Ad Experience Product Manager

About Philo

Philo is building the future of television. Our product lets you watch your favorite shows on all the devices you care about, with seamless playback, insightful discovery, and effortless sharing. In short, we’re building the TV experience that we’ve always wanted for ourselves.

We’re a company that puts people first — both our subscribers and our team. At Philo, our philosophy is to empower our colleagues to do their best work while supporting each other in pursuing shared goals. We value pragmatism, pride in our work, and passion. We believe in having transparency and openness across all parts of the company.

We are committed to diversity and inclusion as we grow the Philo team and shape the future of TV. We believe that a diverse set of voices and perspectives on our team enables us to innovate faster and create the best experience for our subscribers.

Philo is headquartered in San Francisco, with additional offices in New York and Cambridge, MA. Our leadership team includes a cofounder of Facebook as well as alums of Meraki and HBO. Philo is backed by NEA and industry partners including Discovery, Viacom, AMC, and A&E.

About the Product team

The Product Team is responsible for designing, building, testing, and quite literally reinventing television—one of the most engaging products ever created—across web, mobile, and TV platforms. Just as television is about more than simply watching an episode of your favorite show, so too does our work extend well beyond the play button. We take into account TV schedules, movie and show metadata, real-time ad auctions, live and on-demand feeds, recordings, cross-device interoperability, and individualized viewing habits, preferences, restrictions, and notifications… massaging it all into a comprehensive and seamless streaming experience while cooking up next generation multi-screen and multi-user playback experiences.

At Philo, every member of the team is responsible for building and supporting a quality product experience. As such, product responsibilities are fairly decentralized. Cross-functional groups comprising feature leads from design, engineering, marketing, support, content, business development, data science, and other teams work together to tackle problems, collaborating on the motivation, scoping, design, implementation, release, support, and analysis of the corresponding solutions. The primary role of the Product team at Philo is to identify problems, vet opportunities, and equip other members of the Philo team in these cross-functional groups to be successful in pursuing solutions.

The Role

Philo is seeking an experienced Technical Product Manager to drive all technical aspects of the Advertising Experience in the Philo service.

Philo is leading the CTV ad industry by focusing 100% on programmatic advertising and resellers, foregoing the traditional direct sales models. At Philo you will help to shape the future of television advertising as you build the next generation of our ad business. Leveraging a keen understanding of the programmatic CTV ad ecosystem and working closely with our ad operations team, data scientists, software engineers and external partners, you will help to ensure that we are maximizing our ad revenue on a per-user basis (i.e. fill rates and CPMs) while balancing the overall ad experience for our users, ensuring that the ads our users see are high quality, relevant, and timely.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with our Ad Operations and business teams, work with our partners to gather requirements, determine the optimal services and partner integrations needed to optimize Philo’s transactions throughout the programmatic ad ecosystem, then help the team go build the services to make that vision a reality.
• Work with Philo software engineers to help design, implement, deploy, and monitor the next generation of Philo’s SSAI service.
• Collaborate with internal stakeholders across engineering, ad operations, and data science teams to ensure we are measuring and optimizing every aspect of our ad delivery process (and our users’ viewing experience).
• Direct the collection and analysis of relevant data to investigate issues, form hypotheses, conduct experiments, and make informed decisions among a very large set of unknowns and trade-offs.
• Work with Philo software engineers to drive continuous improvements to the reliability, performance, accuracy, and security of Philo’s ad services.
• Help to design and drive the implementation of identity solutions for ad targeting and measurement.
• Interface with external standards bodies (IAB, MRC, etc) to implement new certifications, maintain compliance with new standard adoption, etc.
• Drive iterative, prototype-driven product experimentation with the Ad Experience team.
• Balance objectives, metrics, and resources in prioritization decisions.
• Continually leverage research, data, and past experience to identify areas of product improvement.
• Serve as a feature owner for multiple projects—past, present, and future—including answering/routing questions about the project as well as identifying and mobilizing cross-team resources to scope, design, build, ship, support, and analyze the project or feature.
• Consult with domain experts to take an idea from infancy (the “what” and the “why”) to a decently-scoped implementation plan (the “how”), along with shepherding the project through implementation, documenting and socializing the “last mile” of product decisions that happen along the way.
• Schedule, run, and summarize meetings about current and future projects.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of product management experience with a focus on digital advertising in the connected TV space.
• 6+ years of experience designing, building, analyzing, and iterating upon product experiences.
• 6+ years of experience leading cross-functional teams (identifying stakeholders, organizing inputs, mobilizing contributors, running meetings, documenting outcomes and deliverables, and socializing changes).
• 6+ years of experience demonstrating strong communication with technical and business stakeholders to understand product, technical, business, and logistical tradeoffs between different approaches to solving problems.
• Experience building or integrating ad servers, demand-side platforms or supply-side platforms with personalized ad targeting capabilities.
• Familiarity with programmatic advertising using platforms like Publica, Freewheel, Google Ad Exchange or Amazon APS.
• Familiarity with industry standards such as VAST, VMAP, OpenRTB and header bidding.
• Familiarity with SSAI using MPEG-DASH or HLS media streaming technologies.
• Knowledge of ad ecosystem trends and changes that will impact how Philo manages our overall ad stack for years to come.
• Experience working with large amounts of data and making data-based decisions to prioritize projects, including familiarity with relational and non-relational databases and modern data warehousing and querying.
• Expertise with product documentation, managing timelines/resources, and/or an operations role.
• Some demonstrated expertise with product and business goals, metrics, and analytics
• Strong written and oral communication skills.
• Strong organizational skills.
• Startup experience on a small team (<25 employees) is a big plus.

Projected Start Date: ASAP
Status: Full-time
Location: San Francisco, CA
Compensation: Includes annual salary between $170K-$210K depending on experience and location, company stock options, and health benefits

We value a diverse and inclusive workplace and we welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, skills, and perspectives. Philo is an equal opportunity employer. We believe that everyone does their best work when they are supported by each other and the company, and we offer a generous set of benefits to make sure the Philo team is happy and healthy. Here is a sampling of the benefits we offer our team:

• Full health, dental and vision coverage for you and your family
• Flexible working hours
• Generous paid parental leave
• Unlimited paid time off for vacation and sick leave
• $2,000 annual vacation bonus (we pay you to take a two week vacation)
• $5,000 annually for professional development and educational assistance
• $500 “TV stipend” for new employees to upgrade their home watching setup
• $1,000 annual home office stipend for employees to upgrade their home work setup
• $500/month ($6,000/year) bonus for employees who commit to working at least 3 days per week in our offices
• Dog-friendly office
• And much more!

For California Residents: Philo’s CCPA Notice at Collection – Employees, Applicants, Owners, Directors, Officers and Contractors