Adobe Advertising - Diagnostic

Adobe Advertising - Diagnostic

Background

Adobe Advertising Cloud is an automated demand-side platform(DSP) and it has been consistently named a leader in the field by Forrester. It allows easy management of planning and buying advertisements across screens, devices and formats. As its China product manager, despite the integration work with major content providers(Youku, Aiqiyi, Weibo, etc), I also worked on international features due to the complexity of the platform. Those are always the combined efforts of multiple teams across continents. Diagnostic panel was one important feature that enables unified planning, reporting, forecasting, and as the name suggested - self diagnostic.

Challenges

1. Cross region/culture collaboration with an international team.

2. Constant trade off with other PMs and teams working on different parts.

3. New product features need to be cohesive with multiple devices & user permissions.

Process

Product Road Map > Product Feature Validation  >  Product Design  >  Develop Iteration and QA

product ROAD MAP

Quarterly meetings were held by PMs, directors and project managers in order to set the goals and product road map for the next quarter. This process often involve intense debate and trade offs with different Dev teams as every PM will try to put their feature request into JIRA. The challenge here for me was to convince the director with thorough & reasonable plan and also locate specific developers in headquarter, Chengdu and Kiev.

product feature validation

In order to validate the features and make sure they are in-line with the user&market expectations,routine meetings were scheduled with corresponding product marketing manager and user representatives in the early stage of the development cycle. I tend to keep regular session after release for direct feedback and suggestions. My expertise in product design allowed me to quickly communicate with them using low fidelity mock ups. Below are a few early stage mock ups to demonstrate product features. However, majority of my work was on Confluence due to strict regulations.

Due to the complexity of the platform and the amount of metrics involved. I found high fidelity mock up for the key user journey not only helpful for communication, it also helped the team to quickly understand the user and the tech jargon hidden in obscure places.

product design

A key principle I always believed in is good product design must be simple, concise and minimalist. Thus I tend to have a high fidelity wireframe of the core user journey throughout the development cycle. The initial version normally packed with features and possible pitfalls and I need to work with the team to gradually remove the unnecessary parts. Despite the large amount of acronyms used, they all have different status corresponding to different user permissions. A solid product wireframe from the Product Manager with explicit notation for different user status works the wonder according to the feedback of the team members.

What Perk does former design experience grants*

As a product manager I didn’t get much involvement in UI design for the project. I do however, kept a constant peer-to-peer meetings with head of design director to make sure the overall style fits her version, it’s also a great opportunity to bridge designers and developer so the team always stay on the same page and produce the product with solid consistency.

Develop Iteration & QA

JIRA was used for development iteration. Agile development ensured the team can respond to all sorts of incident quickly and I wish I had used it earlier back in Forehead. My advantage as a former designer is I had all my product feature ticket paired with a high fidelity mock up and it’s welcomed by all the engineers. The first release had successfully reduced the support tickets in the first week by 30%.