Chief Experience Officer Recruitment

Exec Capital provides senior Chief Experience Officer (CXO) recruitment for UK firms across SaaS, financial services, retail, healthcare technology, professional services, and broader experience-led businesses. The Chief Experience Officer role typically combines senior UX and design leadership with substantive customer journey strategy and (often) digital product experience accountability. The role takes substantively different forms depending on firm context: at SaaS scale-ups, the CXO often leads design and product experience reporting to the CEO or CPO; at established firms, the CXO often leads customer-journey transformation programmes alongside CMO and CCO peers; at digital-led firms the role can dominate brand and customer-facing strategy. UK senior CXO hiring is shaped by the substantive variation in scope, with strong specifications calibrating the role explicitly to the firm’s commercial model and existing senior team.

Our practice covers UK senior Chief Experience Officer appointments across firms with substantial design and digital experience scope, customer journey transformation programmes, and broader experience-led commercial strategies. Every mandate is led personally by Adrian Lawrence FCA. For Chief Customer Officer recruitment (a related but typically broader senior commercial customer role), see our Chief Customer Officer recruitment service.

A Note from Our Founder — Adrian Lawrence FCA

CXO appointments are particularly prone to the design-versus-strategy dimension. Strong CXOs bring both — substantive design and UX credentials at the level required to lead senior creative teams, plus the strategic and commercial fluency required for genuine C-suite participation. The pattern that recurs is firms over-indexing on one dimension and producing senior appointments that struggle in the other. The fix is calibrating the brief explicitly to require both, and assessing both substantively during the search.

At Exec Capital we run CXO searches with both dimensions worked through at the front of the brief. Strong candidates evaluate firms carefully — the existing design and product capability, the realistic mandate and budget, the executive team’s substantive engagement with experience as commercial strategy, and any matters in the firm’s recent history that bear on the role. Every senior CXO mandate is handled personally — there are no junior account managers running these searches at Exec Capital.

Speak to Adrian about your CXO appointment →

Adrian Lawrence FCA | Founder, Exec Capital | ICAEW Verified Fellow | ICAEW-Registered Practice | Companies House no. 13329383

What the Chief Experience Officer role covers

The substantive CXO role typically covers four dimensions, with weighting varying by firm.

Design and UX leadership. The senior leadership of design and UX teams across the firm — design system, design operations, senior creative talent management. Strong CXOs typically have substantive prior design or UX leadership credentials.

Customer journey strategy. The substantive design of end-to-end customer journeys — pre-purchase, transactional, post-purchase, support, retention. Strong CXOs lead substantive customer-journey design as commercial work, not as cosmetic refinement.

Digital product experience. Particularly central in SaaS, fintech and digital-led firms. Senior leadership of product experience design, digital product strategy, and (often) front-end engineering partnership.

Brand and creative direction. In some firm contexts, the CXO carries substantive accountability for brand expression and creative direction across customer-facing surfaces — websites, applications, physical environments, marketing materials.

The candidate pool

Five pools recur. Sitting CXOs at peer firms. Most direct pool. Step-up candidates from VP Design or VP Customer Experience roles at larger firms. Natural growth pool. Senior design and UX leaders transitioning to broader CXO scope. Strong pool with substantive creative credentials. Senior consulting partners from CX practices. Common pool for transformation-led firms. Senior product leaders transitioning to experience-led roles. Particularly common in SaaS contexts.

Related Services

Closely related senior search services from Exec Capital

Chief Customer Officer Recruitment

Senior customer-led commercial leadership

CMO Recruitment

Senior Chief Marketing Officer search

Head of Product Recruitment

Senior product leadership

Chief Brand Officer Recruitment

Senior brand leadership

Chief Innovation Officer Recruitment

Senior innovation leadership