Welcome to Behind the Screens, our in-house series that dives into the day-to-day experiences of the various team members at OpenX. Through candid Q&A sessions, we unveil the diverse roles, unique perspectives, and behind-the-scenes operations that drive the ongoing evolution of the programmatic ecosystem.

How did you get into adtech?

During grad school, a speaker from OpenX came to my digital marketing strategy class to talk about programmatic advertising. Shortly thereafter, and purely coincidental, somebody from OpenX reached out about an opportunity. The role was in product operations and focused on driving go-to-market success for major new features and products. 

I wanted to work in technology, specifically hoping to help determine the impact of new product launches, so it was a good fit for my interests. To be honest, the fact that it was adtech was not the primary driver of my interest, but this industry is far more fascinating than I imagined at the time.

How does your team support OpenX’s clients?

I lead our marketplace product group within our larger product team. We aim to maximize buyer campaign outcomes by offering best-in-class curation, addressability, and activation tools that help buyers gain more control and transparency over their programmatic campaigns with less effort. 

Trading teams are constantly strapped for time and resources but still under immense pressure to meet campaign objectives while ensuring brand safety. Our focus is to continually innovate in ways that save traders time while ensuring they meet their campaign objectives. 

To achieve this, our platform must continuously innovate as the industry evolves, including challenges to addressability. As trust and effectiveness in programmatic continue to build and extend into new channels, so will campaign budgets, ultimately benefiting our publishers and DSP partners as well.

What does a typical work day look like for you?

While there really is no typical day, there might be typical weeks or months. Every week, I know that I’ll spend a lot of time working directly with my team and their engineering leads to discuss current projects, experiments, and discovery priorities. In these conversations, we aim to sharpen our understanding of the problem to solve, identify the minimally valuable product, and remove any blockers to progress.

I will also reserve quite a lot of time every week to ensure we maintain a strong connection with key stakeholders across the organization, encourage their feedback, and clearly communicate our priorities. Ultimately, even the best ideas will flop if you can’t find alignment and trust across departments on the product strategy.

“It’s a good reminder that the best insight comes from customers. Simply put, we’re here to serve our customers first and foremost.”

At least every quarter, we’ll take a step back as a leadership team and within our individual product groups to review the past few months and evaluate our plan for the next few months. We do this intentionally to ensure alignment, find continual opportunities to tweak strategy or process, and ultimately drive impact. I find that creating space away from the day-to-day is critical to maintaining a focus on what’s important, not just what’s next.   

Lastly, all product managers at every level must prioritize time with customers and monitor our fast-moving industry. I’ve always liked the acronym NIHITO — “Nothing Interesting Happens In The Office.” It’s extreme and not actually true, but it’s a good reminder that the best insight comes from customers. Simply put, we’re here to serve our customers first and foremost.

What’s your leadership style?

Chill, but serious? [Laughs] No, but really, product management can be stressful. It’s a hard job. I have very high expectations for myself and my team, but I try to approach everything with calmness, compassion, and honesty. My intention is to create a team that feels fully empowered to do the best work of their careers and leave OpenX a better PM than when they started. 

We emphasize collaboration, constant communication, true expertise, deep understanding, and respectful challenges of the “way things are.” I strive to create an environment of high trust and psychological safety because I believe that will result in the most creativity, job satisfaction, and, ultimately, impact. The individuals on my team are just that — individuals. Each person has different strengths, weaknesses, and career goals, and I try to adapt my style and areas of emphasis based on that.

“For some, curation might feel like a new trend or offering in programmatic from SSPs, but we pioneered curation back in 2018. 

We felt it was critical that buyers be able to execute true people-based marketing with an SSP. To do this, we built the industry’s first supply-side identity graph to offer buyers the precision of audience-based targeting strategies at the scale of programmatic.”

What’s an OpenX offering that you’re proud to have worked on?

I was around for the early days of launching a curation platform at OpenX. For some, curation might feel like a new trend or offering in programmatic from SSPs, but we pioneered curation back in 2018. 

We felt it was critical that buyers be able to execute true people-based marketing with an SSP. To do this, we built the industry’s first supply-side identity graph to offer buyers the precision of audience-based targeting strategies at the scale of programmatic.

We have evolved and innovated that platform significantly over the years as we’ve listened to the market, but I remain impressed at our understanding years ago of buyers’ needs and where the industry was headed. I’m honored and humbled to be trusted to continue to shepherd it forward today.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

It’s a tie between problem-solving and the intense collaboration required by product management. I’m in product because I’m naturally attracted to both. I love deeply understanding issues and getting into the details of how to solve them with other people. I am never the most creative person in the room, so I really enjoy building high-caliber teams, helping set the stage, and letting them do their thing. If I do my job well, I’m creating sensible guardrails and an environment that helps people focus, be creative, and consistently make an impact.

What does collaboration look like at OpenX?

At OpenX, our default is inclusion. It’s a deeply held belief that we will consistently make smarter decisions with more, not fewer, voices. We want everyone to feel ownership over OpenX’s success, and you will constantly be encouraged to speak up and voice your opinion. This might sound simple, but adjusting to that culture in the early days took me some time. It can feel intimidating for some to be asked to speak their mind early in their time at a new job or in their career, but ultimately, that challenge helped me grow immensely.

Specifically in the product function, we strongly emphasize making time and space for anyone, at any level of the organization, to contribute to product strategy and success. There are so many smart people at OpenX with different perspectives and diverse backgrounds. We constantly ask our PMs to seek multiple vantage points to sharpen our understanding of the problem and ideate the best solution to deliver value to our customers and the organization. At the end of the day, we’re shepherds of the best idea.

What industry trends are you currently keeping an eye on?

I spend a lot of time thinking about three trends: addressability, CTV, and AI. I realize these are not novel answers, but they take up most of the airspace across our industry and in the trades for good reason. Also, no surprise, but each area is well represented across our product roadmap. 

“Signal loss is often talked about as a threat, but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s also an opportunity.”

With CTV, our intention is to continue to drive growth in biddable CTV by maintaining the highest possible inventory quality and pairing that with advanced curation tools to drive precision, transparency, and performance. 

Signal loss is often talked about as a threat, but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s also an opportunity. OpenX has made significant investments in future-proofing our curation platform to support several alternative addressability solutions so that advertisers can find scale and precision in formerly unaddressable environments. What isn’t discussed enough is that this delivers clear value today, regardless of when third-party cookies disappear, given that around 35 percent of global traffic is already browsing in cookieless environments, and some Chrome users disable cookies on their own.

Lastly, with AI, we see opportunities to help drive superior campaign performance without using sensitive user data and to ease the operational burden of routine campaign activation tasks such as data or inventory discovery and campaign optimization.