Phil Freo Email & Phone Number

San Francisco, California, Us

Close.com (formerly Close.io) is a B2B SaaS product helping salespeople be more productive and close more deals. Over 6,000+ startups and SMBs trust Close as their CRM.• I currently lead our world-class 60-person Product/Design/Engineering department.• Led the Product and Engineering organization through a re-org resulting in more sustainable team structures. • Promoted and now managing Engineering Managers, Product Design Manager, & Group Product Manager, improving cross-team collaboration, hiring & retention, and roadmap/goals.• Working closely with founders & directors of other departments on overall company strategy/goals.We're looking for great people to join our Product and Engineering teams.Check out the behind-the-scenes of what we do here:https://making.close.com

San Francisco, California, Us

• Promoted/hired and now managing 4 Engineering Managers; Led our 20+ Engineering department.• Set engineering team goals, setting high standards, improving processes, identifying bottlenecks, hiring & retention, fostering team culture & relationships.• Set up product development processes based on Shape Up.• Working closely with our Product team on high level product strategy and improving our product development process.• Working closely with founders & directors of other departments on overall company strategy/goals.• Helped navigate COVID pandemic response with senior leadership. Found ways to significantly lower AWS infrastructure costs and keep employee morale high during uncertain times.(Promoted from Director to Sr. Director in Dec 2020)

San Francisco, California, Us

• Grew the Product/Engineering team from 3 to 15 people, going from a tiny team of Full Stack developers to hiring specialist roles in areas of DevOps/Infra, Backend Engineering, and Frontend Engineering. • Hired our first Product Designer and first Product Manager after championing for the need in our company and designing the recruiting process.• Created & managed a remote screening, interviewing, & hiring process. See https://philfreo.com/blog/when-who-how-to-hire-an-engineering-team-including-hiring-remotely/• Created onboarding plans, delegated work, and created more formal product development processes.• Championed remote work & helped transition the company from fully in-person (Palo Alto) to fully remote (~20 people worldwide at the time, grew to be 60+ later).

San Francisco, California, Us

• Helped design, build, & launch our new product Close (then called Close.io) from scratch.• Helped grow Close from 0 to profitable & millions in ARR when we were a company of 6 people.• Led our initial 3-person Product+Engineering team where I wore many hats, including:• I was the our primary Frontend/JavaScript developer and architected+built most of our initial Backbone.js SPA / UI.• I served as our defacto Product Manager and Product Designer, designing most of our UI for the first several years.• I contributed on the Backend (Python/Flask/MongoDB/Elasticsearch) and in DevOps (AWS/Puppet/CI/CD).• Contributed in other ways – customer support, helped close early deals, worked with integration partners, etc.

San Francisco, California, Us

I was the first Engineering hire at Quizlet.com, a study website used by 6M students (60M page views) monthly. I worked closely with the company's founders and led Engineering/Product.Focused on designing/developing new features (PHP, JavaScript), backend scalability (MySQL, Memcached, devops), improving UX/UI, Engineering Recruiting, and Product Management.I spent 2 years working at Quizlet full-time in San Francisco. Before that, I did several months of contracting work with them.More details: http://philfreo.com/blog/two-years-at-quizlet/

Portfolio: https://philfreo.com/Designed and developed websites for dozens of happy clients. Included project management, custom design work, custom development, CMS integration, eCommerce, and more. Tech: JavaScript (Ajax, jQuery), PHP 5 (Zend Certified), SQL / MySQL, HTML5, CSS Photoshop / Design, HTML, User interface design (UI), usability, SEO, ExpressionEngine CMS, WordPress themes and pluginsLearn more:https://philfreo.com/blog/technologies-ive-worked-with-in-2009/

Mountain View, Ca, Us

• Improved design and usability on existing user interfaces; improved information architecture for intranet pages. • Initiated, developed, and launched a project adopted quickly by over 1,000 employees, increasing their productivity. • Developed significantly in JavaScript and PHP; worked heavily with JavaScript & Ajax and interacted with web services.

Sunnyvale, Ca, Us

• Created client-side statistical data selection and graphing tool in object-oriented JavaScript / DHTML. • Developed new and improved upon existing PHP web applications for data presentation and input. • Worked extensively with and extended the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) JavaScript libraries. • Attended several training courses in JavaScript, DHTML, and CSS best practices.

• Developed parts of ASP application to control climate control systems securely online and present real-time or archived data textually and graphically, and allow authorized users to change temperature set points & schedules. • Implemented Ajax in online tools to decrease employee time spent on creating data presentations. • Created database schemas, managed SQL server, and created routine database backup/maintenance jobs. • Improved user interface and navigation of web applications and designed template for company website. • Developed intranet web application in ASP.NET to manage company’s support tickets.

(During high school)• Developed parts of secure ASP web application to manage real estate listings & supporting documents. • Developed online mail merge system to output labels and letters to Microsoft Word for printing. • Created online photo gallery to display company’s installation work for dentists. • Created system to view, search, & manage existing inventory database online. • Documented and fixed various bugs in existing web applications.