While expanding your business, getting more people aboard to be in charge of specific tasks, the question pops up. What should be their job title.

Different companies choose different job titles to describe the same thing, here is my 2 cents about that.

If I consider when someone to be in charge of marketing, business development or finances. We would have to choose between “Manager”, “Executive” or “Officer”.

Manager manages people, if someone’s task is managing people working on the same thing, then Manager is to be used.

If you run a startup and a single person is to be responsible of specific tasks, I’d personally not choose manager; no structure to manage. It could make sense though if it’s about managing the process. But that’s not good enough to my taste.

Executive is being very specific in execution, so someone described as executive implies – for me – not being involved with planning.

A startup describing someone as executive, seems like an insult to me. A guy who have no idea what he’s executing. just execute.

Officer, officer implies responsibility, power and I see include both managing processes + executing it. Officer = Planner+Executive+Manager

For a startup where an individual is responsible of a complete process, Officer is to be used. responsible, decisive, creative, manager and executive!