Scott
Bajtos

Scott Bajtos arrived at Adobe in October 2021 with a specific task: consolidate the company's sprawling post-sale organization into something a customer could actually navigate. Customer Engineering. Customer Success. Professional Services. Three disciplines that had operated in their own orbits. His job was to make them orbit together — with the customer at the center.

The move wasn't a surprise to anyone who had followed his career. Bajtos spent 11 years at VMware building exactly this kind of integrated model. Before that, he did it at Business Objects. And before that, at Cadence Design Systems — where he created the company's first global customer advocacy program when "customer advocacy" wasn't yet a job title that showed up in org charts.

That question — plain, direct, a little uncomfortable — is the one Bajtos keeps asking. Not "are our support metrics green?" Not "did we renew?" The harder version: did the customer actually get what they came for? It's a distinction that sounds obvious but costs money to operationalize, and most companies don't do it.

At Adobe, that philosophy translated into the Ultimate Success initiative — a program built around Technical Account Managers who work alongside customers proactively rather than waiting for tickets to open. In 2024, Forrester analyst Laura Ramos singled out Adobe's post-sale approach during a series of executive briefings at Adobe Summit, describing it as one of the more coherent agentic roadmaps she had encountered in B2B software. Bajtos and his team were the reason she looked.

The same year, the team won two TSIA STAR Awards — for Excellence in Organizational Convergence and Excellence in Aligning Sales and Customer Success. Both awards point at the same thing: the administrative and structural work of getting departments to cooperate is, it turns out, a competency. One that Bajtos has built and rebuilt across multiple companies and decades.

His career reads like a map of the enterprise software industry's consolidation era. Cadence Design Systems. Then Marimba. Then Business Objects, where he led a team of 1,350 people across 10 global sites managing $600 million in revenue. Then SAP, where he inherited Business Objects after the acquisition and ran an EMEA sales organization of 258 professionals responsible for $350 million in annual license revenue. Then VMware for 11 years as Chief Customer Officer — overseeing global technical support, professional services, education, and customer advocacy.

In 2020, a brief detour: FinancialForce (now Certinia), where he served as Chief Customer Officer and described the company as one that "has put customers at their center since day one." Then Adobe called.

Bajtos is a practitioner of StrengthsFinder — the Tom Rath framework that maps individuals to their native talents rather than asking them to shore up weaknesses. He uses it with his leadership teams. The philosophy behind it matches his management style: find what people are good at, build the organization around that, then get out of the way.

That approach earned him a profile in the podcast circuit. The episode on Develop Great Managers — titled "Amazing Leader Whose Strength is to Serve Others" — captures something that colleagues across his career have noted: Bajtos leads from behind. He asks before he decides. He listens before he instructs.

Off the executive calendar, Bajtos lives in Horseshoe Bay, Texas — a lakefront community on Lake LBJ, well outside the gravitational pull of Silicon Valley. He describes himself, with no apparent irony, as a "fitness fanatic" and "globe trotter." The self-description on his Twitter bio — "Customer Support/Advocacy Wiz, Fitness Fanatic, Globe Trotter" — has not changed since he joined the platform in June 2014.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Management (with honors) from Saint Mary's College of California, and has participated in executive education at INSEAD. He served on the Board of Directors of the Service Executive Industry Board (SEIB) and was a member of the Support and Services Professional Association (SSPA).

The underlying bet of his career is consistent: in a software industry where switching costs are falling and AI is commoditizing features, the customer's decision to stay — or leave — will come down to how they feel about the relationship. Bajtos has been building for that outcome since before most of his peers knew what to call it.