The neatest clue to Megan Simoes's career is hidden in an old piece of practical advice about meetings. A project is finished. Everybody gathers to review it. The conversation is lively, the observations intelligent, the coffee tolerable. Then people return to their desks and nothing changes. Simoes's prescription was wonderfully unromantic: write down each action, give it an owner and a due date, and keep checking the list. “Talking is great,” she wrote, “but action is better.”
That sentence could sit above her new desk at Nextiva. In July 2026, Simoes became Chief of Staff to CMO Yaniv Masjedi, charged with helping drive strategy and execution across the marketing organization. Strategy and execution are two words companies enjoy placing beside each other. The difficult bit is the small word between them. Simoes has made a career of the “and.”
First, learn how the thing is made
Simoes did not begin in an executive suite. She studied graphic design at Drake University from 2007 to 2010, with a period at Richmond, The American International University in London, in 2009. Her early jobs crossed design and technology: graphic design at CEA Global Education, template website design, an internship at the London agency Fortune Cookie and contract web development.
This is a useful apprenticeship for an operator. A website is where attractive intentions meet browsers, budgets and somebody's unexpectedly ancient phone. Design asks what should be clear. Code asks what will actually run. Client work asks whether any of it solves the right problem. The three questions are not always on speaking terms.
In 2013, Simoes joined The James Agency in Scottsdale as a web developer. She became a senior web developer in 2015, then Director of Web Strategy & Development in 2016. An awards book from the Phoenix advertising community credits her in that role on a Silver-winning website for Davis Home Furnishings. Yet the more revealing evidence of her technical years is what she warned clients about. Low-cost website templates work nicely, she said, until a business needs to alter the template. Then the apparent shortcut can acquire developers, workarounds and bills.
“Talking is great, but action is better.”Megan Simoes on project post-mortems
The promotion that widened the lens
By 2020, the title changed to Integration Director. It sounds like a job invented after one department says, “We thought they were doing it,” and another replies, “We thought you were.” Her remit was to make specialty teams work together, share knowledge and give clients a coherent experience from one stage to the next.
The move was not a departure from her web background. It was the same problem at a larger scale. Instead of fitting components into a page, she was fitting expertise into a client engagement. Instead of debugging code, she was debugging handoffs. A former manager's public recommendation described Simoes as fast, collaborative and positive, and recalled colleagues praising a project she co-managed as unusually seamless. Seamlessness is an odd achievement: when it works, the audience sees less of the labor.
Simoes also argued that a team's education should be treated as part of the operating system, not as a decorative benefit. At the agency, directors and employees met monthly about goals, aspirations and possible career paths. Her recommended resources were modest - online courses, webinars, conferences, professional groups - but the principle was large. A company buys commitment from people partly by showing commitment to them.
The idea had autobiographical force. Simoes had been allowed to outgrow one job after another. In 2018 she added a Google mobile-sites certification; in 2020, an Associate Professional in Human Resources credential. One belongs near Lighthouse scores and responsive layouts, the other near people policy. Together they make a tidy Simoes pair: systems and humans, best considered at the same meeting.
The first president, already fluent in the place
In June 2022, The James Agency named Simoes its first president. Founder and CEO Veronique James pointed to her appetite for solutions and her decade of growth inside the firm. Simoes framed the appointment in terms of apprenticeship and obligation: working under a strong female leader, she said, inspired her to lead and mentor others inside and beyond the agency.
The timing sharpened the job. The agency had survived a startling 62 percent revenue loss in a matter of hours at the beginning of the 2020 shutdowns. It retained its staff, diversified its clients and reorganized work. By the time Simoes took the presidency, the firm was projecting 19.71 percent growth for 2022 and had been voted the number-two workplace in its category by employees. None of that belonged to one person. It does explain why continuity, learning and cross-functional trust were more than pleasant phrases in the office.
As president, Simoes supported talent, operations, account management and long-term strategy. In 2023, she described a more consultative model that required the agency to know a client's business “like the back of our hand.” The point was not endless discovery for its own sake. It was the ability to offer advice that reached the bottom line, with agency and client teams operating as if they shared an address.
Design and development gave Simoes firsthand knowledge of how strategy behaves under real constraints.
Integration turned the gaps between departments into a job worth managing deliberately.
Her post-mortem method insists on owners, due dates and repeated follow-through.
The presidency and chief-of-staff role apply the same habits across whole organizations.
Her advice to women-led businesses carried the same practical cadence. Tell the distinctive story. Use automation to communicate consistently. Show how the offering performs. Measure, then optimize. It is difficult to put that on a tote bag, which may be why it is useful.
A new building, the same hallway
In July 2026, Simoes announced that she was leaving The James Agency after 13 years. Her note did not attempt corporate poetry. She thanked the people who had given her trust, challenges and durable relationships, then said she was looking forward to partnering with Masjedi at Nextiva. The company operates in business communications and customer experience, a larger technological landscape than a regional agency and one that makes coordination its product as well as its daily work.
A chief of staff title can be maddeningly vague from the outside. Its substance depends on the leader, the organization and the problems arriving before breakfast. Simoes's own description supplies the useful nouns: strategy, execution and the marketing organization. Her history supplies the verbs: translate, connect, review, assign, teach.
There is a temptation to tell her story as a surprising ascent from coder to president. Surprise undersells the logic. A developer learns dependencies. A designer learns hierarchy. A client partner learns trust. An integration director learns that the org chart is less important than the work moving across it. By the time Simoes reached the president's office, she had already spent years studying how every nearby room functioned.
The career was never a jump from pixels to people. It was an expanding definition of what needed to connect.
Her public persona remains more operator than oracle. She writes about the useful meeting, the affordable course, the hidden cost and the next action. Even her post about attending the 2024 Trainual conference ended with what she planned to apply to growth and efficiency back at work. Inspiration was welcome. Implementation still had a due date.
There is also a modest argument here for careers that compound sideways before they rise. Simoes did not discard design when she learned development, or discard development when she moved into integration. Each discipline became another way to ask whether the message, mechanism and people agreed. Companies often advertise for leaders who can “connect the dots,” as if the dots were considerate enough to number themselves. Her record shows the slower version: work close enough to each discipline to understand its pressures, earn enough trust to question the handoff, then make the next handoff cleaner. The result is less a collection of past jobs than a set of working lenses.
That may be the clearest way to understand what Simoes brings to Nextiva. She has spent a career moving closer to the center without losing sympathy for the edge where work is made. She knows the exhilaration of strategy and the indignity of a locked template. She knows that people want a path and clients want comprehension. She knows the meeting is not the work, though a good meeting can make the work much better.
Thirteen years after arriving at an agency to build websites, she entered a new company to help build alignment. The scale changed. The hallway got longer. Simoes, one suspects, has already started a list.