Simon Bennett is our VP of Product, leading our product vision, engaging with customers and helping the engineering team deliver awesome product to our customers.
A brief bio
I originally hail from the UK where I studied computer science and began my professional career working on projects in retail, financial services and a long-extinct category of company called “dotcoms”
The picture to the left was one of the first projects I worked on while finishing my degree at the University of Southampton. It felt very futuristic at the time.
I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2002, lured by the huge number of software companies and the freedom to snowboard or surf at the weekend depending on the season.
Somewhere along the way I got interested in the “business side” and switched from pure engineering management to product management. I really enjoy working on building durable businesses that produce valuable software products for lots of people.
Why you joined Bitnami and what excites you about working here?
During my time at VMware working on the personal desktop products I loved being able to make hundreds of thousands of developers and professionals more productive. Working for large, well-known company has many benefits, but I missed the dynamic nature of smaller companies where an individual team’s results directly affects the health of the business as a whole.
At Bitnami, I feel like I have the best of both worlds - the ability to reach hundreds of thousands of users to make them more productive, plus, a dynamic and passionate team willing to experiment, execute, and learn what our users and partners need every single day.
The caliber and passion of the people at Bitnami means I’m always learning something new - whether it’s “how to run an excellent meetup” from our operations team, or “the latest trends in immutable software infrastructure” from our globally distributed team of architects and engineers.
What are you working on?
One of my current projects is analysing the results from our annual user survey. I’m trying to understand what our users love about Bitnami today and where we can improve. Our industry is being revolutionized by the move to cloud computing and it’s a privilege to have the insights from over 17,000 survey respondents to guide our strategy and investments.
I’m also spending time getting hands on with our automated packaging system, which has been significantly upgraded in the last few months. We intend to make parts of that system available outside Bitnami to tackle new use-cases. In doing so I’m learning that having a team distributed throughout the world means that Bitnami, in a literal sense, never sleeps.
What do you like to do for fun?
I typically have 3-4 different projects on the go at any given time, often an art, building or electronics project with one of my boys. When time permits, I’m likely to be outside - exploring the city, heading to the mountains or the beach.
During my time at VMware working on the personal desktop products I loved being able to make hundreds of thousands of developers and professionals more productive. Working for large, well-known company has many benefits, but I missed the dynamic nature of smaller companies where an individual team’s results directly affects the health of the business as a whole.
At Bitnami, I feel like I have the best of both worlds - the ability to reach hundreds of thousands of users to make them more productive, plus, a dynamic and passionate team willing to experiment, execute, and learn what our users and partners need every single day.
The caliber and passion of the people at Bitnami means I’m always learning something new - whether it’s “how to run an excellent meetup” from our operations team, or “the latest trends in immutable software infrastructure” from our globally distributed team of architects and engineers.
What are you working on?
One of my current projects is analysing the results from our annual user survey. I’m trying to understand what our users love about Bitnami today and where we can improve. Our industry is being revolutionized by the move to cloud computing and it’s a privilege to have the insights from over 17,000 survey respondents to guide our strategy and investments.
I’m also spending time getting hands on with our automated packaging system, which has been significantly upgraded in the last few months. We intend to make parts of that system available outside Bitnami to tackle new use-cases. In doing so I’m learning that having a team distributed throughout the world means that Bitnami, in a literal sense, never sleeps.
What do you like to do for fun?I typically have 3-4 different projects on the go at any given time, often an art, building or electronics project with one of my boys. When time permits, I’m likely to be outside - exploring the city, heading to the mountains or the beach.
Interested in working with Simon at Bitnami? Apply for one of our open positions!