Simon Males

Head of Product

I'm a developer → engineering manager → product manager → head of product person! I guide the product orginsation by fielding the inputs to discover appropriate solutions for our users that are viable for the business. Self-custody is hard and introduces a paradigm shift in the mental model for the convenience-seeking user.

Location: Prague, Czech Republic

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonmales/

Personal: https://sime.net.au/

Work History

Febuary 2022 - Current

Head of Product Software, Trezor, Prague

Aligning the product organisation with business goals and aligning roadmap developments with specific KPIs
Developing the competencies of product managers
Facilitating the communication of product strategies and initiatives with the wider organisation

October 2020 - Febuary 2022

Co-Founder, Bojagi, Berlin

Focusing on discovering product market fit
Conducting user interviews and product testing
Outbound sales and pre-sales

November 2014 - October 2020

Senior Software Engineering Manager, Delivery Hero, Berlin

Architecting the infrastructure for the Restaurant Portal product and internal plugin SDK.
Facilitating SCRUM ceremonies for the product team: stand-up, grooming, review and planning.
Extensively using AWS serverless technologies: Lambda, SQS, SNS and DynamoDB.
Managing six direct reports, including their performance and professional development.
Performing screenings and interviewing candidates for positions across the company.
Soliciting SDK and component library feedback from remote sister teams (Dubai, Singapore and Montevideo).

April 2015 - Current

Faxologist, Bitcoin Fax, Berlin

Personal project that allows users to send faxes and pay for them with Bitcoin. My concept is that from time to time digital natives need to send a fax and Bitcoin doesn't suffer from merchant processing fees on small transactions.

Over 700 faxes and 1 Bitcoin worth of transactions in the first year.

December 2013 - April 2014

Senior Web Developer, Tinkerbox Studios, Singapore

TDD with RSpec.
AJAX compatible site scraper.
Migrate MongoDB Arrays into Collections, and deploy MongoDB indexes.
Implement clean URLs for SEO.
Reduced assets file size to increase page speed.
Google Analytics Event tracking for conversion analysis.

April 2013 - September 2013

Web Developer for stealth mode e-commerce company, Singapore

Developing front and backend systems using Foundation and CakePHP respectively.
Converting requirements to Gherkin for BDD and CI with Travis CI.
Responsive CSS for three widths: 320px, 768px and 1024px.
Handlebars.js for templating real time calculations during checkout.
Automated deployments with Capistrano.

January 2012 - March 2013

Platform Engineer, Pollenizer, Sydney and Singapore

Developer and CTO for Coachy, Tiwala, Accruto start-ups.
Developing from Product Manager provided scenarios.
Practise lean startup methodologies.
Relocated to Singapore in October 2012.
Using CakePHP (2012) and Ruby on Rails (2013) frameworks.
Linux System Administration for existing Pollenizer resources.

October 2010 - December 2011

Web Developer, Buyinvite, Sydney

CakePHP development of high transacting eCommerce site.
Resolving process inefficiencies by directly coworking with all departments.
Rearchitected infrastructure, halving the number of servers.
Reducing page load times.
MySQL query tuning.

June 2010 - October 2010

Web Developer, Loaded Technologies, Sydney

LAMP development.
Support, maintaining and upgrading both internal and client SugarCRM installations.
Client requirements gathering.

November 2006 – June 2010

Web Support Developer, Independent Digital Media, Sydney

Developing and supporting PHP sites: homehound.com.au, PRIMPED and The Knot Australia (Rails).
Formatting HTML newsletters for web based and mail desktop clients.
XHTML compliance, client side scripting via jQuery.
Supporting developers, planing deployment and developer processes.
Web server, database and caching administration.

September 2005 – June 2006

Technical Support, Creative Computing, Sydney

Successfully deploy and maintain Linux based Point-Of-Sale servers and clients.
Establish pre-sale relationships with clients prior to deployment.
Remote configuration of services such as Samba, CUPS and Postfix.
Support internally developed accountancy package.

Education

2016 Certified ScrumMaster, Scrum Alliance

2008 MySQL for Database Administrators, Cliftons, MySQL Training

2006 Linux Professional Institute Certified Level 1 (LPIC-1)

2002 – 2005 Bachelor of Information and Communication Technology, Network Management (Major Study), University of Wollongong.

Other/Personal

Serverless documentation contributions.
Bouldering and Beach Volleyball.

sime / cv