A series about building a real career in ad tech, navigating chaos, learning fast, and finding ways to grow without burning out.
In the last post, I explained how I created my own path into product management. But getting the title was only half the battle.
To actually be effective in ad tech product management, you need to understand an overwhelming mix of technology, business, and operations across buyers, sellers, and the platforms that connect them (ad servers, SSPs, DSPs, DMPs, etc.).
I’m going to lay out the three drivers behind how I absorbed an insane amount of ad tech and business knowledge over the course of a 15-year-and-counting ad tech career.
Put yourself in environments where learning is unavoidable.
Driver 1: Proximity to Everything (Startup Osmosis)
In my previous article, I credited working at a startup for giving me a path into product management since that was a glaring need in the small company.
But one other advantage of working at a small company is exposure to a much broader range of job functions, and oftentimes needing to step into them because there is literally nobody else to do them.
For example, I learned ad ops by doing ad ops. I trafficked ads. I debugged issues. I dealt with the seemingly endless issues that could pop up on any given day because we didn’t have a dedicated ops person early on.
I learned by doing, and now, when I help develop new features for people working in ad ops, I can empathize at an innate level because I personally understand the frustration and struggles they face.
Physically, most of the company was packed into a ~1,500 sq ft space. Through pure osmosis, I would gain an understanding of what everybody was working on.
I would hear yells of triumph after a sale closed or a grunt of frustration after a bug was discovered.
We’d also be constantly asking each other for advice or guidance on blind spots that others’ knowledge covered. A quick one-on-one conversation often turns into a group discussion, with others chiming in with ideas.
If I had a question, I didn’t need a meeting; I could just ask the engineer, salesperson, or CEO right beside me.
Compare that to most companies, where getting that same access requires tickets, scheduling gymnastics, or layers of hierarchy.
This is the version of “in-person synergy” people talk about—but it only really works when the company is small enough that everyone is within reach.
As many people have faced, or are soon to face, return-to-office mandates, I think anecdotes like mine exemplify the magical synergy and serendipity that executives often cite for in-person work. But replicating this kind of magic required most of the company to be in a single room, which is a far cry from the sprawling offices most people find themselves in.
That environment gave me something incredibly valuable early on: context across the entire business. Having the ability to interface with different roles across the company and gaining exposure to their various job functions gave me a breadth of experience unparalleled at any medium-sized to large companies.
I credit this era greatly to helping me understand how the business was run and executed from all angles. But then it was time to go deeper into the technology.
Takeaways from Driver 1
Exposure compounds faster than specialization early in your career. Breadth creates the foundation for depth later.
Startups force learning through necessity. You don’t get to say “that’s not my job” when no one else exists to do it.
Proximity matters more than process. Being physically or organizationally close to different functions accelerates understanding.
Empathy comes from doing the work yourself. You build better products when you’ve lived the problems firsthand.
If learning doesn’t come to you, go find it.
Driver 2: Expanding Scope on Purpose
When I made the jump from Beachfront to SpotX, I quickly realized that, while serendipity still exists at a medium-sized company, it was far less than I had experienced before.
Outside normal business functions and meetings, I’d cross paths with salespeople, account managers, and engineers in the hall, at the coffee machine, or over a game of ping pong — but this was no longer the startup world I came up in.
When I arrived, I was assigned two product areas: forecasting and internal tools.
One thing was dark voodoo magic of estimation (forecasting), and the other was boring stuff we desperately needed to run and troubleshoot the programmatic business (internal tools).
So, like a good little PM, off I went interviewing customers and coworkers alike on their wants, needs, and desires.
Since we had an army of people to perform every job function a growing video supply-side platform needed, there was no longer a need for me to step outside my role, and it was actually frowned upon to encroach on someone else’s responsibilities.
This was a time when I had to seriously work on my product management muscles, extracting information from interviews and conducting independent research on topics I did not have firsthand experience with.
I did the job. I interviewed stakeholders. I shipped products. I worked with engineering to deliver a forecasting suite and a set of internal (and eventually external) tools.
But I hit a wall: I was bored.
I’ve always had a low tolerance for stagnation. If I’m not learning, I start looking for ways to fix that.
So I asked for more.
Not random work—targeted work that would expand my skill set.
I looked for opportunities that did one of two things:
Exposed me to new technology
Built skills aligned with where I wanted my career to go
That led me to two areas:
Audience management (identity, data, DMP integrations)
Demand-side partnerships (DSP relationships)
This moment helped develop two key skills that, without a doubt, led me to where I am today. There was a glaring need in the company to help out in two areas:
Integrating with DMPs, processing identity and audience data, targeting segments, etc.
Attaching direct product representation to demand partnerships
Audience management dropped me into a world I barely understood. Identity, segmentation, data flows—it was all new.
So I learned the fastest way possible: by owning it.
I became the PM responsible for DMP integrations and worked directly with the engineering team to build audience and data onboarding, targeting, and reporting products. I didn’t understand everything under the hood at first—but I didn’t need to. I learned by immersion.
At the same time, demand partnerships gave me repeated exposure to external relationships, negotiation, and growth strategy. These are all core skills I developed that still help me excel today.
Instead of waiting for learning opportunities, I engineered them.
Did I understand everything I worked on at the time? No. But that forced me to learn, and it was so rewarding.
Nothing drives me more than diving headfirst into a pool of obscurity and coming up for a breath of pure clarity every time something clicks.
Takeaways from Driver 2
Your scope is one of your most powerful levers, so use it intentionally. Don’t just accept work; shape it.
Boredom is a signal, not a problem. It usually means you’ve outgrown your current scope.
The fastest way to learn something new is to own it. Responsibility forces understanding.
Target learning that compounds. Choose work that builds skills relevant to where you want to go, not just what’s available.
At least going into demand partnerships, I had a very solid understanding of the technical underpinnings of DSP integrations from my days at Beachfront. Solid enough that I felt I could help people undertand it, which led me to the next way I grew my ad tech knowledge.
If you can’t find the resource you need, build it yourself.
Driver 3: Learning in Public (Ad Tech Explained)
In 2019, there weren’t many resources that explained advertising technology clearly and coherently.
You had maybe three trade publications worth reading, but they were extremely surface-level or filled with vendors hawking their own products or messaging to further their own goals.
If you really wanted to get down to the nitty-gritty of integrations, you could read the IAB Tech Lab documents that defined technical standards. But most people (especially on the business side) don’t have (and, frankly, don’t need) the skills to understand how those specifications affect them.
I searched high and low for a resource that clearly explained advertising technology and its impact on business. There were a few places that came close but didn’t quite close the gap or go a layer deeper.
This nexus of technology and business was typically occupied by product managers, but as far as I knew, they weren’t publishing content regularly.
As I was typing an email explaining the concepts behind VAST and OpenRTB for executives, it all clicked. I can do the same thing, but share it with everybody.
So I went home and registered adtechexplained.com.
I thought at the very least that writing about the things I already knew would cement them in my mind, and then writing about the things I didn’t know would help me learn about them.
It could also serve as an external resume of sorts in the future to demonstrate to prospective employers what I know, understand, or am interested in.
Ad Tech Explained was not a commercial endeavor, even though that’s what it eventually became. It was a way for me to learn and share what I’ve learned to fill a gap I identified that others could appreciate.
I published my first two articles—OpenRTB Explained and VAST Explained—with zero promotion. No social posts. No distribution. Just publishing into the void.
Then traffic started coming in.
Turns out, a lot of people wanted exactly what I was looking for.
As time went on, I wrote about more things I knew and wanted to learn. Sometimes, when I wrote about advertising topics that drew interest outside the industry, my articles would be linked from popular domains like vice.com or morningbrew.com, and traffic would flood in.
Gaining these backlinks increased my domain authority on Google, and my articles would begin to climb the rankings. Then, to my shock, there were my articles: ranked No. 1 for many common searches related to these topics.
Even more shocking, I began to gain subscribers — people who wanted what I was writing delivered to them as soon as it was published.
So I kept going.
As I wrote more, my understanding deepened. More articles ranking. Backlinks came in. Subscribers followed.
But the real payoff wasn’t traffic—it was repetition.
I was effectively giving myself extra reps:
Before work
After work
Weekends
And those reps stacked.
Eventually, people across the industry started reaching out. Relationships formed. Opportunities opened.
Not because I said I understood ad tech—but because I had proof of understanding.
Takeaways from Driver 3
Teaching is one of the fastest ways to learn. If you can explain it clearly, you understand it.
Creating forces clarity. Writing exposes gaps in your knowledge immediately.
Consistency beats intensity. Small, repeated efforts compound faster than occasional deep dives.
Build in public to create leverage. Your work becomes proof of your capability.
Main Lesson
A holistic understanding isn’t taught. It’s built from multiple angles over time.
No single job, team, or project will teach you everything.
You need:
Exposure (startup environments, cross-functional proximity)
Intentional scope expansion (choosing what you work on)
Independent learning (writing, researching, building)
Stack those together long enough, and you stop seeing isolated systems. You start seeing how everything connects.
Additional Lessons
1. You don’t need permission to learn beyond your role. Your job defines your responsibilities, not your ceiling.
2. Optimize for learning early, efficiency later. Breadth early in your career pays dividends forever.
3. Put yourself in uncomfortable situations on purpose. That’s where the fastest growth happens.
4. Reps matter more than talent. Whether it’s product work or writing, volume builds mastery.
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This post is part of Surviving and Thriving in Ad Tech, a series on building a durable, fulfilling career in an industry that rarely slows down.
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