Global Senior Product Manager - Inventory Management

As TV audiences fragment across a range of platforms and as viewing behaviours evolve, TV advertisers are grappling with how to continue making best use of their most trusted medium. Finecast was created to help solve this challenge.

Finecast enables advertisers to precision-target viewers across multiple on-demand, linear and live streaming TV environments. Finecast gives advertisers the ability to deliver targeted ads to audiences watching TV content across multiple broadcasters, connected devices, set top boxes, over-the-top providers, and game consoles – all through a single point of access with standardised measurement.

Finecast optimises delivery across the entire addressable TV marketplace. With access to hundreds of different targeting segments, from socio-economic to life stage, purchase and financial data, advertisers can identify and reach viewers whenever and wherever they are watching.

About GroupM

GroupM is the leading global media investment management operation. It serves as the parent company to WPP media investment agencies; Wavemaker, MediaCom, Mindshare, Essence, and m/SIX.

Its primary purpose is to maximise the performance of WPP’s media communications agencies on behalf of our clients, our shareholders and our people by operating as a parent and collaborator in performance-enhancing activities such as trading, content creation, sports, digital, finance, proprietary tool development and other business-critical capabilities. The agencies that comprise GroupM are all global operations in their own right with leading market positions.

The focus of GroupM is the intelligent application of physical and intellectual scale to benefit trading, innovation, and new communication services, to bring a strategic advantage to our clients and our companies.

About the team

The world of TV is undergoing a paradigm-shift as traditional, linear TV shifts into the new world of TV powered by technology advances, content proliferation and ubiquitous data. Finecast is a team of individuals shaping the future of TV advertising and as such we set high standards for the individuals we hire and the skillsets they bring to our business.

We are a rapidly growing organisation that require a hands-on approach with creative thinking, strong communication skills and a passion for what we do that translates into real energy in our team culture. There is no place for politics – Finecast is a fun, open, honest place to work where we support each other for our mutual success.

The role objectives

The Senior Product Manager will work within the Global Platform team, supporting Finecast with design and build of its Inventory Management Capabilities. The successful candidate will collaborate with trading teams and inventory owners across various markets to define and build a scalable solution. This will help Finecast improve acquisition, monetisation, and forecasting of inventory across broadcasters and publishers.

The ideal candidate will lead cross-functional teams consisting of stakeholders, designers, and engineers to define the product strategy, outline requirements, create and evaluate prototypes to build the platform iteratively from the ground up. The role will also work with Project Management and Product Marketing to increase adoption and roll-out of the features across all Finecast Markets.

They must be able to work effectively across all areas of product development and management, including design, creation, enhancement, and maintenance of new and existing features, functionality, and processes.

The primary responsibilities of the role will be:

• Define product roadmap to deliver inventory management capabilities and insights to help teams make better decisions. These include
  • Supply forecasting: Improve the accuracy of supply available based on deals, current pipeline, and seasonal trends
  • Acquisition insights: Equip Inventory owners with insights on what kind of inventory is needed to meet coming demand
  • Supply utility: Allow teams to see how we utilise inventory across various time periods and forecast future inventory needs
  • Management tools: Create tools to help inventory owners control and forecast supply

• Align stakeholders towards the product strategy and keep engagement through the development process ensuring product development lifecycle stages are completed on time and communicate updates to stakeholders and leadership team
• Drive product development with team of engineers, designers and stakeholders through ideation, development and launch of innovative products
• Measure success of product through identification and measurement of metrics
• Produce functional requirement documentation for new product initiatives
• Lead testing programmes for new products
• Manage product rollout and training schemes
• Maintain platform product roadmap and associated prioritisation process across Finecast markets
• Support the overall platform product strategy through ongoing assessment of needs and putting innovation at the heart of our roadmap
• Work closely with Finecast local market stakeholders to ensure we have a transparent, open product roadmap process with strong participation and collaboration in feature development from our user community

Experience & skills:

The following skills and attributes will need to be demonstrated:

• Some experience of working with the following is desired:
  • Inventory Management, Yield Management (preferably within media)
  • Ad Tech - Programmatic trading; SSPs, DSPs, etc.
  • Forecasting models
• Relevant experience in product development and management
  • Stakeholder management
  • Requirements gathering, development of user stories and acceptance criteria
  • Technology specifications and development
  • Solution delivery and adoption
  • Strategic vision and commercialisation
• Experience creating products from the ground up
• Sound experience of working with agile product management practices working closely with engineering teams in a continuous development approach
• Familiarity with principles of design and UX
• Understanding and experience of product prototyping process
• Evidence of technical comfort and understanding of application development, cloud computing, and database technologies
• Ideally, experience within the media industry - preferably in the areas of TV and digital advertising – but other industry experience is welcome
• Comfortable in speaking to any level of seniority, tailoring your message as appropriate
• Excellent Communication skills, effectively translating complex ideas into easy to understand, workable solutions