Product Manager - Bidder and Forecasting

TEGNA, a leading local media company, is looking for a technical Product Manager to manage the bidding and forecasting systems within our ad tech platform. These systems answer two questions on every request: What should we bid on this impression? What can we deliver against this plan? Your goal will be to make those two answers agree, so what we forecast is what we deliver.

Our bidder covers national scale and executes locally for our clients, with stations in 64 markets and delivery well beyond them, which puts these systems underneath every campaign we plan and execute. We emphasize how bidding and forecasting tie together over depth in any single channel, focusing on whether the number we quote is the number we deliver.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership

• Bidding Roadmap: Define where we invest in bidding capability next, and whether we build or buy.
• Forecasting Roadmap: Define what planning and sales can promise a client before a campaign runs.
• Thought Leadership: Set the standard for how we evaluate auction and pricing decisions, and advise planning and sales on what the platform supports.

Core Product Ownership

These are some of the areas that you can expect to work in, but not exclusive

• Bid Logic: Own bid logic, bid shading, and pacing across CTV, video, display, and audio.
• Tie-Out: Keep bid behavior and forecast output consistent, so a quoted number and a delivered number describe the same campaign.
• Avails and Forecasting: Own avails, reach, and frequency forecasting for standard and custom targeting, and publish accuracy against delivered actuals.
• Planning and Execution Experience: Give planners and traders a number they can commit to, and the tools to see when it moves.
• Applied AI: Own the models behind bid optimization, dynamic floor pricing, and forecast generation, and the experiments that prove a change worked in live traffic.

Tactical Execution

• Agile Delivery: Write technical requirements the bidder engineering team can build from.
• Diagnostics: Trace a delivery shortfall across forecast, bid, and supply, and tell planning and sales what happened.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner daily with Engineering, Ad Operations, Planning, Sales, Publisher Partnerships, and Program Management.

Required Experience and Skills

Technical Expertise

• Auction mechanics. First and second price dynamics, bid shading, and pacing.
• OpenRTB and supply path economics, including what a bid request costs to process.
• Forecasting methods, and the reasons a forecast diverges from delivery.
• SQL and log analysis, enough to answer a delivery question without opening a ticket.
• Inventory quality and sell-side yield strategy are a plus.

Professional Experience

• 5+ years of product management, with at least 3 at a DSP, SSP, exchange, or bidder.
• Hands-on technical work in at least one of CTV, video, or display. Audio is a plus.
• Shipped a change to a bidding or forecasting model, designed the test that proved it worked, and can state win rate or accuracy before and after.
• Diagnosed a delivery shortfall to root cause across forecast, bid, and supply.
• Shipped a product surface with a model behind it, and can explain how they tested it.

Soft Skills

• Goes to the data before asking someone for a pull.
• Explains auction economics to a seller without losing the mechanics.
• Defends a forecast when the number is smaller than sales wanted.
• Builds a prototype before writing a spec.