Episode 290: Frank Roe - Chief Executive Officer, SmartBear

The career path to a CEO position at a tech company is not linear. If you look at the background of CEOs, there are many different roads. It could be operations, product management, marketing, or other functional areas. In Frank’s case, he ran several teams including sales and professional services. Some might believe that the CEO’s role is to be the Chief Decision Making Officer, but as Frank shares in our discussion, it couldn’t be further from the truth - at least in the way he leads. For Frank, he believes the best CEOs are influencers where they are able to gain consensus from the team versus convincing people of your own opinion. It is more about more of understanding everyone’s perspective and creating that level of collaboration amongst the team. In addition to this key point, you’ll hear Frank share some other core elements that go into a successful CEO. SmartBear delivers the complete visibility developers need to make each release better than the last. The company’s award-winning and industry favorite tools are trusted by over 16 million developers, testers, and software engineers at 32,000+ organizations – including companies like Adobe, JetBlue, FedEx, and Microsoft. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Frank’s career path from consulting to executive leadership roles in the software industry. * The differences of working in a VC backed versus a Private Equity owned company. * All the details on SmartBear in terms of the company, scale, and its suite of products. * A discussion on how SmartBear has always leveraged a Product Led Growth strategy long before the term PLG was coined. * The company’s secret to making successful acquisitions. * The culture at SmartBear and why he considers the word “curious” as the most important company value. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.