CTO, CPO or CPTO: How UK Technology Companies Structure Product and Technology Leadership

In October 2026 we reviewed the published executive teams of 40 UK technology companies, 20 listed on the London Stock Exchange and 20 privately held. Thirteen have a chief technology officer and a separate chief product officer. Sixteen have a technology chief but no product chief at executive level. Five have one executive who leads both, in every case titled chief product and technology officer (CPTO).

We found no published count of how UK companies divide these roles. Most research on the question comes from surveys of product managers, which ask where the product function reports. Those surveys measure reporting lines, not the titles on a company’s executive team.

What the CTO, CPO and CPTO are responsible for

The chief technology officer leads engineering and is accountable for the architecture, delivery and reliability of the product. The chief product officer decides what the company builds and in what order, based on its customers and its strategy. A chief product and technology officer holds both responsibilities, and usually has a head of product and a head of engineering reporting to them. Our guide to the CTO role covers the CTO’s responsibilities in more detail.

Twenty-one of the 40 companies have no product chief at executive level. In our experience, where there is no product chief, the chief executive makes the main product decisions or a head of product reports to the CTO.

How the 40 companies structure product and technology leadership

Thirty-four of the 40 companies have a technology chief on the executive team, under titles that include chief technology officer, chief engineering officer and chief technology and data officer. Nineteen have a product chief in some form: 13 alongside a separate technology chief, five in a combined role, and one, an online car marketplace, with a chief product officer and no CTO.

The other five publish an executive team with no C-level product or technology title. One uses executive vice-president titles and has had its technology post vacant since August 2026. Another, a digital bank, has titled its senior technology role vice-president of technology since July 2026. One is led on the technical side by a chief scientist and vice-presidents. One has a chief platform officer, and the company does not state that role’s remit. In the fifth, the former chief product and technology officer is now chief operating officer.

Listed and private companies made similar choices. The combined role is the only visible difference. Four listed companies use it, and one private company does.

Fifteen of the 40 companies are in financial services, mostly banks, lenders and payment businesses. None of them has a combined CPTO. Eight of the 15 have a technology chief with no product chief. Among the other 25 companies, eight have a technology chief alone and all five combined roles appear.

Company size and the product chief

The largest difference in the review is by size. Of the 15 companies with 1,000 or more employees, nine have a separate CTO and CPO. Of the 25 companies with fewer than 1,000 employees, four have both roles and 13 have a technology chief with no product chief. Four of the five combined roles are at companies with between 500 and 999 employees. None is at a company with fewer than 500.

The pattern is the same in both halves of the review. Among listed companies, six of the nine with 1,000 or more employees have a separate CTO and CPO, against one of the 11 smaller companies. Among private companies, the figures are three of six and three of 14.

ProductPlan’s 2024 survey of more than 1,440 product professionals worldwide found that about a quarter of organisations had product managers reporting to a CPO, whatever the size of the company. The share rose with the size of the product team, from 16% of organisations with one to four product people to 35% of organisations with 50 to 99. In small companies, product more often reported directly to the chief executive.

In the companies we work with, the CPO is usually the later appointment, made after the CTO at the point where the chief executive no longer has the time to lead product decisions.

Thirteen companies changed product or technology leadership in 2025 and 2026

Thirteen of the 40 companies changed their most senior product or technology roles between January 2025 and October 2026. Four of those were changes of person: two new CTOs, a replacement chief product officer, and a technology post left vacant after the holder left. The other nine changed the structure itself.

Five of the nine structural changes added a separate product chief at executive level. A consumer travel platform made its chief data officer CTO, responsible for technology and data, and appointed a chief product officer from outside the company. A privately owned cybersecurity company replaced its founding CTO with two executives, a new CTO and a chief product officer in a newly created role.

In two other companies, one executive now leads product and engineering together. At a workplace learning platform, a chief product officer appointed in February 2026 had the title chief product and technology officer by October. At a data integration software company, a chief development officer leads product and engineering, alongside the co-founder who remains CTO.

Two of the nine structural changes followed the departure of a founding CTO, and three of the nine companies also changed chief executive in the same period.

12% of product teams report into engineering

Product Focus, a UK product management training company, surveys product managers each year. In its 2026 survey of 677 people, 83% of them in Europe, 26% said their product function reports to a chief product officer and 24% to the chief executive or board. A further 12% reported into development or engineering.

The figure for engineering has been similar in every survey we found. It was 15% in Product Focus’s 2023 survey and 17% in 2024, and 10% in both the 2011 and 2017 surveys run by the Pragmatic Institute. Product Focus also compared answers by reporting line. Of the respondents who report to a CPO, nearly 80% said their company treats product management as a leadership role. Of those who report into engineering or sales, about 50% said so.

Who leads AI in the 40 companies

Four of the 40 companies name a senior AI leader. Only one of those leaders sits on the executive team, as chief corporate development and AI officer at an energy software company. Two companies have a chief AI officer below the executive team, and one has a vice-president of AI who leads its applied researchers.

Where the other companies describe AI leadership, it usually sits with technology or data. One bank’s CTO joined in 2026 with responsibility for technology and AI. At one software group the chief product officer’s remit includes AI, and one bank has placed AI in a new transformation office.

IBM’s 2025 study of chief AI officers, a global survey of 624 respondents across 22 countries, found that 26% of the more than 2,300 organisations it contacted had the role, and that 57% of chief AI officers reported to the chief executive or the board.

Which structure suits which problem

The first question we ask on any appointment is what problem the new leader has to solve. A company whose product strategy needs rebuilding usually needs a chief product officer who reports to the chief executive. A company whose platform cannot cope with the next stage of growth needs a CTO first.

Whichever structure a company chooses, the chief executive should set out in writing who has the final say when product and engineering disagree about priorities, and the board should know what that arrangement is. In ProductPlan’s survey, the CPO had the final say in 40% of organisations and the chief executive in 38%. A combined CPTO gives one point of accountability for those decisions. A separate CTO and CPO need an agreed route for the disagreements they cannot settle between themselves, and in most companies that route leads to the chief executive.

If you are planning a technology executive search or reviewing how product and technology are led in your business, we would welcome a conversation.

Notes on the data

We chose the 40 companies to cover a range of sizes and sectors among UK-headquartered, technology-led businesses, so they are not a random sample. Fifteen are financial services businesses, because financial technology accounts for many of the UK’s larger private technology companies. Listed companies include two on AIM. We counted private equity-owned companies that operate independently from a UK headquarters as privately held. We counted one company as listed whose primary listing moved to Nasdaq in May 2026, because it keeps a London listing and is run from London.

For each company we read the executive or leadership team on its own website, its latest annual report or Companies House accounts, and its announcements from 2025 and 2026, as at 23 October 2026. Independent researchers then re-checked 26 of the 40 companies, including every company where the first reading was uncertain, and found three factual errors, which we corrected.

We classified each company by the titles of its executive team. A technology chief holds a C-level title that includes technology, technical or engineering. A product chief holds a C-level title that includes product, so we counted a chief marketing and product officer as a product chief. We did not count a chief digital officer, a chief development officer or a chief scientist as a product or technology chief, and we did not count vice-president titles. Where a company’s own sources disagreed, we used the most recent dated one. For one bank, that was its published executive team, which lists a chief strategy officer whose title in the 2025 annual report was chief product and strategy officer. For one private company, it was a company post of 14 October 2026 that names a chief product and technology officer, although its leadership page still says chief product officer. For a listed company that publishes no executive committee, we used its central leadership team. A private bank publishes its executive committee by role only, without names. The cybersecurity company in the table announced its new CTO and its newly created CPO role on 22 October 2026, the day before our reading. We excluded changes we could not date or confirm: a move to a CPTO at one listed company, a bank’s retitling of its chief product officer as chief strategy officer at some point between May and October 2025, and a reported CPO change at another bank.

Titles do not show reporting lines or the full scope of a role, and a company may have a product leader below the published executive team. Employee numbers come from each company’s latest annual report or accounts, or from a dated company statement where no accounts figure was available. A few are older or cover the UK operating company only. Total employees is a rough measure of size for this purpose, because a bank with large operations teams can have many more staff than a software company with a larger engineering team.

• Product Focus, 2026 Survey of the Product Management Profession (March 2026), with the 2023 and 2024 editions for earlier years. The 2026 edition had 677 respondents from 40 countries, collected between October 2025 and January 2026.
• ProductPlan, The 2024 State of Product Management Report. More than 1,440 respondents, surveyed in the fourth quarter of 2023.
• Pragmatic Institute, 2011 and 2017 annual product management surveys.
• IBM Institute for Business Value, Solving the AI ROI puzzle (July 2025). Survey of 624 respondents in 22 countries in the first quarter of 2025.