Where to go?

/ Product discovery and roadmapping

I have worked in discovery and have maintained roadmaps on multiple occasions.

At Gupy, I had one of my most challenging exercises in discovery and road mapping as I led the Company Engagement team. Gupy is an applicant tracking system that helps hiring teams streamline work and hire the right applicants for the right positions. Showing analytics to these human resources users is essential for their organization and forecast, but building an analytics and insights section takes work. Customers don’t always converge on which metrics are the most relevant to their businesses and how the data should be sliced and presented, and I led multiple sessions in ideation and refinement to arrive at a valuable MVP. During this process, my team embedded a data visualization platform into the analytics section, and I learned how to use SQL to immediately address customer feedback on the data visualization without going through the entire development cycle. The new Analytics section was being rolled out as I left Gupy to join an MBA program in 2020, and the partial results showed increased performance, recurring visits and satisfaction with the new Analytics section.

Starting in 2021, I was part of the PagerDuty Career Accelerator Program for two terms, leading initiatives on Services and Dependencies, the company’s core product, and including Service Standards, PagerDuty’s strategic bet on services visibility for large companies. During my time at PagerDuty I conducted a comprehensive discovery on user onboarding that now informs the company’s onboarding strategy.

More recently, at Proposify, I led all four product teams into a company re-platforming project. The core part of the initiative involved rebuilding Proposify’s content editor. My teams took the editor to closed beta with overwhelmingly positive performance and customer satisfaction indicators when compared to the current alternative. I have also delivered a quarterly roadmap to bring the product to a successful open beta.

"[Simone and I] worked on a very ambitious and fundamental project, and I was impressed by her dedication, “can do” attitude, and desire to contribute to PagerDuty success. She is action-oriented, friendly, and (...) worked hard to (...) turn problems into opportunities. She cares about customers’ experience and business outcomes and effectively collaborates with her colleagues.

‍Brita Seltzer is a Product Leader at PagerDuty and led Simone directly.

"[With Simone], I learned how to pay attention to customers on another level, truly understanding their pain, desires and fears. She helped the team achieve the highest level of productivity through a deep dive into customer data digested in a simple, powerful way. She might not know the exact answer to a question, but you can trust that she will find one. Simone is humble and bold, executes precisely, and measures constantly."

‍Pablo Castro (he/him) is a Software Architect at Proposify, in Canada. Pablo and Simone co-led a squad at Proposify.

Zero to One

/ Bringing net-new products to life

In my first product role, I oversaw the internal products squad at Gupy, a Brazil-based applicant tracking system. My previous roles leading the Customer Success and Support teams gave me great insights into the main blockers and frictions those users were facing. I managed the execution of a few impactful solutions to tackle them.

We were dealing with the typical problems of a fast-growing venture. Some of the most time-intensive activities were preparing for customer sales meetings and managing feature flags internally. After a discovery and ideation cycle, the team implemented a new trial experience for enterprise clients. The sales team could generate new, pre-populated platforms, and enterprise prospects could take time to understand the entire solution in their own time. Internally, we also created a feature flag management tool after a detailed build-or-buy analysis. That made it simpler for support teams to manage feature rollouts and prospects' proof of concepts, and we could showcase specific functionalities to specific customers without going through the full development cycle. These changes combined improved the sales conversion by 27% in the segment.

Finally, our internal platforms were also not connected, which made it hard to answer questions like "Which leads take us to the most lifetime value?" or "Which leads go on to become champion users without handholding?". I led a systems integration initiative with its initial rollout completed when I left the company to pursue my MBA. Now, sales and financial data could be connected with platform usage insights so that internal teams could better understand a customer's context and take more intelligent action.

Managing iteration

/ Boosting relevant metrics one day at a time

One of my preferred parts of working as a product manager is to lean on Product-Led strategies and test potential ways to boost strategic metrics day by day. These improvements generally arise from design thinking and ideation sessions, thorough alignment with stakeholders and testing multiple alternatives, either live on the platforms or with mockups and user interviews.

At Gupy, the challenge of contacting applicants in a hiring process had my team working on improving email usability and deliverability, boosting responses from candidates considerably and ensuring deliverability of 98% of messages. At Proposify, one of the main product goals was to engage and expand enterprise customers. One of the teams I led focused on delivering a net-new Single Sign-On experience that contributed to the company’s boost in customer lifetime value by 153%.

My attention to improving strategic metrics and eye for day-to-day performance indicators goes beyond product, and into Operations. As a Customer Success Leader at Gupy, I gathered, analyzed, and synthesized data, arriving at the first version of the Client Health Score, an essential tool to understand and manage portfolios efficiently in Customer Success. I also led the team through designing Support processes using a unified software on track to handle over 40,000 monthly calls, with a 94% satisfaction rate. These changes resulted in a surge in team productivity that increased the client base by 440%, while the team only doubled its size over the same period.

While leading the Customer Experience team at Loggi, I was also involved in the initial interface between Operations and Product. I structured processes and partnered with the Product team in initiatives that reduced overall tickets by 30% and wait time for 45% of drivers' tickets.

Screen with a dashboard filled with charts.

"Simone is always concerned with innovating, even in small details, always with a well-fundamented and strong business perspective. She developed the culture at the People team of measuring and working with objective metrics. (...) One of her best qualities is being data-driven while having an open, practical and curious vision of the world."
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Lidi Caetano is a Facilities Manager at Shopee, in Brazil. Lidi and Simone worked alongside when Simone was a People Development Coordinator at Loggi.

UX card sorting exercise - hand placing post-its on a wall.

"Being led by Simone changed my life - I can say that with no hesitation or doubt. She is fast-paced, with high-quality deliverables, and concrete contributions that are justified and full of context [for her team]. Her strategic positioning is responsible towards the business, and she leads in a light, sincere, and transparent way."

Mel Diniz (she/her) is a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Specialist at will bank, in Brazil. Simone was Mel's direct manager in the Customer Experience and People Development teams at Loggi.

Applying leadership

/ Improving team dynamics and lead time in startups

I have led one, two, even four delivery teams at a time as an Intermediate and Senior Product Manager. I continuously monitor the delivery velocity so that product teams can ship faster, experiment with more ways to improve customer experience and boost strategic metrics.

Holding a graduate degree in Strategy, Design and Innovation and having over 10 years of facilitation experience, I have led teams and facilitated group discussions to increase synergy and improve delivery pace.
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At Gupy, when leading the User Engagement squad, I brought Design Sprints and Lean Inception into team routines for the first time in the company's history in 2019. The team was experimenting with ways to engage applicants in the hiring processes held through the platform, and a design process I facilitated pointed us to try updating candidates through SMS. Features like that, even in their MVP state, used to take up to 3 months to be first seen by actual customers. My team and I delivered an initial version of the SMS engine in 2-3 weeks and generated evidence pointing to the need for a solution like that to be added to the roadmap.

More recently, at Proposify, I led the efforts to rebuild a core part of the platform, the proposal editor. Delivery time was the most impactful challenge the company faced at the time, and the introduction of consistent agile practices I implemented improved delivery time from 13 to 5 days.