Speaker 2: 0:00

Hey everyone, I'm your host, Ava Hinds, and today we're getting radically candid with Alex Bronkar, our product enablement specialist here at Cognition. In this episode, we pull back the curtain on what it really means to be the bridge between Product, Dev, and the rest of the team. Alex walks us through all six of our products, breaks down how they work together, and shares how it takes complex builds and makes them click for everyone else. If you've ever wondered how feedback actually makes it back to the dev team or what our products are truly capable of, this is an episode you're not gonna want to miss. Enjoy.

Speaker 3: 0:39

Well, hi Alex, welcome to Radically Candid. So we're just gonna start the pod off by introducing yourself, how long you've been at Cognition, how is your old thought?

Speaker 1: 0:48

Yeah. So I'm Alex. Um been with Cognition almost four years now, so it's 2022. I started on the operations team, kind of learning everything about the Amazon DSP, reporting for our clients, and just you know, all the Mandarin Media piece of it. And after some time, I started to be pulled into you know more client conversations, talking about strategy, execution, all of that, and was good at it. Found a need uh there kind of between the the account management and uh operations, and then I joined the account management team um and took on my own my own clients and you know kind of did start to finish in in that piece. Um, and then and then I moved into uh a new role, product enablement. Um gosh, I don't know how long it's been six months. We'll throw a number out there, uh time flies. But yeah, and that that was more around like kind of finding the need and right in the middle of everything um of of hey, use my strength and knowledge to kind of help our team um across the board as opposed to you know just just my handful of clients. Um and right and and then begin going both directions, not just account managers, but into operations, into the product side, um yeah.

Speaker 3: 2:00

How do you find that need that product needed?

Speaker 1: 2:03

I think it's I was pulled in the conversation, right? It was it was can you walk us through this? Yeah, you know, it's a big load to kind of have one job and then it starts evolving, right? And it's like, okay, maybe maybe maybe this needs to be kind of a separate piece. I think the needs kind of find themselves in my eyes, because I'm I'm the one that I'm willing to help, right? So it's like it's just like you know, it's that's a small team cognition is what do we eat five beers now? So we're growing, but uh it's always you know it's fast and it's yeah, it's a lot. Find something new every day. Yeah, I always always always learn.

Speaker 3: 2:40

So kind of turn into you doing operations, being an analyst, then background turned to like you managing a team, then they're like, Well, since you know so much about this, let's do account management, and then since they could ask me so many questions about product, it's like, well, let's just play with product then.

Speaker 1: 2:54

Yeah, yeah, oh yeah. I I I don't know. That's pretty much how it would go. But yeah, more so just kind of understanding the organization. Okay, we're running a lot of new people every day. You you've seen it. Yeah. Um, so it's it's how do we educate them, how do we bring them up to speed? Um, and it's just having our departments working together and kind of planning those efficiencies.

Speaker 3: 3:18

No, you explained yourself kind of as the bridge between product and dev to the rest of the organization. And can you walk us through what actually it looks like on a daily basis?

Speaker 1: 3:26

Yeah, daily basis is hard. There's that uh changes every day. Here's a list of what I plan to do today and what I actually do today. But but yeah, I think the biggest thing in that is I would say I speak all languages. Um coming from operations team, understanding behind the scenes, going to account management, hearing the clients, um, and then working with the dev team um and just kind of how to communicate with our teams. And again, it kind of puts project name on right at the center to say, okay, client operations, whoever it is, what's the need? What's the what's the what we won't call it problem, but we'll call it opportunity. Yeah. Um, and then how do we package up that relate to our product managers and our development team to create something, build off of that? Right. So you give the ideas kind of too. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 4:16

Yeah. Yeah. And like what does the feedback loop look like between account management, operations to product?

Speaker 1: 4:22

Yeah. I mean, we're only as good as our feedback, right? So if we we spit out products and no one says anything, then we failed. You're always going to have those bugs. Um whether it's a bug, user error, or it's an enhancement that we need. Um, I think that's kind of the first step, right? When when something is is presented to us, is what's the opportunity? Are we fixing the bug? User error, do we need to rewrite how this process works, or is this an enhancement that we need to create in our platform that to make it better and yeah, efficient?

Speaker 3: 4:52

Would you say the difference is to be like a new feature versus like an enhancement?

Speaker 1: 4:55

Enhancement is this could work better if we do it this way. Um, and then that new feature is it didn't exist before. Yeah, you gotta train everybody on it.

Speaker 3: 5:05

I know the dev stuff can get really complex and complicated, uh, how do you simplify it to the rest of the team or specifically?

Speaker 1: 5:12

I think that kind of comes with like that that multiple languages piece, and and I don't know, it's it's more like learn and understand that process.

Speaker: 5:20

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 5:20

Um, and then how it works for each team member, each user, each client, and understanding their role in it. Yeah. And then kind of piecing that all together to say, okay, here's a new enhancement. What does the operations team need to understand with this when they're executing it? What does the client need to understand when they're reading it?

Speaker: 5:41

Right.

Speaker 1: 5:41

We're setting it up, right? And then just kind of understanding that the whole process and then where each part in that process creates and who's who's clicking the button, who's putting the information in.

Speaker 3: 5:53

Yeah, just simplifying it down to this is how the product works and how you can use it.

Speaker 1: 5:57

Exactly.

Speaker 3: 5:58

Yeah. And then can you give us like an example of how someone reached out to you that they should we should better something? And then you guys did it.

Speaker 1: 6:06

Yeah. You're on the operations team too. Yeah. Um, and I'm sure you're aware of the the creative swaps, right? And how that can be a recurrence. Um, yeah, every month, a couple times a month, here's a new video. Very manual process of someone downloading a video, uploading it multiple times, right? The client downloads it, uploads it, sends it to us. We download it, upload it, put it in the DSP, and seeing that process, and then how could we simplify that? And it became okay, let's let's do a file transfer. Um where the client delivers it to us. We have logic to say put this video here. Um, and we we did that for a while, and then it developed into us creating an ad server, which is now one of our one of our products. So, yeah, so first it was just kind of a process of like, hey, what is this video? We're gonna do this with it. Um, and then now it's we actually create ad tags, serve the ads out of our own ad server.

Speaker 3: 6:58

Let's care if it was born.

Speaker 1: 6:59

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 6:59

In a way. Do you wanna see a good segue, but do you want to explain kind of what each product does, just like a crash course?

Speaker 1: 7:06

Yeah. Yeah, we have six of those now.

Speaker 3: 7:08

We've six now.

Speaker 1: 7:09

Media studio, pretty self-explanatory, but that's campaign management, launching your campaigns, executing those immediate campaigns. And then measurement, that is your performance on those campaigns, but that also includes our attribution tools. So how many of these people of data of my first party data, or you know, um, through our through our cognition, reported sales, how many of these people were exposed, and then um converted, leap, sale, whatever it is. Um, and then our our headless analytics, um, which is that that psych tracking mechanism that we have now. Um, and headless analytics is gonna be the thing that connects all of these even more so as time goes on. Um, and then data studio, again, kind of self-explanatory, but that's kind of creating. Um, if you have first party data, how do we create audiences? How do we push that into the measurement piece of attribution? And then again, kind of the modeling piece of who we're targeting, what we're doing with that um data. And then ad sorving the piece I mentioned that goes hand in hand with other products, create a studio, right? Um, but essentially how how can we serve this creative on multiple DSP, multiple platforms, all from one source, and that gives us the power to do things with headless analytics where we can kind of track things across the board, um, and it's all intertwined and connected. Um, if I launch a campaign on Amazon DSP DV360, I can push data and pression data um to our ad server and see what's happening across those. And then it's funny we always put this one last, but it's always first. Planning inside insights is our sixth one. Um that's just taking the data we have, the measurement we have, all that information and piecing it together to create that media plan and execute on.

Speaker 3: 8:54

Yes, they all kind of work together in their own way. So if we put your ad on, we can create your ad, we can measure it. Absolutely. Yeah. What's something about our products you wish people understood more about? I know you were on account management, you talk to clients. So what do you wish people knew more about?

Speaker 1: 9:08

I mean, there's definitely an education piece on all of it, kind of understanding the programmatic space. I mean, you know, you guys are pushing out great content, uh kind of educating the masses.

Speaker: 9:17

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 9:18

Um I think just kind of what what what comes behind it, understanding it. That's always what I've been obsessed with is how do we get to that end result? Um, right. That's the piece of there's a lot that goes on in programmatic, how quickly the ads are served, but then that measurement piece and that execution piece, and you know, kind of what we're doing to to go from the ad to the to the result.

Speaker 3: 9:40

Yeah. So just it's all capable of a lot more than we all think, or exactly.

Speaker 1: 9:44

And that's why we have those six products, right? Yeah, too. That start to start to finish approach.

Speaker 3: 9:48

What are like some misconceptions you've heard about products?

Speaker 1: 9:53

Oh man, I don't know. Oh we got, no.

Speaker 3: 9:58

Just off the top of your head, even.

Speaker 1: 9:59

I mean, I think it's the streaming landscape, I think everyone is starting to learn and pick up on that and understanding that where it fits into the the life cycle of an automotive, right? Of buying a car that you know, seeing a video on your TV, I'm not gonna click on that ad and buy a car, right? Yeah, it's gonna be a part of my journey. Um, again, with headless analytics, we're gonna see that journey, how many touch points is it cuff coming from other sources like aid social and direct and just piecing all that together into our journey? I mean understanding that every spot has its place and it's not always in the same order. Yeah. Like it's gonna come in, and you're it's just touch points on the customer journey.

Speaker 3: 10:40

Right. And I know you started definitely when cottage shows very new, and you've seen pod devolve as we talked about, but what was product when you first started? Like what did we have?

Speaker 1: 10:49

Uh we didn't have our products.

Speaker 3: 10:51

Yeah. Or just like what products did we even have when you start?

Speaker 1: 10:55

We had Media Studio, um, and we did not have our own platform yet. So it was um putting ads up. Yeah, we were we were Amazon DSP and launching campaigns and then kind of coming back with Excel reporting and things like that. And what we've evolved to is our our own platform, our our own rewarding tools, and then obviously layering on all these other products. Yeah, the feedback loop was hey ops, can we do this? Yeah, all right. I'll talk to I'll talk to the dev team, which is yeah, you know, Colin. Colin at the time, yeah.

Speaker 3: 11:27

Yeah. And then how did like all these products kind of become born? I used to talk about ad certing and create a studio and be a studio, but how did all these come together?

Speaker 1: 11:36

It's that feedback loop, really. It's it's from our clients um and hearing what they need and what what's missing, right, from from what they're able to to the story they're able to tell with the whole whole process of things. Um so it it's hey, we hear this need, um, and and if we feel it's important as well, and we can we can help tell that story, then um, we can we can kind of build to that with what what we have and what we're capable of.

Speaker 3: 12:03

Yeah. And where do you see product going with the offer?

Speaker 1: 12:06

Um right now I think it's faster, more efficient, and more dynamic. Um that way uh we can scale for our clients much quicker, um, like like that creative component of uh how can we get 100 videos uploaded in 10 minutes, sort of thing, right? Kind of those areas. Um and then it's just it's just building up piecing all those products to make them more efficient. But again, with uh with headless analytics piece that I keep mentioning, um, that's really gonna tie everything together. Um, I think just make it make it all possible and and give you that visual piece that that sometimes we're we're building still.

Speaker 3: 12:41

Yeah, just evolving them and scaling and everything.

Speaker 1: 12:44

Exactly.

Speaker 3: 12:45

And for someone who's curious about moving into a product role within cognition, what advice would you give them? Or do they explain?

Speaker 1: 12:51

Yeah, I mean, you gotta be curious. Um, and I think it's just it's learning, it's it's understanding every piece of of that process and and just what do you wish someone told you? Uh I don't know, that that's tough for me because I don't think anyone really really had to tell me, right? I I was I dove in kind of head first. I didn't have a lot of experience and I I wanted to learn uh and understand like what do I have now? And yeah, what could it be? Connect that piece of like, okay, what is this? And then what is someone asking me and how do we connect that dot, right? Like how what are they asking me? What do we have? And what's that happy medium in the middle of where where they could connect?

Speaker 3: 13:31

Yeah, makes sense of like you just be curious and be creative and want to build something and all of that. But yeah, I think that's all my questions. Cool. Anything else you want to add or no, this has been great on the master lab. Cool. Where can they find you? On you want to LinkedIn or I think it's just Alex Brokker.

Speaker: 13:52

I don't even know, guys. How does Eton work? I just log in.

Speaker 3: 13:55

Yeah, log in. Cool. Okay.

Speaker: 14:00

Emails, I got the lucky up on the Alex at.

Speaker 1: 14:02

Alex at no last name.

Speaker 3: 14:04

So yeah, I know we're kind of like the OG spot one or fancy. Oh, thank you so much, Alex. Thanks.