What does it mean to be an Ads PM?
About us: Andrew (AM) and Chandrika (CM) met during their MBA program at MIT Sloan and connected over their passion for product, growth and paying forward the help they got transitioning into product management. AM currently works as a Product Manager at Moveworks and CM works as a Senior Product Manager at DocuSign.
In this new series, we are covering our peers in PM roles across different organizations to give you a view into what various roles demand and which role is likely the best fit for you. For this post, we spoke to our friend Katerina who is currently a PM at Google. Katerina has experience managing a variety of products over the last 5 years ranging from public sector to ads.
Katerina is a PM at Google working on Search Ads. A large part of her role is focused on lead generation ads products.
In this post, Katerina reflects on her experience working as an Ads PM.
How do you define the business objectives that you are working towards with your project?
As a Search Ads PM, I have to take two different personas into consideration - the advertisers and the users.
For advertisers, my business objective is to help maximize their performance. The primary KPIs to measure are cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA). There are also other intermediate metrics like click through rate (CTR) and conversion rate that we measure.
For users, the primary considerations are around usefulness and data privacy. Since I work on lead generation which enables users to share information with advertisers, my priority is to make sure that the right protections are in place.
If we successfully maximize value for both advertisers and users, our revenue grows.
How do you go about defining requirements for your projects?
Since I have to focus on two distinct personas, I account for input across both of these sets of users. For advertisers, our team gathers feedback and data from sales teams and then stack-ranks the top asks. For users, we run experiments to see the impact on metrics. We also conduct user studies to validate product perception and any theories/hypotheses we are working with.
How do you prioritize projects?
We use the data we gathered about our advertisers and users through feedback, experiments, and user research to determine which features are most likely to move the needle on our KPIs. We also take into consideration effort required - sometimes it is possible to sneak in some quick wins!
Overall, who do you think will enjoy the role of a ‘Ads PM’?
Someone who enjoys a healthy mix of a lot of things. The role is very cross-functional. The day to day can range from working on a PRD for your core project team to a presentation for executives. You do work with engineers very closely so you need to be a bit technical. If you are learning “Intro to Coding” and enjoy solving little tech problems every once in a while, then you would be a good fit even if you are not technical by education.
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