The delivery owner for an eight-person team building a video media planning platform inside a fixed three-month window against a hard go-live date. The role owns requirements, the backlog, sprint cadence, acceptance criteria, and user acceptance testing. It is the single day-to-day point of contact for the client.
The role also carries the commercial edge of delivery. Scope was agreed feature by feature against a prioritised inventory, and the committed set is what the date and the price were built on. Several inputs the build depends on are client-owned and arrive during the build rather than before it. Holding the agreed scope, resolving ambiguity in client-authored requirements before it reaches development, and chasing client dependencies to a date are the parts of the job that determine whether the platform ships on time.
AdTech background is required at a strong general level. Technical depth is required to the point of being useful without the architect in the room: following an engineering discussion, reading an API contract, and judging whether a requirement is testable. Writing code is not part of the role.
Client: a global media network, engaged through a delivery partner. End users are media planners at one of the network’s agencies.
Product: a video-only, omnichannel media planning web application. A planner defines a campaign — advertiser, budget, flight dates, target audience, objectives — through a six-step wizard. The platform generates budget-optimised plans across video channels, scores them using two deterministic engines, and exports a client-facing Media Plan (PDF) and an operations Activation Plan (XLSX).
Channels in scope: linear TV, BVOD, SVOD, AVOD/FAST, YouTube, social video, video out-of-home. The market is primarily UK/EMEA.
Scoring: two deterministic engines. A weighted channel quality index built from sub-dimension scores, and a reach and frequency model using exponential saturation against effective spend with cross-channel de-duplication. No machine learning is used.
Delivery: three-month fixed window, sprint cadence, hard go-live date. The team covers delivery management, solution architecture, back-end, data, front-end, DevOps and QA automation.
Delivery (primary)
- Own the backlog and sprint cadence — planning, prioritisation, ceremonies, and the flow of work through an eight-person team.
- Maintain a single source of truth for scope, traceable from the client’s prioritised feature inventory through to delivered functionality.
- Track delivery against the three monthly milestones, including their exit criteria, and report progress to the client and internally.
- Surface risk, slippage and dependency exposure early, with the options for handling it rather than the problem alone.
Scope and requirements
- Translate client requirements into buildable, testable work items with acceptance criteria the team and the client both recognise.
- Resolve ambiguity and contradiction in client documentation before it reaches development, rather than allowing an assumption to be built.
- Run change control. Anything outside the committed set is either explicitly re-scoped and re-costed or recorded on the roadmap. Nothing enters the build informally.
- Protect the committed scope under date pressure, and make the trade-off visible when scope, date and quality come into conflict.
Client interface and dependency management
- Act as the single day-to-day point of contact for the client throughout the build.
- Maintain the dependency register — each client-owned input with a named owner and a date, chased until it lands.
- Prepare and run client sessions, including methodology and requirements workshops with the client’s own specialists.
- Report status honestly, including bad news, at the point it is known rather than at the point it becomes unavoidable.
Acceptance and release
- Define what “done” means for each milestone and drive milestone acceptance with the client.
- Coordinate user acceptance testing with media planners, including preparation, scenarios, and defect triage.
- Coordinate go-live readiness with QA automation and DevOps, and own the release checklist through to production.
Experience
- 5+ years in technical product ownership on software built for an external client, including ownership of scope and acceptance rather than status reporting alone.
- Delivery to a fixed date and a fixed scope, where the trade-offs had to be managed rather than absorbed.
- Owning a backlog and acceptance criteria for an engineering team.
- Sustained direct client contact, including holding a position in a difficult conversation.
- English: strong written and spoken, C1+ effectively. The role runs client sessions and produces written documentation.
Technical Acumen
- Modern web platform architecture — services and APIs, relational data, cloud deployment. Able to follow, summarise, and question a technical discussion without the architect present.
- API contracts — able to read an OpenAPI specification and reason about what an integration does and does not provide.
- Requirement quality — able to judge whether a requirement is unambiguous, testable, and complete enough to build.
- Delivery tooling — backlog management, documentation, specification and traceability.
- Estimation and sequencing — able to interrogate an estimate and understand what sits on the critical path.
Domain Knowledge — required
- AdTech at a strong general level — how media is planned, bought, delivered and measured; the main platform types and their roles; how campaign and audience data moves between them.
- Enough measurement literacy to hold a conversation about audiences, reach and frequency with client-side specialists without needing it translated.
Judgement & Soft Capabilities
- Holds agreed scope under pressure without damaging the client relationship.
- Says no clearly, with a reason and an alternative, rather than deferring or absorbing.
- Distinguishes what has been agreed from what has been assumed, and writes the difference down.
- Escalates early, with options.
- Communicates precisely in writing; a summary they send is one the client can act on without a follow-up call.
- Experience in an agency, media network, or media technology vendor.
- Delivery through a partner or intermediary structure, where the contracting party and the end client differ.
- Experience with media planning or buying tooling.
- Experience running formal change control on a fixed-price engagement.
- Experience preparing and running user acceptance testing with non-technical business users.
- Familiarity with MoSCoW-prioritised scope and phased release planning.
A technical product manager who has shipped to a fixed date for an external client, and who treats scope as the thing they are accountable for. You have run a small senior team through a compressed build before, and they know that the difference between delivering and not delivering is usually decided in the first month, in conversations about what is and is not included.
You hold the line without souring the relationship. When a client asks for something outside the committed set, they do not quietly absorb it, and they do not simply refuse. You name the trade-off, offer the alternative, and record the decision. This is the single trait the role lives or dies on.
You chase what they need. Much of what this build depends on sits with the client and arrives during delivery. You keep a dependency register. You know who owns each item, and they follow up until it lands rather than reporting that it is still outstanding.
You are technical enough to be useful in the room. You can sit in a session with client-side specialists, follow the discussion, ask the question that exposes an ambiguity, and leave with a decision written down. You do not need the architect present to have a productive conversation.
