They learn from failure

In a culture of continuous improvement failure is an option, said Theo Beack (@theobeack), CTO, Vertafore. We view our mistakes as opportunities to learn how to improve our products. This requires a fearless level of transparency and accountability to ourselves, internal stakeholders, and our customers. My team instruments everything, from our core software engineering process, product UI, core product, and production infrastructure. The ability to get live telemetry into every aspect of our development process, operations, product behavior, and user experience enabled us to identify critical areas of improvement, which we attacked iteration after iteration. This was the roadmap Beacks team followed when handling an incredibly complicated merger. The teams efforts have earned us recognition by Best in Biz and the Puget Sound Business Journal, who named me CTO of the Year in 2014. I give 100 percent credit to my team for their role in transforming technology operations in a $400 million dollar corporation, added Beack.