Progress Over Perfection
Steve Reny, President and CEO of Acquia, brings more than 35 years of technology and finance leadership to the question of how companies build better digital experiences for their customers. His governing principle is straightforward: if your existing customers are not happy, no amount of marketing will compensate.
“An unhappy install base will not sell for you. When you hand people the keys to a Ferrari, they focus on the driving, not the engine.”
Steve Reny is the President and CEO of Acquia, the open digital experience platform company founded by Drupal creator Dries Boitart. He joined Acquia as COO in 2018 and became CEO in January 2023, bringing over three decades of experience leading technology businesses, building operational infrastructure, and navigating complex B2B go-to-market environments.
Steve began his career at KPMG in 1986 before spending the 1990s in finance and investment banking, with specialisms in technology and financial services. That background led him to the operating side of technology in the 2000s, where he held senior roles at Zantaz, Autonomy, and HP Software, as well as a period co-founding and running a franchise business. He joined HPE Software and later Micro Focus before moving to Acquia.
At Acquia, he oversaw all aspects of customer success, support, services, security, and operations as COO before becoming CEO. His leadership philosophy centres on a single overriding priority: improving the customer experience. He runs the company around a set of vital few objectives with customer experience ranked first, and expects every team, from engineering to marketing, to be able to articulate that priority and apply it to every trade-off decision they make.
“Your brand isn’t what you stick on an ad. It’s the service they get from you.”
“We very purposefully have our number one VFO as improving the customer experience. When you say, how do you instil that culture?”
Acquia runs the business around a set of vital few objectives in priority order, and everyone in the company can recite them. Number one is improving the customer experience. When anyone in the business faces a trade-off decision between two options, the question is simple: which one improves the customer experience? That clarity removes ambiguity and aligns cross-functional teams without requiring a management layer to enforce it.
“Your existing customers are sometimes your best sellers. Make sure they are realising the value they expected.”
The best marketing in the world cannot compensate for a dissatisfied customer base. Steve’s operating logic is that customer success is a marketing function, even if it does not sit in the marketing org. Customers who realise the value of their investment become advocates. Customers who do not become a drag on every acquisition effort. The sequence matters: retention before expansion, expansion before acquisition.
“The real opportunity is not just generating content with AI, but managing and converting it across the right channels.”
Steve frames the digital experience challenge around three interconnected problems: creating and managing the right content, making decisions informed by real data insights, and optimising experiences to be accessible, performant, and efficient. The risk in the AI era is a sea of sameness, generated content that looks like everything else. The opportunity is in the management layer: the strategy, the targeting, and the conversion that sits on top of the generation.
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