[Hiring] Director, Product Development @USA TODAY Co.

Role Description

We are seeking a strategic and commercially minded Product Director to lead the evolution of our audience, media, and advertising platform capabilities. This leader will define and deliver product strategy across audience solutions, programmatic advertising, and the integration of owned media into a unified commercial experience. The role will turn audience insights, media assets, and performance data into differentiated products that are easy to sell, plan, activate, measure, and optimize. It is an opportunity to shape a foundational growth platform at the intersection of product, data, advertising technology, and commercial transformation.

What You Will Own

• Audience Strategy & Product Development
  • Define and execute the vision, product strategy, and roadmap for audience capabilities.
  • Build differentiated products using first-party, behavioral, contextual, geographic, and advertiser-permissioned data.
  • Create packaging, activation, pricing, measurement, and reporting frameworks.
  • Advance segmentation, enrichment, identity, insights, and responsible data use.
• Owned Media Integration & Unified Workflows
  • Integrate owned media inventory and audience signals into planning, selling, delivery, and reporting workflows.
  • Define the target experience across planning, order management, inventory, campaign delivery, optimization, and measurement.
  • Connect advertising, commercial, data, and reporting capabilities through clear platform boundaries.
  • Simplify fragmented workflows and reduce manual handoffs.
• Programmatic Monetization
  • Own the strategy for direct and automated media offerings across multiple buying models.
  • Improve yield and inventory utilization while protecting customer value and premium experiences.
  • Advance forecasting, pricing, packaging, decisioning, and campaign optimization.
  • Use performance data and market insights to prioritize investment and validate product-market fit.
• Commercialization & Leadership
  • Build business cases, launch plans, adoption strategies, and success measures.
  • Lead across Sales, Client Success, Marketing, Data, Engineering, Operations, Finance, Legal, and Privacy.
  • Guide roadmap, investment, dependency, and trade-off decisions with senior stakeholders.
  • Develop product talent and influence matrixed teams across the organization.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of product management experience in digital advertising, advertising technology, media platforms, data products, or related fields.
• 5+ years leading complex platform products, major integrations, or multi-team transformation initiatives.
• Strong understanding of programmatic advertising, digital media monetization, audience products, campaign workflows, and advertising operations.
• Experience translating customer and commercial problems into platform strategy, roadmaps, product requirements, and measurable outcomes.
• Strong analytical and commercial judgment, executive communication, and cross-functional leadership skills.

Requirements

• Deep working knowledge of Google Ad Manager or a comparable enterprise ad server, including orders, line items, targeting, pacing, creative trafficking, and reporting integrations.
• Experience with advertising order-to-cash ecosystems, including booking, pricing, fulfillment, billing, and revenue-recognition processes to connect with ad-serving and reporting platforms.
• Understanding modern cloud data platforms and warehouses, such as BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or Databricks, including audience tables, identity graphs, data marts, and scalable reporting layers.
• Expertise in audience and identity architecture, including first-party identity resolution, consumer graphs, segment taxonomies, known and anonymous audiences, and deterministic and probabilistic matching.
• Experience defining API and integration patterns, including REST or GraphQL, event-driven contracts, system-of-record boundaries, and data synchronization across commercial, advertising, and reporting systems.
• Strong understanding of media monetization and yield concepts, including CPM pricing, rate cards, floor strategies, margin structures, premium and remnant inventory, and cross-channel revenue attribution.
• Knowledge of cross-channel audience activation from owned environments into social, video, and demand-side advertising platforms.
• Knowledge of data-modeling and SQL, including dimensional models for campaign, impression, audience, and revenue data; sold-versus-delivered reconciliation; complex joins; window functions; and performance optimization on large datasets.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience launching audience-based solutions and enabling commercial teams to bring new capabilities to the market.
• Experience integrating advertising, customer-management, order-management, reporting, or revenue platforms.
• Familiarity with AI-assisted media planning, campaign optimization, and decision-support products.
• Experience integrating customer relationship management and commercial workflow platforms, including campaign planning, quote-to-cash, and opportunity-to-order processes in a media sales environment. Experience with Salesforce or an equivalent platform is beneficial.
• Experience with business intelligence and reporting platforms that surface campaign, audience, and revenue insights to commercial teams and customers. Familiarity with tools such as Looker, Tableau, or comparable reporting solutions is beneficial.
• Understanding of creative fulfillment workflows, including how creative assets are requested, produced, approved, and routed into advertising delivery systems. Experience with commercial creative workflow platforms is beneficial.
• Working knowledge of Python or a similar language for prototyping, data validation, analysis, and workflow automation.
• MBA or equivalent experience leading product strategy and commercial transformation.

Salary Information

The annualized base salary for this role will range between $160,000 and $180,000. Variable incentive compensation, including commissions, is not reflected in these figures and based on the role, may be applicable. Exact compensation may vary based on skills, experience, education level, location, and union representation, if applicable.

Equal Opportunity Employer

USA TODAY Co., Inc. is a proud equal opportunity employer committed to building and maintaining a diverse workforce. As such, we will consider all qualified applicants for employment and do not discriminate in connection with employment decisions on the basis of an applicant or employee’s race, color, national origin, ethnicity, ancestry, citizenship status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, religion, age, marital status, personal appearance (including height and weight), sexual orientation, family responsibilities, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy status (including childbirth, breastfeeding or related medical conditions), education, genetic characteristics or information, political affiliation, military or veteran status or other classifications protected by applicable federal, state and local laws in the jurisdictions where USA TODAY Co. employs employees.