My Career
skills | job history | work examples
I've led large product and operations teams to success at all company stages:
startup, growth, pre-IPO, and tech giant. As a 2x founder, my product philosophy stems from accepting you can't know all the answers, so you better get damn good at learning them as fast as possible.
THEIR WORDS, NOT MINE
Marc Eberhart (CMO, Degreed)
"Simply put, Peter is a phenom."
James Currier (Managing Partner, NFX VC; 4X founder w/ $200M in exits)
"Peter is one of the best product people I've ever worked with."
Rob Angarita (4X founder, all exits and/or unicorn valuations)
"Without any hesitation, I would hire, partner with, or back Peter Simones."
TOP SKILLS
Leading/managing people, architecting rapid test/learn cultures, complex cross-functional collaboration, language and positioning, community building, writing, hiring, beating deadlines, process design and implementation, getting shit done
BETTER THAN MOST
SQL (mysql, psql, SQL Server), UI/UX design, data analysis, email design and coding, App Store Optimization, cooking, Boggle playing
As a 2x founder, I've done everything required to build and run apps and websites except backend engineering. Yes, everything. No, I don't want to write another Terms of Service.
OTHER STUFF THAT MIGHT BE IMPORTANT IF YOU WANT TO HIRE ME
Sports Editor of USC's Daily Trojan during the football team's peak run under Pete Carroll; wrote 100+ articles and columns and edited 1,000 more
USC Trustee Scholar (full tuition, merit-based); 3.89 college GPA
I built a CD burning business when I was 12. After my revenue rose to $200/day, my mom promptly shut it down
35 ACT; 800 SAT Math, 800 SAT II Math, 800 SAT Writing
Once had a five-minute conversation with Aaron Rodgers
Work examples
FACEBOOK PRODUCT
Projects for which I was the overall Company lead (i.e. responsible for strategy and execution, responsible for resourcing and team health, and most accountable for ultimate outcome):
Rooms (Zoom competitor; “chosen one” bridge product to AR/VR enhanced future; 6 weeks of daily, direct interfacing with Mark; 300+ people on the project)
Stories Reader (full consumer-side content liquidity between FB and IG; massively political and contentious execution environment; precursor to today’s Reels integration (but did not launch itself); 50 people on the project)
Facebook App messaging platform and inbox (5+ years after forcing Messenger installs, we launched full messaging functionality in the FB App, inclusive of an inbox in many non-US countries; 100 people on the project)
COVID-19 Integrity (about as “in the fire” as any effort at any company this century; led the myriad teams handling all things COVID-19 vaccine integrity, from policy definition to ML detection to human-powered escalation tooling to first-of-its-kind public-facing data transparency; 100s of people on the project; ask President Biden how we did)
YouFood product & design
You name it, I designed it - from point of entry (App Store pages) to new user onboarding (walkthrough, coachmarks, following recommendations) to power user features and rapid A/B testing.
Both peers and investors told us YouFood's active user engagement was the best they'd ever seen (non-Facebook category). This engagement led to tens of thousands of YouFood members transforming their health and happiness.
KEY PRODUCT DESIGN DECISIONS
Dual home feeds
YouFood revolved around peer support and accountability; a chronological feed ensured you could follow your peers' days. When members continually asked for inspirational recipes and achievements from the broader community, we had to deliver this without disrupting that support anchor. The solution was a "Daily Awesomeness" toggle that surfaced 5-15 of the previous day's best posts, personalized to your diet and goals. By keeping it finite and releasing it at a specific time each day, we boosted overall engagement (6.5 > 8.5 app opens/day; 20m > 24m time spent/day) without sacrificing any peer support.
Retention "magic ratio"
Through continual testing and analysis, we identified a set of behaviors within a new member's first seven days that predicted, effectively, lifetime retention. We then reengineered our in-app language, new member onboarding, suggested following algorithm, welcome series emails, first week push notification strategy, and Daily Awesomeness post selection algorithm to maximize new members' achieving of this magic ratio. As volume of members meeting this ratio more than doubled, the retention effect held - validating our hypothesis.
Cramster/CHEGG OPERATIONS: forecasting and staffing
Cramster's Q&A promise - we'll answer any college-level question you have, in any subject and at any time of the day or night, within two hours - was vexing, especially as question volumes hit an inflection point in 2009.
I architected and implemented the solution, from start to finish, resulting in profitability at 85% service level.
PROBLEM COMPONENTS:
- Forecasting overall question volume amid 100%+ YoY growth
- Forecasting seasonality, which varied heavily by month, day of week, and hour of day
- Forecasting average question difficulty (and thus, time to answer)
- Modeling in-house answering capacity
- Predicting managed network answering need
- Implementing 24/7 staffing schedules to properly match forecasted demand
- Building the operations management software to deliver employees the right question to answer, right now
- Performance measurement
- Service level analysis (Per subject, are we answering 85% of questions within two hours? If not, why?)
- P&L analysis (Are some subjects more profitable than others? What drives profitability?)
WORK REQUIRED TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM:
- Heavy Excel modeling and sanity testing against early indicator data
- Building a 24/7 staffing plan within budget
- Designing an operations management backend from scratch, and managing the engineering team building it
- Training 20 managers and their 300+ reports on a new operational model, from the technology they use to the way performance is evaluated
- Evaluating efficacy and tweaking the system (from task distribution algorithms to staffing schedules) to patch weak areas
- Evaluating P&L
RESULTS:
- Successfully answered 85% of all questions asked within 2 hours of being posted
- Raised engineering subjects' service levels from 45% to 85%
- The OM backend I architected and implemented became the bedrock of all company operations, and has successfully scaled as Chegg Study has grown into a $150M annual business