We connected with Dan Faulkner, Chief Product Officer at SmartBear, for a Q&A to discuss why he decided to join the team.
Why join SmartBear now?
SmartBear is an exciting company at a critical stage. The company has maintained a rapid growth rate and expansion over recent years. During the interview process, it became very clear that the entire executive team is ambitious for even more success. I’m excited by that desire for more. I believe I can help the company position itself for and execute on the next stages of growth.
I was particularly pleased that the executive team and investors would like to drive more of the company’s growth through organic product investments. That means building more products from scratch, and it means expanding the capabilities of our existing products to expand our user base and increase pricing. While I love utilizing M&A as part of a growth strategy (and I do expect that to continue), supplementing that with our own innovations presents an opportunity to compound growth. It also creates new technical and career opportunities for the entire product organization, as well as creating a greater sense of cohesion and common mission throughout the product and engineering community at the company.
So that combination of scaling the organization, continuing M&A, and setting up the company to accelerate organic growth is very attractive to me.
What are your first impressions of the teams you are working with here?
Very positive, and I expected them to be. The SmartBear culture comes through in all my interactions. I’ve found the entire team to be friendly, committed, smart, driven, and curious; all traits I love to see in my colleagues. There’s a high degree of technical excellence, also as expected.
With that said, there are clearly opportunities for us all to improve and evolve as the company grows, and I’ve been grateful that the people I have worked with so far have been candid about where they feel we excel and where we have opportunities to improve.
It’s also rare to see such outstanding sales and marketing lined up behind the product portfolio as we have at SmartBear. Product, Marketing, and Sales really support each other, and the sales and marketing teams are real powerhouses that catapult our great products into the market.
I recently had the opportunity to have in-person meetings with the teams in Bath, UK, and Wroclaw, Poland, and there really is no substitute for meeting people face-to-face. I have more listening to do over the coming weeks and months, and I’m looking forward to hearing from as many people in the organization as possible.
Coming from a larger company (Nuance), is there anything you can see bringing into SmartBear from what you helped to build over many years?
I believe I can. I was with Nuance as it grew from a few hundred employees to over 14,000. Like SmartBear, Nuance executed many acquisitions, had offices all over the world, and generally operated with a high degree of complexity. There are very clear parallels in SmartBear that are familiar to me, and I believe I can help the company get the most out of the opportunities that lie before it based on that experience.
While Nuance did experience outstanding growth, it also made mistakes along the way. All companies make mistakes, and we will obviously make them, too. My goal is to try to help SmartBear repeat the best practices that Nuance developed during its best phases and to achieve them earlier than Nuance did. And of course, to help us avoid some of the issues and pitfalls that Nuance encountered.
I learned at Nuance that it is critically important to have a conscious set of values and a conscious culture to get the best from your organization. I can see the management team here really cares about its people and is invested in making everyone in the company successful and rewarded. It probably doesn’t always feel like that to everyone – it never always feels like that to everyone – but it is clear to me, from the executive team to individual managers, there’s a deep commitment to team welfare, growth, and advancement.
Are there any particular strengths our product and dev teams have that you see as important to continue?
I expected a high level of technical acumen and I see it. So that is – for me – a given.
One thing that has resonated with me is the extreme degree of customer focus throughout the organization. Every developer I have met so far has a keen sense of the end-users of our products, what they need, and what they’re going to need. That’s fantastic to see, and long may it continue. Deep customer knowledge is invaluable – it helps developers work more efficiently and make better decisions day-to-day.
There’s also a higher than usual level of accountability, which I absolutely love to see. Caring about the complete performance of your products – rather than just the tasks to be completed in the sprint – is one of the key markers of excellent software teams.
What surprised you most in your first few weeks here at SmartBear?
Well, there’s a lot of orange 😊. Seriously, very little has surprised me so far. This is a highly, highly competent organization that demonstrates operational excellence daily. The strengths are as advertised, the areas for focus are as anticipated. The company is very much as I expected it to be based on the interview process, which speaks well of the interviewing team.
Fill in the blank in this the sentence: “Expect …. from the product and development team in the coming year”
A technical vision for the SmartBear portfolio, expressed quite specifically and concretely: our target portfolio to address a well-defined target market. From that, a logically prioritized roadmap and execution strategy that gets us from where we are today to our target, with urgency. Greater velocity both through streamlined processes and increased investment in R&D. A tighter technical integration between our products. A focus on reusability across the portfolio to free up more bandwidth for new product developments and innovative enhancements to our existing products. An intense focus on a delightful end-user experience that is common to SmartBear users, whichever of our products they are using. A more integrated product and engineering organization whose members are excited to contribute to the SmartBear technology mission, wherever they are and whatever product they are working on.
