Heidi Farris
CEO at ActivTrak
Heidi Farris is CEO and board chair of ActivTrak, the work intelligence platform helping enterprises measure productivity, manage workforce performance and quantify the ROI of AI adoption. She leads the company's strategy and enterprise growth, with a focus on establishing ActivTrak as the system of record for how work gets done across humans, AI-assisted workers and autonomous agents.
Heidi's career has been defined by a single recurring challenge: leading organizations through inflection points with the discipline to execute and the transparency to bring people along through every hard decision.
At SolarWinds, Heidi joined after the dot-com bust as a website content manager and grew into demand generation, helping architect the inbound go-to-market model that defined the company's growth trajectory. By its 2009 NYSE IPO, SolarWinds had reached roughly $100 million in revenue.
At Idera, she served as CMO and EVP/GM of its Database Tools Division, leading the business through twelve acquisitions and growing its valuation from $250 million to over $1 billion. The work required inheriting businesses fast, making hard calls and integrating without breaking what worked. It also informed a conviction that has shaped everything since: there had to be a more precise, more humane way to make workforce decisions.. That belief is what ultimately drew her to ActivTrak.
Heidi joined ActivTrak in 2019 as COO, driving roughly $5 million in ARR motivated by the product’s potential to shift how organizations design and measure work. She stepped into the CEO role in 2023 as growth slowed and cash burn peaked, redefining the company around transparent workforce analytics, shifting upmarket and growing ARR more than 10x to $65 million, including 47% growth in enterprise ARR in 2025. In January 2026, she launched ActivTrak's Enterprise Era, a structured push toward $100 million in ARR.
Heidi leads ActivTrak through clearly articulated strategy, defined priorities and transparent tradeoffs. That discipline traces back to her start as a journalist — and to a belief that still guides her leadership: precision is not the enemy of empathy, it is the prerequisite. Good decisions require good information, and leaders have an obligation to close the distance between themselves and the actual work. The absence of data does not protect people; it means decisions get made with less rigor, less fairness and less accountability.
Heidi was was named to The Software Report's Top 25 HR Software Executives list in 2025. Her thought leadership has been featured in CEO World, Forbes, People Managing People, SHRM and more. Areas of expertise include enterprise go-to-market strategy, work intelligence, AI adoption measurement, organizational transformation and executive leadership in high-growth B2B technology.
Heidi's career has been defined by a single recurring challenge: leading organizations through inflection points with the discipline to execute and the transparency to bring people along through every hard decision.
At SolarWinds, Heidi joined after the dot-com bust as a website content manager and grew into demand generation, helping architect the inbound go-to-market model that defined the company's growth trajectory. By its 2009 NYSE IPO, SolarWinds had reached roughly $100 million in revenue.
At Idera, she served as CMO and EVP/GM of its Database Tools Division, leading the business through twelve acquisitions and growing its valuation from $250 million to over $1 billion. The work required inheriting businesses fast, making hard calls and integrating without breaking what worked. It also informed a conviction that has shaped everything since: there had to be a more precise, more humane way to make workforce decisions.. That belief is what ultimately drew her to ActivTrak.
Heidi joined ActivTrak in 2019 as COO, driving roughly $5 million in ARR motivated by the product’s potential to shift how organizations design and measure work. She stepped into the CEO role in 2023 as growth slowed and cash burn peaked, redefining the company around transparent workforce analytics, shifting upmarket and growing ARR more than 10x to $65 million, including 47% growth in enterprise ARR in 2025. In January 2026, she launched ActivTrak's Enterprise Era, a structured push toward $100 million in ARR.
Heidi leads ActivTrak through clearly articulated strategy, defined priorities and transparent tradeoffs. That discipline traces back to her start as a journalist — and to a belief that still guides her leadership: precision is not the enemy of empathy, it is the prerequisite. Good decisions require good information, and leaders have an obligation to close the distance between themselves and the actual work. The absence of data does not protect people; it means decisions get made with less rigor, less fairness and less accountability.
Heidi was was named to The Software Report's Top 25 HR Software Executives list in 2025. Her thought leadership has been featured in CEO World, Forbes, People Managing People, SHRM and more. Areas of expertise include enterprise go-to-market strategy, work intelligence, AI adoption measurement, organizational transformation and executive leadership in high-growth B2B technology.
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