Brian Simmons

Following a strategic shift in the company to refocus as a vertical media organization, I stepped into a leadership role to run a team of product managers, UX designers, and engineers to increase revenue via our advertising and sponsored content offerings and grow our core audience by improving engagement metrics with our content. Responsible for strategy, OKR's, and execution for three product lines.

• Improved our mobile news UPV's 36% YOY by integrating with the AMP publishing framework.
• Increased our mobile engagement rate (2+ articles in one session) by over 30% from site architecture and usability improvements.
• Boosted Google Search impressions 10x across all site content by making SEO improvements.
• Identified a key usability issue for our company customer segment’s login flow and improved the sales funnel CR from 13% to 37%
• Instituted a growth culture of A/B testing by assembling a framework that allows experiments to be launched weekly via the Product team.
• Championed for better data tools to understand our audience, led the roll out and on boarding for Marketing, Editorial, and Sales teams to build a culture of democratized data.
• Manage and mentor five direct reports.

I developed a new service from concept to product/market fit for our Jobs customers that provides hiring edtech companies with medium to senior level talent in marketing, sales, product and curriculum design roles. I also have jumped in on site design, SEO/marketing, sales CRM, and CMS projects when needed.

• Developed new service EdSurge Connect alongside sales team, validated with initial customers until reaching product/market fit, and developed into a new revenue stream underneath the Jobs product line.
• Designed marketing automation and sales cycle workflow to increase retention and build new customer pipeline.
• Managed growing job seeker community to build product awareness, create transparency, and increase customer satisfaction.
• Support existing product line for Jobs Board, along with feature improvements, bug fixes, and revenue analysis.
• Created wireframes for design team for article engagement, navigation, and marketing projects.

I led multiple teams on the development of our program partner websites and minisites, mobile apps, landing pages, and lead forms. I also worked on greenfield projects such as My Portal, a communication tool for prospects that interfaces with SalesforceCRM, and Teach100, a blog ranking tool for education.

• Devised and launched company's first internal API authentication service (Greenlight) to bridge all marketing properties, application products, and LMS under one unified account.
• Led a team to build and launch a new product (My Portal) for prospective students which has increased new application submits by 15%.
• Introduced a new landing page product for our marketing department which utilized a flat file CMS & Amazon Cloudfront, bringing uptime to almost 99% and reduced redundancy for web developers.
• Oversaw implementation of accessibility improvements to meet the WCAG 2.0 (A, AA) level of conformance.
• Utilized lean principles to control a growing backlog of maintenance requests for 12+ marketing websites.

My journey with 2U began in a role assisting with the content strategy and rollout of our second university partner : USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. I cut my teeth on CMS projects with Wordpress and Drupal, managed client expectations, and implemented CRO tests.

• Launched several university program websites during a period of fast growth for: USC, Georgetown, UNC, WashU, American, and GWU.
• Worked with program stakeholders to gather requirements for marketing efforts and set expectations.
• Executed SEO campaigns to increase websites’ visibility to top rank on SERP for specific keywords and content.
• Wrote marketing copy, edited freelance blog contributions, and acted as general webmaster for over six program partner sites.