At many publishers there is a distinct line between the Product team and Ad Operations team. Product is focused on developing cutting edge, revenue generating formats that are desirable by agencies and advertisers, while AdOps is focused on executing timely, high quality campaigns. While the skill sets required of these teams may differ, there are multiple near-term and long-term advantages of “blurring the lines” between teams in the product development lifecycle. AdOps professionals bring a unique perspective to the development process and can be instrumental in the creation of highly effective, usable products. Here are some of the benefits:
Near-term:
- Quicker time to market – Involving AdOps personnel early and often in the product development lifecycle can reduce a lot of pre-launch issues that often hold up a launch. AdOps may find issues that, if caught early, can reduce the amount of coding required to resolve the problem. Campaign managers are also an excellent resource in alpha and beta reviews. They get a ton of information from agencies and advertisers on features and functionality that they desire in a product. This can help inform critical product design decisions.
- More usable templates/products – AdOps designers and developers live and breathe ad templates. Nothing is more frustrating than ill-constructed templates that extend campaign development time or simply frustrate developers. Soliciting their input in how to best set up these templates is critical to ensuring product adoption from your internal AdOps staff as well as agencies using your templates.
- Built-in Beta group – As part of your product release workflow, you may depend on your agency clients to provide feedback on the product, both on its effectiveness as well as its ease of use from a development perspective (the underlying template). AdOps can provide you with much of this information and in a timelier manner. During Alpha and Beta releases, developing sample campaign executions will bring to light many issues that you may not find in traditional quality assurance testing. Finding these issues prior to release can greatly increase the adoption of your product and decreases your reliance on customer input, which can take a lot time and effort to extract.
Long-term:
- Quicker campaign execution – Having intimate, hands-on knowledge of how the format works, and how the development template is set up will lead to quicker development times – even for initial executions after product launch. Designers and developers will be less reliant on the Product team in terms of build guides, etc. This frees up the Product team members to focus on their core responsibilities.
- More informed Ops team – By involving AdOps professionals in the product development lifecycle you are creating internal product champions as well as a first line defense for addressing potential client questions or issues. The more AdOps knows about the product and its inner workings, the less questions/issues that get escalated to the Product team.
- More motivated Ops team! – Most AdOps professionals are focused on execution, execution, execution. Having the opportunity to participate in strategic activities like product development empower AdOps employees and also provide a feeling of ownership. Knowing that you have played a big part in a product’s development makes you that much more willing to go the extra mile to ensure a successful campaign launch.