I was appointed Head of the Crisis Overcoming Committee to address an escalating issue with one of our long-standing clients in the Custom Solutions department. The client's white-labeled platform was experiencing severe problems with high-stakes Awareness campaigns, each carrying multi-million-dollar budgets. By the time I stepped in, the situation had reached crisis levels:

• The client’s CEO was escalating complaints to our leadership team.
• Advertisers were pulling back budgets due to the platform’s poor performance.
• Our internal team was unclear about the root cause of the issues and unable to propose concrete solutions.
• The project lead and the client's representative were both on vacation, leaving the project in limbo.

The main problems involved:

• 3rd-party integration causing timeouts and slowing down the platform.
• Incorrect platform setup, leading to insufficient traffic being delivered to campaigns.
• General confusion and lack of communication across teams about the status and scope of the issues.

As the appointed leader of the recovery effort, my responsibility was to stabilize the situation, rebuild trust with the client, and ultimately ensure that the campaigns could perform as expected. I took immediate control, working closely with:

• The Deputy Project Manager
• The VP of Engineering
• Several developers
• My own experience with the BidSwitch and BidCore platforms.
• This involved hands-on troubleshooting, leading technical decisions, and orchestrating communication between all stakeholders to resolve the critical issues at hand.

Over the course of one intense week, I led a series of ad hoc decisions and brainstorming sessions to tackle the platform’s issues. My approach focused on several key areas:

• Clear Communication: I established daily updates with the client’s team and internal stakeholders to ensure everyone was aligned. I also kept the client’s leadership informed of our progress and strategy, which helped to ease tensions.

Immediate Technical Fixes:

• We quickly addressed the 3rd-party integration issues, working around timeouts by making reasonable technical trade-offs to ensure the platform could function without delay.
• I oversaw the reconfiguration of the platform, making sure that traffic delivery to campaigns was restored and performing at the expected levels.

• Proof of Capability: To regain the client’s trust and their advertisers' confidence, we ran a series of short, proof-of-concept campaigns. These campaigns demonstrated that the platform could perform as intended, with the fixes we implemented proving their effectiveness.

Within a week, we turned the situation around:

• Budgets were restored, and advertisers regained confidence in the platform’s ability to deliver on their Awareness campaigns.
• The client’s CEO expressed relief as the platform’s performance improved and escalations ceased.
• Our team emerged with a much clearer understanding of the platform’s capabilities and how to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.

The crisis was averted due to:

• Effective communication with all stakeholders, keeping everyone informed and aligned.
• Hands-on troubleshooting and smart technical trade-offs to resolve the 3rd-party integration issues.
• Ensuring the correct setup of all interconnected platforms, which allowed us to recover the campaign’s performance.

This experience underscored the importance of clear communication, decisive technical leadership, and quick action in a high-pressure situation. By bringing together key stakeholders, working through technical challenges, and keeping the client in the loop, we not only saved the campaign but also restored trust with one of our most valuable clients. The ability to take charge during a crisis and lead both teams and clients to success is a vital skill I bring to product management roles.