GoViral was a video-distribution platform for brands, built before YouTube ate the world and before social networks had real video products. After the AOL acquisition, the question was whether the GoViral playbook could survive — and contribute to AOL's bigger advertising business — in a category that was changing every six months.
I led product post-acquisition. We rebuilt the platform to play well with the social networks rather than against them — distribution APIs, analytics that brands could actually use, and a creative-services product that gave agencies a reason to come back. I helped move the team off waterfall and into Agile, which was less buzzy than it sounds and more about shipping every two weeks.
The platform stabilized inside AOL's advertising business, the team's release cadence improved, and several of the playbooks we built for branded video distribution carried into AOL's wider ad-tech work. It was the period of my career where I learned how to walk into a team that was already running and change how it ran without breaking it.