LEADERSHIP / 2022-2025 (2+ years of active leadership)
Led the evolution of Perseus, Inmar's proprietary creative platform, from a 2022 experiment into the core production engine for a 20+ person creative team. As the creative-side product strategist, my role bridged frontline creative needs with technical implementation, influencing roadmap decisions, coordinating cross-functional teams, and driving org-wide enablement. The platform scaled annual savings from $12K to $670K while processing $40.6M in campaign revenue for major advertisers like Pepsi, Publix, and P&G.
When Inmar acquired Aki in 2023, we faced a fundamental integration challenge. Aki excelled at brand storytelling, while Inmar specialized in incentive-heavy offer media. Campaigns routinely required three creative variants (Equity, Offer, Clipped) across dozens of ad sizes, each with retailer-specific messaging and personalization layers.
The creative team was hand-building every permutation in Photoshop and After Effects, then handing off to external creative platforms that charged CPM fees on delivery and didn't support our highly niche and bespoke use cases. The toolchain was fragmented, turnaround time lagged, and strategic targeting ideas died because production couldn't scale.
Perseus existed as an underutilized 2022 experiment with minimal adoption. The acquisition provided the catalyst, and executive mandate, to transform it into an enterprise platform. But there was no clear product owner, no formal roadmap process, and engineers who didn't understand creative workflows. Someone needed to bridge these worlds.
The creative-side product strategist role emerged as the voice of the creative team with deep operational knowledge and business acumen. The position owned requirements definition, roadmap prioritization consultation, and cross-functional enablement.
Partnerships with engineering leads and a newly added PM meant every feature decision ran through validation based on understanding both creative operations and business constraints. The role translated between creative workflows (layer-based design, keyframe animation, versioning) and platform requirements.
My influence came from demonstrated expertise. Campaign demand signals showed which features would unblock potential high-budget deals, efficiency calculations quantified build time reductions (70%), creative team feedback highlighted adoption blockers, and competitive analysis against Celtra justified capabilities. Combining business context with product feasibility gave engineering and product the confidence to trust judgment on feature prioritization and implementation decisions.
The biggest challenge was operating at two levels of abstraction simultaneously: platform requirements with engineering, and practical creative application with the team.
Teaching Engineers How Creative Works
Engineers didn't understand layer-based design, keyframe animation, or versioning workflows. The hours I spent walking them through Photoshop and After Effects built shared mental models. Our sessions showed how designers think about composition, hierarchy, timing, and interaction. Translation between creative workflows and platform capabilities was essential.
Outcome: Engineering team could implement features without constant consultation, leading to faster development cycles and higher-fidelity implementations.
Training 20+ Creatives on Each Release
Feature launches required teaching new capabilities while maintaining adoption momentum. Live walkthroughs with every monthly rollout, documentation for the #perseus_updates channel, Confluence playbooks, and support channel staffing all contributed to the validation of the platform's usefulness and positive sentiment towards a new tool on the team.
Outcome: Platform became the default tool with adoption across all major campaigns. Creative team provided continuous feedback improving each release.
Cross-Functional Pod Process
Pod checklists codified alignment between Account, Creative, and Ad Ops on KPIs, personalization rules, tagging, and compliance before build. This eliminated downstream errors and rework.
Outcome: Standardized workflow reducing errors and inefficiencies; faster campaign launches with fewer QA cycles.
Quantified outcomes demonstrating the platform's value:
Annual Savings Growth
$12K → $670K
56x scale in year-over-year savings through platform adoption
Campaign Revenue
$40.6M
Total campaign revenue trafficked through Perseus
Efficiency Gain
70% Faster
Build and trafficking times
Render Quality
89.88%
MRAID render rates, exceeding outside vendor benchmarks
Adoption
Enterprise-Wide
Every major advertiser ran through platform
Platform Evolution
2+ Years
Continuous feature releases and improvements
Without direct reports or a formal PM title, outcomes came through influence and enablement. The framework for prioritizing features when everyone wanted different things:
1. Business Impact - Which features unblock revenue or major advertiser deals?
2. Adoption Drivers - Which features would increase platform usage across the team?
3. Operational Efficiency - Which features save the most time or reduce errors?
4. Product Feasibility - Development effort vs value delivered
Feedback gathering happened through weekly standups (active user pain points), campaign retrospectives (what was hard to build), account team requests (client requirements), and platform usage dogfooding. Niche requests benefiting only 1-2 users got deprioritized. Balancing "must-haves" with "nice-to-haves" ensured iterative shipping rather than waiting for perfect features.
Technical capabilities influenced and validated:
This project showcases capabilities beyond technical execution: