The Critical Pivot: How This Product Manager Turned a Project Misstep into a Winning Strategy

OK. And do you want an example where we had to sort of move away and shut it down, deprioritize it,

OK. Yeah, I can, I can give you a situation. So, um, we were building a strategic what we called a unified auction, um, product that did not at the time exist in the market specifically for CTV publishers. And we started down the path of working on, um, what was called Prebid, uh, Prebid.org, which has a, a library, an open source library of code that we thought that we could leverage because they were working with us as part of a small consortium. Um, of, uh, getting as many, uh, ecosystem players as possible to transact in, uh, the most, um, functional, efficient, and transparent way. So we, we went down the path of looking at the, at the,

transact for, uh, for the content. So he was, he was trying to plug in as many demand sources or as many DSPs in the most simplest way possible into this unified auction, which, uh, again, as a product did not exist at the time. OK. Um, we spent about 34 months, uh, getting the code set up because what we found is that, uh, Uh, even though it was open source library and through conversations with their product managers and their tech leads, um, the, this is the, the Pribi.org folks, um, they told us that some of the functionality is already there or they're developing and they would be able to push it, uh, pretty quickly. Um, we looked at, uh, how to set up those, uh, servers and some of the logic in some of those libraries on our side, and what we found is that there was actually a lot of missing pieces based on some of our other experience with live streaming and CTV, uh, content. That, um, we would have to build, uh, ourselves. So, we spent an extra 3 months, uh, at that time to try to kind of plug in or patch some of the problem areas that we saw in this, um, open source code. And at that time, what had happened, this was, uh, towards the end of the year, this was right around the January time frame, uh, there was another player, um, Publica. Who came on board and actually, basically announced the product that we were building. Um, they announced it in, in such a way that they already had publishers, um, several large content owners and content creators on their platform testing with them, uh, and we were still probably about a quarter out from when we would be kind of code complete just because we had to patch so many things in this code. So, um, that's when we started to reevaluate whether we should keep going down that path, which was basically a competitor product, right? Or whether we should kind of try to pivot away or just fully shut it down and maybe figure out a partnership with, uh, with the Publica. So, does that make sense so far? It does, yep. OK. So, we, we went on, um, to the, the three options that I, that I just mentioned, we went to evaluate them, right? Like going down that path, we still had a little bit of an unknown in front of us. We estimated it would take 3 months, it could take a little bit longer to just be de complete. This is without any testing or any publishers really signed up for, uh, for this, uh, at the time. And The decision that we made was that going forward with it, uh, having spoken to Publica as well as a couple of shared partners that we had that would be using their, their product, they seemed to be much further ahead. They did not start on the open source library, they actually built everything from scratch because it was just easier for them to do. Um, and we decided not to go head to head and compete with it because this was, uh, really from what we heard and we also saw a demo of this product that they built was, uh, self-service, it was faster, more efficient than ours, uh, and we decided to just completely shut down the project. So, we were in the time frame, you asked, you know, more than 50% there. We were about, you know, 6 months into a 9, 9-month cycle, so pretty far into it. Uh, and we decided to shut it down and instead partner with Publica and leverage behind the scenes of their tech stack with, with our, uh, SSB capabilities. OK.

Yeah, well, for us, uh, it was kind of being first to market at the time. Like I mentioned, we were really excited about the open source libraries, we could just leverage everything that another consortium was, uh, was building and, uh, trying to kind of, uh, bypass that a little bit, given that experience that we already had, uh, doing, uh, live stream monetization, right, to overlay our stack capabilities, but we ended up falling short. And so that that criteria for being first to market with this unique solution is what made us kind of pivot away and divest from, uh, from the solution. And instead pursue a partnership, a closer partnership. With a potential competitor. But

Uh, at the time, yes, because it, it didn't exist. It is something that we saw really valuable for publishers for, uh, for live streaming when we talked to them about, uh, capabilities that we were looking to bring on board and, or, uh, some of the solutions that brought in their direct sales against our programmatic capabilities. Unified auction that could show them, follow the dollar of like, hey, this is where the bids are coming from, from this particular platform. This is how much for this channel for this device. Um, it was, uh, a unique offering that we were looking to do. We didn't know what some of the other competitors were doing at the time. Um, but it was to kind of get first to market, and then I wouldn't say corner in the market, but, uh, get a pretty large market share of it, at least, you know, 25, 50% as, uh, kind of a success for that story. But because we're just still so far behind and there was already a competitor out with a much better product, that's when we kind of started pumping the brakes and reevaluating.