In a custom white-label performance marketing DSP, our team was responsible for platform stability, ROI, and volume in the "business-as-usual" segment, while the client handled the exploration activities, including bringing new advertisers, business development, and SSP relationships to drive ROI across the entire platform. Despite clear responsibilities, misalignment between the client and our team led to issues with platform performance, and frequent interruptions of ongoing initiatives and experiments were undermining the platform’s potential for generating revenue.

Several problems arose:

• Lack of structured evaluation for initiatives and experiments, leading to frequent starts and stops.
• Miscommunication between client and internal teams, resulting in inefficient resource allocation.
• The client’s inability to fully grasp the complexities of platform changes, impacting overall decision-making and platform investment.

As part of the management team, my role was to align the client’s goals with our development, operations, and data science teams. I took responsibility for:

• Direct client communication and escalation management.
• Managing the development team of five, along with a project manager to ensure the timely delivery of platform enhancements.
• Coordinating the data science and operations teams to provide clear, actionable analytics that helped the client better understand complex developments within the platform.
• Ensuring the platform's ROI stability and volume consistency, while helping the client generate new revenue streams and address emerging issues.

To bring clarity and alignment to our collaboration, I introduced a new “Initiatives and Experiments” framework. The goal was to shift our approach from reactive to proactive, giving structure to the way we evaluated and executed new projects and experiments.

Key Elements of the Framework:
Five-Dimensional Evaluation: Each initiative or experiment was evaluated before starting on five key dimensions:

• Technical feasibility
• Urgency
• Potential profit
• Client's investment
• Platform’s investment

Early Exit Criteria: I introduced clear early exit criteria for all initiatives, ensuring that ongoing experiments were only stopped if predefined thresholds were reached. This prevented the previous tendency to prematurely stop initiatives due to unrelated performance issues, which had been causing interruptions and inefficiencies.

Investment Clarity: By making the investment required from both client and platform explicit from the start, it became easier to determine whether to proceed with or delay any given initiative. This clarity reduced the back-and-forth and facilitated quicker decision-making.

The new framework produced immediate benefits:

• Improved Decision-Making: The five-dimensional evaluation provided the client and our teams with greater clarity on whether to proceed with initiatives. This led to fewer interruptions and more informed decisions about how to allocate resources.
• Cost Savings: By avoiding premature stops and starts, the cost of executing experiments was reduced by at least 30%, as fewer resources were wasted on inefficient processes.
• Increased Alignment: The framework fostered better communication between the client and our internal teams, as everyone had a clear understanding of project feasibility, investment requirements, and performance thresholds.
• Consistent Execution: The introduction of early exit criteria ensured that initiatives weren’t stopped without valid cause, allowing experiments to run their course and produce more reliable results.

The key lesson from this experience was that the shift was more of a mindset change than a technical or administrative adjustment. By introducing a structured, clear approach to evaluating initiatives, we moved away from chaotic decision-making and created a more stable, predictable environment for both the client and our team. This approach ensured that client investments and platform efforts were aligned, resulting in improved long-term ROI and a more efficient working relationship.