Should Your Company’s Head of Product Design Report To?

Should the Head of Product Design report to your CEO, CTO, or Head of Product?

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The answer is, naturally, it depends. Every company has its own org chart nuance. From a benchmarking standpoint, the size of the company has a large impact on the results.

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Product Design Leadership Benchmarks

Pave’s data science team analyzed 900+ Pave customers, looked at each company’s most senior product design leader (defined as M5+), and categorized them by who they report to. The results were broken out by company size in terms of employee count. And as a reminder, Pave’s dataset skews heavily tech.

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At earlier stage companies with fewer than 100 employees, the design leader (if one exists) usually reports to the CEO. As companies get larger and the org chart solidifies, it becomes increasingly common for the design leader to report to the Head of Product, or an equivalent executive.

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In third place is the CTO/Head of Engineering. The Design Leader reports to the Engineering Leader ~15% of the time–pretty consistently by company stage. Those that fall into the “Other” category commonly report to leaders in Marketing, Operations, or the President. 

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