Career Summary
As companies scale their ad products, they tend to hit the same wall: workflow efficiency breaks down, infrastructure stops scaling cleanly, and the ad stack starts working against the business instead of for it. I help companies work through exactly that.
My background in ad tech runs across Amazon, Swiftly, and Mega Prime, and the same pattern shows up at every stop. At Amazon Advertising, I built the forecasting front end for their DSP and launched their PMP program, giving advertisers and agency trading desks the tools to plan with confidence at a massive scale. At Swiftly, I helped launch their first self-service ad platform, opened several new ad-based revenue channels, and scaled the business across multiple media channels including Meta, Reddit, and CTV.
At Mega Prime, I helped take the company to more than $20M in annual revenue by improving operations, launching self-service tools, automating reporting, and optimizing the bidding systems underneath it all.
AI has become a core part of how I build products and operate teams. I use it to rapidly prototype new ideas, validate market opportunities before significant engineering investment, and evaluate product trade-offs from multiple perspectives. It allows me to move from concept to working prototype significantly faster while improving decision quality throughout the product development process.
I also use AI to generate and refine product requirements, technical specifications, user stories, acceptance criteria, Jira tickets, roadmap documentation, executive presentations, and other operational artifacts that help teams execute effectively. Beyond product development, I leverage AI to automate recurring work across reporting, metrics monitoring, research, and day-to-day operational workflows, allowing more time to focus on strategy, customers, and business outcomes.
Outside of my professional responsibilities, I use AI as a learning platform to continuously expand my understanding of software development and emerging technologies. I've used AI to independently design, build, and launch several working applications, including Choruku.fit, an AI-built fitness tracking platform, and a browser-based HTML ad and video editing platform. These projects help me stay current with rapidly evolving AI capabilities while exploring how modern product builders can move from idea to production faster than ever before.
Learn more about my work experience and skills further below.
Lloyd Jacob
Product leader with 15 years building and scaling advertising and retail media platforms. Background spans enterprise ad tech, programmatic buying, self-serve ad tools, change management, business consulting, and consumer marketplaces, with deep experience at the intersection of monetization and user experience. Has set 12 to 24 month roadmap vision, built and led PM teams, partnered closely with senior leadership on business strategy, and shipped products that grow revenue without sacrificing platform quality. Uses AI daily to raise team efficiency, automate manual work, and cut operating costs, and has shipped AI-powered capabilities directly into production platforms.
An AI-built fitness tracker, designed and shipped solo using AI tools across the full build, from product concept through working application.
An AI-built browser-based tool for editing HTML ad creative and video, built to explore how far AI-assisted development can go in producing a real, usable creative tool without a traditional engineering team.
- Own the 12 to 24 month product strategy and roadmap for Swiftly's retail media ad platform, setting direction across ad formats, targeting, creative optimization, measurement, and delivery for enterprise CPG advertisers including PepsiCo and national grocery retail partners.
- Built a 0 to 1 custom internal ad server from the ground up, replacing a third-party platform and enabling dynamic creative delivery, real-time updates, improved attribution, and significant annual infrastructure cost savings.
- Shipped AI-powered generative creative tooling and automated campaign optimization into production, improving advertiser performance and cutting manual creative work by a meaningful margin across the team.
- Built AI-based CTV ad creatives and integrated CTV buying APIs, extending the platform into programmatic offsite media.
- Developed a cloud-based AI prototype that automatically optimized new ad layouts using high-performing banner training data, eliminating hours of manual work per advertiser each week and freeing the team to focus on higher-value work.
- Use AI tools across the PM workflow daily for PRDs, specs, prototyping, and research, shortening the path from idea to validated concept and reducing the need for additional engineering or design headcount on early-stage work.
- Identified and automated several manual reporting and campaign-setup processes using AI-assisted tooling, reducing operational overhead and lowering the cost of running the ad platform team.
- Define ad load, placement, pacing, and frequency strategy in partnership with data science, designing experiments to measure performance lift over baselines.
- Partner directly with the executive team on ad revenue strategy, presenting roadmap trade-offs and business cases in leadership reviews; align product, engineering, sales, and client success around shared priorities.
- Hire and develop the ad platform PM function, building a team culture focused on ownership, high output, and continuous learning.
- Enabled non-technical teammates to build working prototypes without engineering support, accelerating validation and expanding product thinking across the org.
- Owned strategy and roadmap for forecasting and planning tools within Amazon's large-scale DSP, giving advertisers and agency trading desks tools to model reach, frequency, and budget before campaign launch.
- Worked closely with auction, bidding, and ML teams to surface accurate supply-side signals that informed advertiser controls, campaign pacing, and targeting decisions at global scale.
- Partnered with finance and revenue leadership to connect product investments to measurable advertiser outcomes and platform revenue metrics.
- Navigated trade-offs between short-term revenue optimization and long-term advertiser trust, building strong instincts about where to draw the line on monetization versus user experience.
- Mentored junior PMs and drove cross-functional initiatives across engineering, data science, and revenue to ship improvements used by enterprise advertisers worldwide.
- Grew a Meta Ads API platform from roughly $400K to $18M ARR in 14 months by building self-serve ad tools, automated optimization, audience targeting, and campaign analytics for performance marketers.
- Set roadmap and product strategy in close partnership with revenue leadership and the CEO, presenting business cases and trade-offs at the executive level.
- Hired and developed the PM team, establishing the processes and culture that supported rapid scaling without losing execution quality.
- Founded and grew a cross-channel performance advertising platform to $20M ARR, building targeting, pacing, attribution, and optimization tools for direct-response marketers.
- Led product, engineering, and go-to-market from zero through fundraising and to profitability.