tech-companyCXO: Chief Experience Officer.
A chief experience officer (CXO) is the officer responsible for the overall user experience (UX) of an organization.
How is he/she different from a senior frontend engineer?
And when(at what stage and with what motive) should a company look to hire a CXO?
Pay attention to the highlighted part:
The Chief Experience Officer (CXO) is charged with leveraging best practices in design and user experience to gain market share. That’s it.
So, although a senior front-end engineer will apply all knowledge and skill needed to build a beautiful product, the CXO will run specific A/B tests, hire design firms and experience researches, manage user experience labs with several prototypes and, the most important, put everyone under the same umbrella.
The CXO will apply a methodological approach in order to achieve the highest rates of downloads, good rating and user feedback. It’s a good balance between theory and practice.
The best CXOs has technical expertise in an addition of ability to present and discuss theories and scenarios (backed by numbers) with CMO, CFO, CEO and investors. Sometimes, the front-end engineer would rather die than explaining his motives and rationale to the business guys.
About timing
The CXO would be valuable when the startup is shifting from MVP mode to growth mode quickly.
If you can get a CXO early on with equity, then do it. But if you are still strugling to launch your MVP, I don’t see how a CXO would be beneficial - once you have bigger problems to deal with.
There are some similarities in terms of when to hire the CXO and the CMO as well, so here are some situations where a CXO would be extremely useful to your startup:
1. When You Need to Put Your Product First
A good CXO can’t save a bad product, but (s)he can take an OK product to the next level and make it better through proper market research and customer feedback.
2. When You Need to Grow
When you’re not growing at a pace you need in order to be an industry leader or provide the returns your investors are looking for, it’s time to think about hiring a CXO. (S)he will bring invaluable inputs on how to make your product better and, as result, grow on market share.
3. When You Found the Company
Hiring a CXO is becoming as important as hiring a CMO or CTO. From surveying users to scaling the company, a CXO is critical for not just the later stages, but also the early stages of your company. To some degree, a CXO is more important at the earlier stages of your development than the later ones because having the right groundwork early can mean the difference between a company that accelerates at 20 percent a month and a company that accelerates at 5 percent.
All content is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.