Ad Simulator

The Initiative

Every January, the Samsung Ads team attends the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, NV. CES has turned out to be a great opportunity to meet clients – content providers and advertising agencies – and showcase Samsung's ads platform. For effective communication with clients, we needed a portable demo tool that could present featured ad placements and post-clicks, with ad creatives customization supported. Thus, a web-based application - Ad Simulator - was born.



My Role

Being a project manager for Ad Simulator, I am at the center, leading a cross-functional team and guiding the success of the project. My duties cover collecting needs and use cases from stakeholders, defining project scope and roadmap, creating and prioritizing tasks, binding and coordinating functions, and more.

How I Lead

Break Down into Steps

Confluence is the major tool I use for project management and team collaboration. Before the first team meeting, I prepared a document with very detailed product requirements, covering the goals, use cases, timelines, etc. Additionally, I set up a table of all the use cases and assigned priority to each. This was the preparation and initiation of engineering tasks.

Confluence



Engineering Discussion

Communication with the Engineering team ahead of implementation is almost always a necessity. In the first conversation, project goals, scope, and an initial timeline were addressed, as well as a walkthrough of all the use cases and related design guidelines. We also discussed potential technical challenges, which is an important consideration to include in the big picture.

Design Guidelines



Create and Prioritize Tasks

Beginning the implementation work, a master Jira ticket was created with a set of prioritized sub-tasks corresponding to the use cases table. In the following Sprint planning meetings, tasks were assigned to the engineers based on prioritization.

Jira Ticket





Check-in and Update

In daily stand-ups, engineers address questions from two aspects: progress and impediments. Attending the stand-up meeting was helpful for me to get updates from the team, and clear up any confusion and obstacles, keeping the project in a healthy status. On top of that, a bi-weekly meeting was scheduled with marketers and sales, who were the end-users, to provide them with a live demo and collect feedback.



Testing and Bug Fixing

Testing was a continuous effort in parallel with product development. When a new feature was released, engineers gave demos that allowed me a user-like hands-on experience. If the feature was not matching the Product Requirements Document (PRD) or design guidelines, a bug report ticket was created to be fixed later.



Tradeoffs and Plan Adjusting

Plans don't always stay as originally conceived. On the one hand, unexpected engineering difficulties may occur. On the other hand, new needs and requests may come from the users. When the plan doesn't match the new conditions, tradeoffs and reprioritization are often inevitable. Within a limited amount of time, a new balance could be needed between getting the product right and getting it released in the scope timeline. Although the plan may change, the final goal stays the same.

Final Product

Ad Simulator is a powerful demo tool part of the sales kit. It is presented every year at CES and is used in client meetings throughout the year. Instead of reading pages of descriptions, or struggling with the idea behind static images, Ad Simulator helps people understand ads products easily through its dynamic and interactive design.

Home Screen Video Ad in Ad Simulator



App Store Video Ad in Ad Simulator




Music Carousel Ad in Ad Simulator


Learnings

Effective communication is the key to leading a cross-functional team and shipping products successfully. In a cross-functional team, people come from many different backgrounds. When someone has a question, I may not know the answer, but I find out who can answer and get the asker pointed in the right direction. In other words, I've learned to be able to communicate multi-directionally: translating engineering jargon into something that business folks can understand, and translating user questions and concerns for the engineers.

I've also learned to communicate regularly, setting everyone's expectations correctly, and keeping everyone on the same page. Sending out a quick note or updating stakeholders regarding questions or requests they brought up prevents any anxieties and misconceptions.

The most challenging part I found was communicating negative news. When progress has slowed or stalled from delays or prohibitively expensive feature implementation, communicating promptly before it grows into a big crisis is vital. Preparing one or two workarounds to overcome the obstacles helps reduce the negative impact on stakeholder expectations. The new outcome can possibly be even better than what was expected from the original plan as well.