The Hired Guns are seeking a Product Manager to join a venerable yet innovative media company. This is a first-time-ever role for this company, so we need a real groundbreaker who hails from adtech and has a strong programmatic / DSP background. Your mission: to improve the display advertising experience for users, increase yield, streamline ad operations, and explore new approaches for revenue generation.
The Nitty Gritty
The backstory on the organization and why they need to hire you!
As Product Manager, you’ll be the designated expert-at-large for all things digital advertising. Until now, no one at this company has been 100% focused on improving the advertising ecosystem holistically to benefit readers, advertisers, and the business. You’ll have the mission and the bandwidth to evaluate processes, technologies, and metrics, identify areas for improvement, build relationships with sales, strategy, and engineering, and be the owner of the roadmap for prioritization and execution.
You’ll start off your tenure by getting your arms around the whole shebang — a variety of legacy systems for local ad operations and home-grown DSPs as well as the whole set of established standard operating procedures for display ad design and placement — all the time looking for quick wins. You’ll spot the low-hanging fruit, then structure and lead sprint teams to deliver rapid results.
While you do that, you’ll also be hatching a master plan for improving or replacing disparate systems to make the entire placement process smoother and less people-intensive, so that changes can be made nimbly. At the same time, you’ll establish testing plans and A/B the heck out of things, gathering and interpreting data to inform ongoing improvements.
Your success will be measured very tangibly, in terms of increasing yield on ad placements, spotting new monetization opportunities, reducing errors, and speeding up all aspects of ad ops. All of which will have direct and visible revenue impacts which you can point to and say, “I did that!”
Why You?
How you’ll know if you’re a fit…
You’ve developed broad-ranging expertise in digital advertising operations and technology over the course of several years working at a major digital publisher or media company, an adtech service provider, a digital agency focused on programmatic, or ideally, a mix of those.
It’s essential that you understand all the component parts of a digital advertising infrastructure and how they piece together. You know what works and what doesn’t work in terms of format and placement, and what you don’t know, you’ll get the data to inform your next move by designing an impeccably structured test.
You’re a standout candidate for this role if you have exceptional project-management chops, experience in Agile development environments, and a track record of helming sprint teams. You must be a strong and influential communicator who knows how to make your case and win the resources to execute your initiatives. You can speak the language of marketers, developers, revenue managers, and last but not least, finance: you’re a whiz at building iron-clad cost-benefit analyses. It’s a huge plus if you’ve helped a past company evolve home-grown legacy systems into more modern and effective infrastructures.
The Inside Skinny
Why you should quit your job right now and join this organization!
This is a unique opportunity that’s the perfect fit for an up-and-coming digital ad product wizard. Get set to work every muscle you’ve got: reader experience, advertiser experience, technology, process optimization, data analysis, and more. You’ll stake out a career-making ad product vision for a media company that’s serious about making their battleship pivot like it’s a JetSki, blazing a trail to increased viability for the news publishing industry.
The Hired Guns does not and will not discriminate in considering and referring candidates for employment, or in its treatment or advancement of its employees, and will not tolerate harassment, on the basis of race, color, religion, gender (including gender identity and expression), sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or any other status protected by applicable federal, state or local law.
