Product Manager, Ad Sales Execution

Company Description

VERSANT (Nasdaq: VSNT) is an industry-changing media and entertainment business and home to trusted brands that shape culture, inform audiences, and build lasting connections. It operates across four core markets: political news and opinion, business news and personal finance, golf, and sports and genre entertainment. These markets are served through a powerful portfolio of iconic and innovative brands, including CNBC, MS NOW, USA Network, Golf Channel, Oxygen, E!, SYFY, and Versant’s sports division USA Sports, along with complementary digital assets including Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, GolfNow and GolfPass.

Job Description

The Product Manager will be responsible for overseeing the product lifecycle for technology that supports the execution of ad sales and marketing campaigns across Versant’s inventory. This role will be expected to understand and drive best practices across ad sales and marketing delivery workflows. As Versant and the industry at large evolves, the candidate is expected to strategize how linear and digital execution of campaigns will converge to drive revenue for the company and provide a pristine experience for Versant’s customers. The role will partner closely with Product and Engineering, as well as Sales, Marketing, Programming & Operations teams to deliver to company strategies.  

RESPONSIBILITIES:  

• Maintain a strong relationship with the user base, ensuring customer satisfaction during all interactions.  

• A deep understanding of the operational workflow to deliver linear logs to broadcast, from traffic and scheduling down to reconciling what went to air. 

• Subject matter expert on how applications in the content supply chain integrate with ad sales and marketing tools. 

• Drive thought leadership and strategic direction on all existing products, with alignment to a destination architecture and rationalization of legacy capabilities  

• Develop multi-year product roadmaps with accountability to short term, mid-term, and long-term execution and deliverables  

• Build highly reliable, available, scalable, and performant products, and continuously measure and monitor KPIs to drive improvement to the development process and run state of all products  

• Translate business requirements into technical product strategies, technical specifications, and designs  

• Work with a ticketing system to track, categorize, prioritize and communicate status to the business.  

• Identify and manage defects and work with vendors and engineering teams to resolve and implement solutions.  

• Understand how issues impact the business and escalate critical issues when necessary.  

• Identify new opportunities and services to enhance the systems platform and drive more productivity/efficiency.   

• Support and troubleshoot issues, identify root causes, and proactively implement sustainable corrective actions.  

• Provide systems support to meet established SLAs during business hours, with occasional evenings and weekends as needed and during special events.  

Qualifications

REQUIREMENTS:  

• Minimum 5 years of experience in Ad Sales, traffic, promo scheduling or equivalent role 

• System experience in Ad Sales pitch to pay stack and marketing execution platforms 

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:  

• Self‑starter with a strong sense of ownership and the initiative to move work forward independently 

• Curious and innovative mind set to streamline processes and automate where possible 

• Proven track record of team project execution and systems implementations  

• Project Management and prioritization skill sets  

• Effective balancer of being both collaborative and decisive, avoiding analysis-paralysis and over-architecting while still exhibiting productive listening and partnership  

• Strong knowledge of the pitch to pay lifecycle including sales planning, order fulfillment, inventory, ad operations, trafficking, order optimization, pacing and delivery reconciliation  

• Technical background – experience setting up system integrations, troubleshooting ad tech issues, and system configuration  

• Experience within a media company a huge plus  

• Strong interpersonal skills  

• Bachelor's degree  

Additional Requirements: 

• This role will require intermittent on-site collaboration. Limited travel (<10%)