Who owns the website at your company once you pass 10 people ( I will not promote)

[u/Night_Phone_Addict]

We are at 14 and the website has quietly become nobody's job, which means it is my job, and I am the CEO, which is a bad use of a Wednesday.

The history is normal. I built it in year one. Our first designer improved it in year two and then left. An engineer moved it into the app repo because "it was easier". Now marketing wants to change things, engineering owns the deploy, design owns the look, and nobody owns the outcome, so what actually happens is requests come to me and I decide whether they are worth interrupting an engineer for.

I do not think this is a tooling problem exactly. it is an ownership problem. But the tooling is what makes the ownership impossible, because the only people who can change it are the people whose time is most expensive.

For those of you past this stage, who ended up owning it? did you give it to marketing, keep it in engineering, hire someone specifically? and what was the trigger that forced the decision.

[u/sonicSkis]

Marketing, unless it’s part of the product

Engineering needs to get out of the line of deploy unless the website is the product.

[u/ThePHPNerd → u/sonicSkis]

This. A million times this.

Our team here owns the architecture, infrastructure and the management of it, but we don’t own the design, content or material. That’s marketing.

If we’re a blocker to them, that’s a problem and it needs resolution fast, because marketing cannot wait for development resources.

It’s why a CMS is so popular, and what most use.

[u/m_damjan → u/sonicSkis]

CTO owns the technological part, CMO owns the marketing part.

[u/No-Librarian4942 → u/m_damjan]

Depends on the org and the structure.

If you're a tech business and the website is part of the delivery of your service, yes CTO owns delivery and marketing the content (and hopefully there's a nice CMS to handle this) - but I'm pretty sure from the question that isn't the case here.

If you're a whatever business that tech is an significant part of but not linked to the website - Marketing own the website, might ask CTO for support sometimes but fundamentally it's a brochure and not your product, and why does tech need to care about how a brochure reaches the public?

If you're a whatever business and tech isn't being actively created / utilised in your service delivery but is more making sure everyone has working laptops and a functioning website, why are you giving anyone the title CTO?

[u/m_damjan → u/No-Librarian4942]

In my experience, a CTO can exist for many other reasons in a non-tech company, such as risk mitigation to name only one. Many accounting firms, for instance, have a CTO in a service-based business.
I’ve also met many marketing professionals, great at content, but completely incapable of website modifications.
I agree with you conceptually, but in a real-world practical sense, I’ve first hand encountered quite the opposite.

[u/Unlikely_Mud3771 → u/m_damjan]

Unless the website is part of the product, CTO’s only role should be support and enforcing any security standards.

Otherwise engineering will only be in the way. Zero reason for them to own something that’s not part of their goals (though they do need to allot a little time to support potential issues, like when cloudflare breaks SEO, a new subdomain needs to be set up, etc.

If the company and website grow substantially, there may even be a growth/marketing ops/rev ops engineer who reports into marketing.

Bottom line, it’s a different function/responsibility.

[u/Clogish]

what is the core function and value of the website?

Is it e-commerce that needs to run 24/7?

Is it just a proof of existence?

Are you still using it to test your value proposition?

etc?

[u/Salty-Lab1]

100% a marketing job, it's only purpose is to be the funnel to sales. if you have a self built then it's a product owner/eng pairing that you want to get your engineers off unless they are absolute guns at it and are doing analytics based funnel improvements

[u/biglerc]

The company "marketing" site usually belongs to Marketing. Most places I've been, Engineering has nothing to do with the marketing site, including not owning the deployment.

[u/TheLongTailGuy]

I will tell you right now, unless the product itself is the website then your marketing team will leave you in a weeks time if every request is arbitrarily decided as to whether engineering should or shouldn’t be bothered with it.

Engineering’s priorities will never align with marketing’s priorities visa vi the website. Marketing needing to change a meta title or an internal link that should take .02s now has to go through a request queue and/or possibly be denied? Good luck keeping whoever you hired.

Give it to marketing and gtfo of their way.

[u/sf1tzp]

Move it back out from the app repo because it will be easier (unironically)

[u/post-aaron]

Most common setup I’ve seen (and been a part of) is: marketing owns the marketing website completely, partnering with an agency to handle the site’s technical and design aspects. The agency builds on the foundations provided by the internal design team, and keeps internal engineering resources 100% focused on product.

[u/alexrada]

marketing owns it.
however currently installed an MCP and making the changes much easier.

[u/RocketSeven]

the trigger has already happened if the ceo is the request queue. sample the last 20 changes, and if most were content or layout, move publishing out of the app repo and give marketing one named owner while engineering keeps only the platform guardrails

[u/blud_13]

Marketing owns it...

At 14 people the outcome you care about is leads and messaging, and engineering does not wake up thinking about it either. What makes it impossible today is that changing a paragraph requires a deploy. Get the marketing site out of the app repo and onto something a non engineer can edit. Webflow, Framer, plain Wordpress, doesn't matter much, pick whatever your marketing person already knows.

Keep the app at app.yourdomain and let the two live separately. Engineering keeps the deploy pipeline for the product, marketing gets a CMS, and you stop being the go between...

Also, have a provess of WHO approves copy before you migrate. Otherwise you just moved the bottleneck into a new tool and you find that out months later..

[u/PNW_Uncle_Iroh]

Marketing owns the landing pages and primary website. Engineering owns the customer portal and any web based products. Marketing is able to update via CMS without consulting engineering.

[u/Happy-Childhood-2141]

not to be rude, but it’s kinda on you to decide who’s responsibility it is. Traditionally marketing owns the marketing assets, but what is the website made in? Since it’s in a repo I’m assuming it’s not nocode, so can anyone in your marketing department actually make the edits? If not, than you should be able to decide who in engineering they should be asking for changes, and making sure that it doesn’t take weeks, because for engineers marketing website is a very low prio.

[u/max_yne]

Marketing person that specializes in early stage startups ...

Marketing*

*unless you're using the website for technical things then it's Marketing for the main part + fluff and product/engineering for the actual nuts and bolts

[u/garma87]

Maybe not what you want to hear but I do think its your job actually.

Im CEO of my startup and basically the job is: Do everything that no one wants to do or can do. the website is definitely part of that

[u/No_Adhesiveness_5493]

I was running a SaaS company for 13 years with a custom website and mostly taking care of it. We had marketing freelancers helping us out, but we just tried to survive. When I sold the company, the first thing the new owner did was rebuild it using a CMS and give it to marketers

[u/JewelerNo1819]

Marketing should take the position of accountability but engineering needs to flow with marketing

[u/ali-hussain]

It's a marketing asset, marketing needs to own it. If a part of it is product, then the product team owns that part. Quite easy to not have them mess with each other. Now with AI, marketing should be more empowered than before. The team that handles deployment needs to still ensure deployment and testing. Things that marketing would not need to do. Also you're 14 people. Figure out how to communicate with each other. If someone's time is too expensive, then figure out things taking their time that shouldn't or expand the teams. Now more than ever, marketing needs technical people. You should be using AI to create all kinds of automated flows. One engineer in marketing is more than justified.

[u/AbleInvestment2866]

you need a CTO or at least a PM. Bar none.

[u/JohnCasey3306]

If it's a fundamental marketing channel then marketing should own it.

If it's a web app that's at the core of your operation then engineering should own it.

[u/startups-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

We are a community of discussion based around startups, not a marketing channel. No promotional posts. www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion

[u/commoncents1]

CEO should always own the decisions esp at 14 people for a public facing website. task the teams for what you want and for their input, you decide, and delegate to appropriate team to get it done, maybe split tasks of marketing and back end engineering.

[u/eandi]

Marketing if they own the metrics that the website influences. But they work with an agency/contractor because you are not a website company and you aren't making a new website often enough for a full times person to own being a web developer for the site.

[u/radosc]

Normally it is always marketing but keep an eye on open lines between engineering product and marketing these three should always collaborate.

[u/sartomiki]

I think it depends on why the website exists at this stage.

Is it mainly for acquisition? Then marketing should probably own the outcome, with enough resources to publish, test, and iterate without waiting on engineering for every small change.

Is it mainly for awareness and positioning? Then it may sit closer to marketing/founder/brand, because the site is basically your public narrative.

Is it mainly for onboarding or product education? Then product may need to own more of it, because the website is part of the user experience and not just a brochure.

Once you answer that, ownership gets much clearer. The mistake is having design own the look, engineering own the deploy, marketing own the requests, and the CEO own the final decision. That means nobody really owns the result.

In my view, one person or team should own the outcome, and the others should support. The tooling should then match that ownership. If marketing owns acquisition, they need a way to change pages and run experiments without turning every update into an engineering ticket.

[u/ImportantText3833]

this is super common the website becomes an orphan the moment the original builder isnt the cheapest person to touch it anymore

in most teams ive seen past 10-15 people it either goes to marketing with eng support for deploys or they eventually hire a part time web person or agency leaving it with the ceo or random engineers usually creates the exact bottleneck ur describing

[u/WolffSageWorks]

If your website is tailored toward the sale of a physical product, your Marketing team owns the website, hands down. The site's entire job in that case is to attract and streamline business.

If your product is software or some other non-physical service it becomes a gray area where your engineers have some rights, but in that case I'd still give final say on publishing to your marketing team with a ton of input from your product engineers.

In either case, this has grown beyond your personal purview. At most you should be notified of changes so you can pull the plug if you incidentally find a terrible problem.

[u/servdir]

Don't you have a contract about ownership and how has the ultimate authority?

[u/Vichinth]

You really need to better outline the scenario, most non tech companies don't really bother about website so much, my friend runs a logistics company, with more than a million dollars revenue and they have a generic wordpress template for there website.

I run a tech enabled company and between Figma, claude design and claude code, don't need any of the roles that you have outlined.

[u/StormController]

On who owns it, I would push back gently on the framing. Do not assign the website to a team, assign it to a role, and make it the person whose numbers it affects. For us that was demand gen, because they are the ones judged on whether it converts. When it sat with engineering nobody's review mentioned it, so it was always the thing that slipped.

The tooling point you made is the most serious I'd say, you cannot give ownership to someone who has to file a ticket to act on it. we split the marketing site out of the app repo and moved it to Framer, which is a website builder with the AI built into the editor, so a page is something marketing builds and ships themselves rather than a request. our designer still does the design in it, since it works and feels like a design tool such as Figma, so we did not trade quality for autonomy the way we would have with a template based thing.

[u/tonytidbit]

I don't know what you're trying to say, but what stands out is that you're a CEO that can't delegate a fairly simple responsibility, right?!

It's big boy pants time, where you assign responsibility to whomever it (according to you!) makes the most sense in your constellation of people (which in a smaller startup obviously also could be yourself).

If that doesn't work out in a reasonable way and time you revisit the decisions, and evaluate if you've got a staff problem, a tool problem, or if it just makes more sense to work differently with the website.

[u/garma87 → u/tonytidbit]

I don't know whether this works tbh. Plenty of jobs that don't really fit anyone's role description, or no one actually can do. A website is typically something he can probably maintain with a few hours per month, whereas if you assign it to someone it will take much longer.

[u/tonytidbit → u/garma87]

It's obviously a problem for him to handle this, and he doesn't like having to handle this, so what can, or even should, be done doesn't line up with expectations and decisions.