Jill Adams has a sentence for the point at which marketing meetings grow too many limbs: “Do more of what works; eliminate what doesn’t.” It is a sharp little instrument. One half asks for evidence. The other half asks whether anybody in the room has the nerve to use it. In a profession fond of adding channels, campaigns, dashboards, acronyms and occasionally fog, Adams has built a career around the edit.
She is now Chief Marketing Officer at HeroDevs, the Utah software company that provides security and long-term support for open-source technologies after their official maintenance ends. The product category comes with a linguistic trap. “End of life” sounds final; enterprise software rarely has the courtesy to disappear when a calendar says it should. Applications remain in production. Dependencies stay buried in systems. Security teams still need fixes. The old framework has stopped moving, while the organization around it very much has not.
Adams’s assignment is to make that uncomfortable middle legible. It is the latest version of a problem she has met repeatedly across startups, public companies and private-equity-backed software businesses: a company possesses something technically useful, the portfolio is complicated, the market is noisy, and growth depends on turning all of that into a story and an operating system that can survive contact with a sales forecast.
The career is a long lesson in translation
The early entries are recognizably pre-SaaS: account management at Dickinson Direct, agency work at Pamet River Partners, consulting at Sapient, then a short stop at Refer.com. By 2001, Adams was at Rational Software. IBM acquired Rational in 2003, and she moved into marketing program management inside IBM. That transition matters because it placed the same operator in two very different machines: a focused software company and one of the largest technology organizations in the world.
A colleague who worked with her at Rational and IBM later described a person equally comfortable with senior executives and internal designers. Adams managed complicated communications projects, led people across functions, kept agencies aligned with deadlines, and then stepped into an IBM program role that required monthly reporting on lead and revenue projections. Communication on one side, analysis on the other. The combination would become the spine of her career.
RSA Security followed, first in competitive marketing and sales enablement, then product-marketing operations. At Progress Software, where she became Senior Director of Marketing Operations, her name also appeared on corporate announcements as a press contact. Then came Globoforce, now Workhuman, where she led the demand center for a growing human-capital software company.
Read as a list, the moves resemble a tour of business-software history. Read as work, they show somebody learning how products, finance, communications, customer acquisition and executive decision-making meet. Adams studied business administration at Miami University in Ohio. Her professional vocabulary still has the neatness of finance: end game, component parts, reporting environment, systematic, repeatable. She likes a noun that can be measured.
“Do more of what works; eliminate what doesn’t.”Jill Adams’s operating mantra
At Absorb, the blank page became a department
Absorb Software hired Adams in January 2018 to lead marketing and design. The brief was broad: build brand loyalty, align the company around measurable programs, and help create a dependable growth engine. Two and a half years later, the company promoted her to its first Chief Marketing Officer.
The promotion arrived after Adams had built what Absorb called a holistic marketing organization. Her remit covered demand generation, product marketing, field marketing, customer marketing and partner marketing. It is easy to treat those as boxes on an organization chart. The harder work is making the boxes exchange useful information without turning every week into a summit conference.
Adams’s method begins at the destination and works backward. Define the end game. Break it into parts. Give each part a purpose, a measure and an owner. Do more of the parts producing evidence. Stop funding the parts producing mainly explanations. The simplicity is a result of the machinery underneath it, not an alternative to machinery.
The Adams loop
In 2020, she credited her team for what they had built and said they were only getting started. The wording is revealing. Even in an announcement centered on her promotion, Adams pointed outward. Her own account of her career says that the foundation under the systems is what she calls “people power.” She describes her leadership as humble and authentic, with trust built up, down and across an organization.
There is a useful tension here. Marketing operations can sound as if people are cogs with calendar invites. Adams argues for repeatability while insisting on humanity. A process should remove accidental complexity, not human judgment. A dashboard should improve a conversation, not win it by exhaustion. Trust is what permits a team to stop a campaign that is not working without treating the stop as a moral failure.
A broad portfolio meets a short promise
Adams joined Appfire as CMO in 2022, during a period of substantial expansion. The company reported ending that year with more than $150 million in annual recurring revenue, up from $10 million in 2019. That growth preceded and overlapped only the beginning of her tenure, but it describes the size of the communications puzzle she entered: a fast-growing portfolio of enterprise apps serving collaboration, workflow, migration, service management and developer work.
The scale of the company Adams joined
Appfire-reported annual recurring revenue. This is company context, not an individual attribution.
In 2023, Appfire unveiled a refreshed brand position and website. The design gave buyers a solution-first route through the portfolio. Adams said the brand should represent the company at the front line and lead with its “Be Human” value. She wanted every experience to feel consistent and predictable, whether the person encountering it was a customer, partner or employee.
Consistency is not a glamorous word, which is part of its charm. A brand is tested less by a launch-day manifesto than by the fiftieth product page, the partner email, the support exchange and the slide somebody opens five minutes before a meeting. For a company assembled across products, platforms and acquisitions, coherence is an operating achievement.
“Underpinning all of my achievements is my ‘people power.’”Jill Adams on leadership
Her life outside work has the same bias toward activity. A public Absorb biography noted home-renovation projects and time outdoors with her husband and three children. The itinerary ran from beaches and soccer fields to hockey rinks, ski slopes and pools. It reads less like leisure than a family logistics platform with weather.
Now the product is continuity
At HeroDevs, Adams has entered a category where the core benefit is time. Companies depend on versions of AngularJS, Node.js, Spring, Vue and other open-source projects long after official support has ended. Replacing a framework can take years. Security vulnerabilities do not politely wait for the migration plan. HeroDevs sells a bridge: maintained, drop-in-compatible support intended to keep those systems secure and compliant while organizations decide what comes next.
The bridge is technical. The decision to buy it is organizational. Engineering knows the dependency. Security knows the vulnerability. Legal and compliance know the obligation. Finance sees an unplanned cost. An executive hears several dialects of risk at once. Marketing must translate without sanding away the consequences.
That makes Adams’s old rule newly useful. Find what works. Remove what does not. Yet legacy software adds a twist: sometimes the thing that still works is also the thing no longer supported. “Eliminate” cannot mean “delete it on Tuesday.” It means separating unnecessary complexity from necessary continuity, then giving a buyer a credible route through both.
Her move to HeroDevs in January 2026 also brought familiar colleagues back into orbit. A former Appfire colleague joining HeroDevs’s demand-generation team publicly celebrated working with Adams again. Professional networks often reveal leadership more clearly than adjectives do. People remember whether the operating system made room for them.
Adams also serves on the board of United Way of Central Massachusetts, where volunteer directors guide policy, budgets, audits and local investment. The scale is regional rather than global, but the muscles are recognizable: decide what matters, allocate finite resources, measure results, remain accountable to people beyond the conference room.
A career this long invites grand theories. Adams offers a short one. Business growth is made operational through component parts, evidence and repetition. Companies, however, are made of people. The trick is not choosing between those truths. It is building a system precise enough to learn and humane enough that people will tell it the truth.