Building Systems, Then 10x the Output
I got hired at Zeta Global around 2012 as a junior engineer on the engineering team. The job was building banner ads, emails, and landing pages. A lot of it was slicing up Photoshop files that the creative team would hand over and turning them into working HTML.
Responsive design was just starting to take off. Bootstrap had barely come out. And our process was still very much stuck in the old way of doing things. For any campaign we built, there was a desktop version and a separate mobile version. Everything was fragmented. Two sets of assets, two QA passes, two deployment cycles. Multiply that across every campaign the company ran, and you start to see how much wasted effort was baked into the workflow.
But I was at a startup, I was in my twenties, and I wanted to learn everything. So I did.
Nobody told me to be in those rooms
Because Zeta was still small enough that nobody told you to stay in your lane, I ended up working with basically every department. Sales needed landing pages. Creative needed HTML builds. Engineering needed someone who could bridge the gap between design comps and production code. Product needed feedback on what was actually feasible. Marketing needed templates.
The engineering team deserves credit here: a lot of talented, smart people who genuinely invested in me. They gave me room to take things on, backed me up when I tried stuff that wasn't technically my job, and gave me space to be wrong while I figured it out. I owe them a lot for what I learned early in my career, and honestly, for where I've been able to develop since.
Nobody told me to be in all those rooms. But nobody stopped me either, and I kept showing up because I genuinely wanted to understand how the whole machine worked.
What I didn't realize at the time was that I was building a mental map of how everything connected. It was still early, and there wasn't really anyone bridging the gap between creative and engineering yet. I just liked talking to people and learning what they did. That curiosity is what put me in all those rooms.
Automating myself into the next role
The first thing to tackle was the fragmentation. We had desktop products. We had mobile products. We had email. We had landing pages. And they were all being built separately, often by different people, with no shared components.
I was learning on the job and spending a lot of time outside of work trying to get better. Staying up in the middle of the night reading about responsive design, Bootstrap, media queries. Ethan Marcotte's book had just come out, people were starting to talk about it. I'd figure something out at 2am and bring it to the team the next morning.
The process we had was still tables and Photoshop slicing. That's what we were being told to do. But responsive solved a lot of problems at once. One codebase instead of separate desktop and mobile builds, one set of templates for email, one landing page system instead of two. Together we rebuilt everything around that approach.
Honestly, I just felt like there wasn't enough time to work on the things I wanted to do. So I was trying to make things easier for myself and for other people. Once the responsive system was in place, I built reusable templates on top of it that anyone could populate without needing an engineer to hand-code each one. Before that, we were doing maybe one campaign every two weeks. After the templates, we were pushing 3-5 a week.
At that point, the role had changed under me. The work that used to take all my time was running on systems instead.
Moving into media operations
With the templates running, the next thing that pulled me was the numbers behind the creative. Building the landing pages wasn't enough. Knowing how they actually performed mattered more. That's what drew me into media operations, handling campaign data, living in Cake Admin, working with sales to understand CPCs and all the performance metrics tied to the assets I used to just build.
Turns out I bit off more than I could chew. The data side was a full job on its own: tracking, reporting, handoffs between teams.
Luckily, we had interns who needed and wanted an opportunity. I trained one of them on the analytics workflow, and they ended up owning the reporting entirely.
That ended up being one of the most rewarding parts of the job. Not just because it freed me up, but because it forced me to learn things about myself I wouldn't have figured out otherwise. How to explain something I understood intuitively. How to be patient when someone processes things differently than I do. Everyone learns differently, and everyone shows up as a different person. Working with people closely like that taught me more about communication and empathy than any technical problem ever did.
Once they had it running, I could start looking at the creative development side, which is where I actually wanted to be.
Training a team across time zones
The company wanted more creative output, so they brought in a team of engineers from India and told me to train them. So that's what I did. Walked them through the responsive template system, the QA process, the campaign workflow. A lot of it was screen-sharing Photoshop files and walking through how to slice them, export them, and plug them into the template system. That was another way of learning how to communicate better. When something didn't land the first time, I had to find a different way to show it instead of just saying it again louder.
I tried to give them the same thing my teammates at Zeta had given me: just patience. Room to get things wrong, room to figure it out. Within a few months they were building and shipping campaigns independently, and the responsive template system we'd built drove a 65% increase in mobile conversions.
Same pattern as before. Take on the work, build the system, find the right person to run it, then move on to the next thing. That's how I ended up as Creative Development Manager, not by climbing over anyone, but by building something solid enough that the team could carry it forward without me.
What it actually was
At the time, none of this felt like "automation." It just felt like solving the thing in front of me. Doing the same thing twice was annoying, so building a system felt like the better solution. Being the bottleneck was annoying, so sharing templates made more sense than keeping them to myself. Most of it was just impatience, honestly.
At Zeta it was Photoshop files and Bootstrap templates. Now at Trending Society it's AI pipelines and structured data schemas. The tools changed, but the habit of looking at a workflow and thinking "there has to be a better way to do this" never really did.
The most valuable thing I picked up in ad tech wasn't any specific technology. It was the habit of building something, giving someone the opportunity to own it, and then going to find the next problem.
None of that would have happened if my team hadn't given me the room to explore things that weren't technically my job. They gave me the pathway, and everything I've developed since came from that. I'm grateful for it, honestly. It taught me that the way you build a team is by setting the next person up for success and paying forward what someone gave you.