Why is there no Chief Quality Officer?

A few weeks ago I got on a video call with Rosie Sherry from the Ministry of Testing to record an episode of the “Leading with Quality” podcast. During this conversation I started musing on why there are so few senior leadership roles for quality. And I loved our chat about, but felt there’s a little more to explore for me, so I wrote about it.

I’ll leave a link to the podcast at the end of the post.

Where are all the Chief Quality Officers?

I’ve been wondering about this for years.

Despite all the talk about quality in our industry, roles like Chief Quality Officer, or even Director of Quality, are vanishingly rare. You’ll find CTOs, Heads of Product, Directors of Engineering in almost every company over a certain size. But a senior quality leader? Unusual at best.

That’s frustrating on a personal level, especially if you’re a tester or QA engineer with leadership ambitions. But it’s also frustrating on a strategic level, because it means a lot of high-stakes decisions about quality are made without quality specialists in the room.

So why is that?

We make space for specialists – until we don’t

At the execution level, having quality specialists is fine. You can hand test tasks to a QA engineer or ask a tester to “own quality” for a given sprint or feature. But when it comes to strategy, quality suddenly becomes everybody’s job, usually folded into roles like CTO, VP of Engineering, or Head of Product.

There’s a belief, sometimes explicit, sometimes just baked into org charts, that someone who focuses solely on quality won’t have the technical or product depth to make decisions at a strategic level. That to have a seat at the table, you need to be something more than a quality specialist.

And because of that, even when companies do have Director of QA roles, they often turn into middle management: headcount, budget, line management. You don’t get a voice in system architecture or product priorities. You’re too far from the actual work to know why a flashy tool that looks great on a slide deck (hello, codeless automation) is going to be a nightmare in reality.

It’s no wonder so many of those roles get cut or reabsorbed.

What could a CQO actually own?

This is where things get tricky. Because in most organisations, authority over architecture, tooling, and delivery speed already lives with the CTO or similar. A Chief Quality Officer wouldn’t be able to dictate changes to the codebase or define how cross-functional teams ship software.

But what they could own is the way a company thinks about quality.

• They could define what “good enough” means and where that bar is set.
• They could connect test results and defect patterns to real customer impact, and make that impact visible at the top table.
• They could represent the concerns of testers and QA engineers, so those signals aren’t lost in the noise of delivery.
• They could help leadership teams balance the desire for speed with the need for resilience, not by slowing things down, but by asking better questions.

Most of all, they’d make sure that quality isn’t just something we react to when it goes wrong. It’s something we think about on purpose.

So what do we do with that?

If you’re working in QA or testing and wondering how to grow into a leadership role, it might mean stepping outside of traditional QA job titles. If your org won’t create a Head of Quality role, maybe you become a Product Leader or Head of Engineering who happens to care deeply about quality, and brings that perspective to the table.

And if you’re already in a leadership team, ask yourself: who owns quality in your org, at the strategic level? Not just the test execution or the dashboard metrics, but the thinking behind what “good” looks like and how much risk is acceptable. If that answer is “everyone,” is that really working?

I’m not sure we’ll ever see CQOs become the norm. Quality, by its nature, crosses boundaries, and that fragmentation isn’t going away. But it doesn’t have to mean invisibility.

We can build influence, even without a neat box on the org chart. We can lead with quality, even if it’s not in our title.

The podcast “Leading with Quality” that inspired this post can be found here.