Professional Experience

In my capacity as Director of Platform Operations at Zeta Global, I lead teams responsible for program management, change control, regulatory compliance, application theory and support, and infrastructure management for programmatic, data management, and email marketing platforms. By identifying, mentoring, and promoting leaders, I developed a culture of knowledge sharing where individual development goals were matched with business needs to provide direction and purpose to cross-training efforts.

Key Accomplishments

• Championed Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) methodology and processes creating martech platform knowledge bases

• Created unified customer portal to provide customers with access to platform and support resources

• Transformed and standardized support across multiple ad tech platforms

• Developed and scaled crucial  business processes tied to operational success

When I was recruited as the Director of Programmatic Product Support at Zeta, I was tasked with building a functioning support organization starting with a handful of people managing support for their DSP through email. Provided with carte blanche and understanding the growth projections for Zeta’s Programmatic business, I immediate set to work on designing and building a Jira-based service desk and confluence-based process and documentation repositories. The evolution of the Programmatic Product Support Group began with that initial step and proceeded iteratively with the growth of sustainable practices and efforts to optimize our productivity.

As I grew this group to include three teams providing 24x7 support, and scaled our service desk to a two tiered structure, we collaborated with Engineering, Product, and Account Management teams to build integrated processes ranging from management of Enhancement Requests to the implementation and leadership of a formal knowledge management methodology that transformed our service desk into a self-service portal. 

Key Accomplishments

• Implemented Lean Six Sigma project methodology for quality control projects

• Implemented Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) methodology and processes

• Built a multi-tiered support organization, service desk,  and all associated workflows and processes

• Scaled multiple teams to provide global coverage

Following the acquisition of Rocket Fuel by Sizmek, I was promoted to the role of Technical Operations Engineering Lead tasked with responsibility for support of Programmatic products including the legacy Rocket Fuel technology. 

Leading a team of engineers that served as Tier 2 Support and Program Managers, we built out the Programmatic support library, identified and successfully completed projects tied to the integration of the legacy Rocket Fuel Technical Operations team and programmatic support infrastructure into Sizmek’s legacy business. 

Serving as the primary liaison between the Support, Engineering, and Product organizations, I led efforts in advocating for both internal and external customer needs and expectations while continuing the development of parallel solutions developed prior to the acquisition. Serving as the principle manager for Programmatic product support, I served as the liaison between the business and it’s customers in the resolution of these issues and led postmortem efforts to identify root cause of those issues and solutions to reduce the possibility of the recurrence of those issues. 

In my capacity as a leader, I successfully identified and provided development opportunities for my direct reports by matching interests with business needs, and by leveraging the development interests of individuals to provide opportunity for pursuit of the development goals of others. One such examples included providing the opportunity for an employee to gain experience public speaking, instructing, and mentoring to design and execute a SQL curriculum provided to other team members.

Key Accomplishments

• Developed and maintained the DSP macro handler service

• Served as primary liaison between Engineering and support org on issues and tasks related to DSP

• Built a training curriculum to build DSP and programmatic acumen and to provide development opportunities for employees

• Served as principal on high priority issues and initiatives

Having reached the limits of what I believed was achievable in the publisher side of the industry, I realized the best opportunity to continue learning and growing was to make the move to Programmatic. I was successful in attaining a position as the Senior Technical Operations Project Manager with Rocket Fuel, Inc. Sitting within the Technical Operations team, I set about examining the state of support for the DSP and designing and implementing solutions to improve the support of high value domains while reducing support overhead. 

One of my early successes including effectively eliminating support escalations tied to multiple specialized DSP pixel syntaxes through the creation of a tool that eliminated the potential for human error in the creation and modification of these pixel syntaxes. Noting process expected individuals with no experience manipulating code to manipulate JavaScript tag templates for a half dozen specialized pixel syntaxes, the resulting stress on those expected to comply with this process, and the high rate of failure and resulting support overhead tied to this process, I created a tool that would present users with a form and generate the correctly populated and formatted pixel tag. Support escalations tied to this process constituted approximately 10% of support workload. This solution effectively resolved the issues users faced with this domain. 

My largest success sought to reduce support escalations tied to ad audit issues, campaign performance and delivery issues, and escalations tied to incorrect implementation of our DSP macros including instances where a user broke an ad tag attempting to accomplish macro insertion manually. Creating what was first a stand-alone macro insertion tool, then evolving this tool into a full-blown macro handling service integrated in the DSP, the solution I built and managed had such a broad reaching positive impact that its full scope was never fully calculated. Every ad tag run through the DSP was processed by Macro Handler, which correctly identified the ad tag syntax, injected the correct ad serving macros, and validated the ad tag to ensure that the tag’s HTML was complete and error-free and that macro insertion had executed successfully. 

Successes such as these resulted in me having the opportunity to share leadership in the restructuring of the Technical Operations team and to successfully apply my past experience to the Programmatic world through ownership of the evolution of the team’s workflows and processes, revolutionizing how the team communicated with stakeholders and collaborators, and through leading the push to broaden the scope of the Technical Operations team through ushering in increased visibility and accountability, increased participation in cross-functional teams, and in building the teams credibility as a solutions provider.

Key Accomplishments

• Developed and maintained the code for the ad serving macro management component of the DSP

• Developed stand-alone tools to streamline tasks for internal teams and reduce support escalations

• Served as primary liaison between Engineering and Operations team members

• Designed and built the Vendor Certification program and led related efforts

I was recruited into United Business Media to build and lead their Advertising Technologies team. In this role I was responsible for the implementation, support, and management of UBM’s digital advertising infrastructure based around an implementation of DART Enterprise. UBM was experiencing a period of growth both organically and through acquisition of other publishers and my primary responsibility was to scale our operations in integrating our advertising technologies infrastructure with each business group’s sites and events. Recruiting and leading a team of Engineers domestically and in multiple locations overseas, I built a world class support organization as the advertising technologies infrastructure I managed grew to support every division of this billion-dollar business. 

To control costs and maintain standards, I implemented Agile project management principles to improve decision-making, identify more opportunities for success, and reduce lag time in projects my team managed. The processes and workflows I created and implemented allowed for the easy scaling of our advertising technologies infrastructure to meet rapidly growing business demands. 

Some of the initiatives I pioneered in this role include the introduction and evolution of video ad serving starting at a point prior to the creation of VAST and VPAID standards, the creation of a more visible knowledge base once the business introduced a wiki, building in-app delivery channels and cross-channel attribution tied to sponsorship offerings, the adoption of programmatic, the implementation of first party audience segment offerings, and the development of high impact rich-media and sponsored content products. 

Key Accomplishments

• Built a global advertising technology support and training organization offering 24-hour services for teams on three continents

• Designed and built UBM’s video advertising operations and infrastructure

• Managed dozens of major ad server migrations including migrations from software based advertising technologies to SAAS

• Developed high impact rich-media and sponsored content products

The opportunity I accepted at CMP Media was my first role in digital advertising. A natural evolution from a past role I held in print advertising with a small agency, I quickly came to learn the vast differences between the world of print and online. 

Hired into a small team led by a Project Manager in CMP Media's Software Development Group, I was tasked with the management of support for our implementation of DART Enterprise for trafficking, engineering, and sales teams. This role provided me with opportunity to interface with people at every level of the business.

The first problem that I would solve in this role was the advertising technologies support escalation process. I addressed this through implementing an informal knowledge management process: I would create knowledge base articles whenever a question or problem was escalated more than once. This content would describe the ask and provide the most common solutions that a user could pursue without my help. Leveraging our in-house content management platform, Content Center, I published this content in a directory and shared it internally. 

The second problem I would solve focused on user acumen. Having provided support for users, I was uniquely positioned to develop training curriculum that I then provided through a training program I developed to raise user acumen on our implementation of DART Enterprise and our proprietary reporting platform. 

Implementing and maintaining a support documentation solution and an internal training program helped me succeed in high value projects, such as migrations and development efforts, that I contributed to or led.

Key Accomplishments

• Led the migration of a proprietary reporting platform

• Developed and led the advertising technologies training program

• Developed and led the advertising technologies product and support content management program