Director, Product Development - Product Management
About The Position
USA TODAY Co. is seeking a strategic, commercially minded Product Director to lead the evolution of its audience, media, and advertising platform capabilities. The role defines and delivers product strategy across audience solutions, programmatic advertising, and integration of owned media into a unified commercial experience. It turns audience insights, media assets, and performance data into products that are easy to sell, plan, activate, measure, and optimize, shaping a growth platform at the intersection of product, data, advertising technology, and commercial transformation. The position owns audience product strategy and development; integration of owned media inventory and audience signals into commercial workflows; programmatic monetization; and commercialization and leadership. The Director builds product vision and roadmaps, develops packaging and measurement frameworks, improves yield and inventory utilization, and leads cross-functional teams and senior-stakeholder decisions. The role requires extensive experience with digital advertising and media platforms, ad-serving and order-to-cash systems, audience and identity architecture, data platforms, APIs, monetization, and analytical data modeling.
Requirements
- 10+ years of product management experience in digital advertising, advertising technology, media platforms, data products, or related fields.
- 5+ years leading complex platform products, major integrations, or multi-team transformation initiatives.
- Strong understanding of programmatic advertising, digital media monetization, audience products, campaign workflows, and advertising operations.
- Experience translating customer and commercial problems into platform strategy, roadmaps, product requirements, and measurable outcomes.
- Strong analytical and commercial judgment, executive communication, and cross-functional leadership skills.
- Deep working knowledge of Google Ad Manager or a comparable enterprise ad server, including orders, line items, targeting, pacing, creative trafficking, and reporting integrations.
- Experience with advertising order-to-cash ecosystems, including booking, pricing, fulfillment, billing, and revenue-recognition processes that connect with ad-serving and reporting platforms.
- Understanding of modern cloud data platforms and warehouses such as BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or Databricks, including audience tables, identity graphs, data marts, and scalable reporting layers.
- Expertise in audience and identity architecture, including first-party identity resolution, consumer graphs, segment taxonomies, known and anonymous audiences, and deterministic and probabilistic matching.
- Experience defining API and integration patterns, including REST or GraphQL, event-driven contracts, system-of-record boundaries, and data synchronization across commercial, advertising, and reporting systems.
- Strong understanding of media monetization and yield concepts, including CPM pricing, rate cards, floor strategies, margin structures, premium and remnant inventory, and cross-channel revenue attribution.
- Knowledge of cross-channel audience activation from owned environments into social, video, and demand-side advertising platforms.
- Knowledge of data modeling and SQL, including dimensional models for campaign, impression, audience, and revenue data; sold-versus-delivered reconciliation; complex joins; window functions; and performance optimization on large datasets.
Nice To Haves
- Experience launching audience-based solutions and enabling commercial teams to bring new capabilities to market.
- Experience integrating advertising, customer-management, order-management, reporting, or revenue platforms.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted media planning, campaign optimization, and decision-support products.
- Experience integrating customer relationship management and commercial workflow platforms, including campaign planning, quote-to-cash, and opportunity-to-order processes in a media sales environment; Salesforce or an equivalent platform experience is beneficial.
- Experience with business intelligence and reporting platforms that surface campaign, audience, and revenue insights to commercial teams and customers; familiarity with Looker, Tableau, or comparable solutions is beneficial.
- Understanding of creative fulfillment workflows, including how creative assets are requested, produced, approved, and routed into advertising delivery systems; experience with commercial creative workflow platforms is beneficial.
- Working knowledge of Python or a similar language for prototyping, data validation, analysis, and workflow automation.
- MBA or equivalent experience leading product strategy and commercial transformation.
Responsibilities
- Define and execute the vision, product strategy, and roadmap for audience capabilities.
- Build differentiated products using first-party, behavioral, contextual, geographic, and advertiser-permissioned data.
- Create packaging, activation, pricing, measurement, and reporting frameworks.
- Advance segmentation, enrichment, identity, insights, and responsible data use.
- Integrate owned media inventory and audience signals into planning, selling, delivery, and reporting workflows.
- Define the target experience across planning, order management, inventory, campaign delivery, optimization, and measurement.
- Connect advertising, commercial, data, and reporting capabilities through clear platform boundaries.
- Simplify fragmented workflows and reduce manual handoffs.
- Own the strategy for direct and automated media offerings across multiple buying models.
- Improve yield and inventory utilization while protecting customer value and premium experiences.
- Advance forecasting, pricing, packaging, decisioning, and campaign optimization.
- Use performance data and market insights to prioritize investment and validate product-market fit.
- Build business cases, launch plans, adoption strategies, and success measures.
- Lead across Sales, Client Success, Marketing, Data, Engineering, Operations, Finance, Legal, and Privacy.
- Guide roadmap, investment, dependency, and trade-off decisions with senior stakeholders.
- Develop product talent and influence matrixed teams across the organization.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Director
Education Level
No Education Listed
