Hey, I’m Simon
I’m a product leader with experience building things at extreme scale.
I’ve built successful consumer products, enterprise businesses, and tackled some tricky problems in the integrity / trust and safety space by applying cutting edge AI/ML.
I’m also an ex-engineer, out-of-practice drummer, father, & husband. I’m an engineer by training: I have a 1st class Masters in Electronic Engineering from the University of Nottingham.
I worked at Meta for 12 years (2010-2022) based in both London and Menlo Park, California. I led developer experience for the Facebook developer platform, was on the founding team for Workplace (an enterprise communication tool used by Walmart, Starbucks, GSK and others), and spent 4 years leading the teams responsible for reducing a number of online harms across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger including child safety, bullying and harassment, fake accounts, and account compromise.
Before Meta, I held a number of product and engineering roles at the BBC and in UK commercial radio. I helped launch BBC Podcasts, and built and launched LBC Plus - one of the world's first paid-subscription podcasting and audio-on-demand platforms.
I like building things.
Why am I writing this blog?
There’s a lot of people taking to the internet with their thoughts on tech and product — so what, you may ask, does this guy think he has to add? Something I ask myself all the time.
I started writing this blog for a few reasons:
Selfishly, I find that writing something down helps me understand it. The process of writing these posts is a forcing function for me to sharpen my thinking and see if the ideas in my head actually stick. Committing to publishing publicly raises the stakes in an exiting way. Paul Graham has, as ever, written eloquently about this.
After a ~20 year career in engineering and product management, I’ve learned a few things. The PMs on my teams have told me that my stories and frameworks have helped them grow — so why limit that impact to the folks I work with directly? Writing scales, and if these posts bend the curve on even one other person’s career, it’ll have been worth it.
I’ll be writing about some frameworks which I know from experience to help product teams be successful. As I join new teams and orgs, rather than having to explain these ideas in person, I can just point people to these canonical posts. Writing helps me scale myself.
Either way, that you decided to tune into this blog means a lot to me. Thank you.
