Areas of Expertise
Streaming product strategy, AVOD and FAST monetization, CTV product leadership, data and analytics, ML personalization, audience growth, content discovery, and cross-functional platform operations — built across 15+ years in digital entertainment.
Streaming Product Strategy
End-to-end product leadership for consumer streaming platforms. From audience research and product vision through roadmap prioritization, engineering collaboration, release planning, and post-launch measurement. Built and scaled streaming products across CTV, mobile, and web for one of the largest free streaming businesses in the U.S.
Product strategy that works in streaming is different from product strategy in SaaS or e-commerce. Content availability, licensing windows, ad load, device fragmentation, and audience behavior patterns all create unique constraints that require domain fluency to navigate well.
AVOD & FAST Monetization
Full-stack monetization expertise for ad-supported streaming. AVOD product architecture, ad tech integration, programmatic demand strategy, ad load optimization, and sustainable UX/revenue balance. FAST syndication strategy, channel distribution, and partner integration across free streaming TV platforms.
The central tension in AVOD and FAST is that maximizing short-term ad revenue and maximizing long-term audience retention are often in conflict. The best monetization product strategy holds both goals in view simultaneously and finds the operating point that sustains both.
CTV Product Leadership
Connected television is the dominant screen for streaming consumption and the most complex device surface to build for well. CTV product leadership requires understanding device fragmentation, remote-first UX patterns, living room viewing behavior, platform certification requirements, and the unique challenges of delivering a consistent product across Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, Samsung, LG, Vizio, and others.
Built and maintained CTV product strategy and execution across the full device ecosystem, balancing platform-specific requirements with a coherent cross-device product vision.
Data & Analytics Strategy
Building the data infrastructure and analytical frameworks that turn raw audience behavior into actionable product, programming, and business decisions. Unified data strategy spanning instrumentation, pipeline architecture, dashboards, audience segmentation, and insight delivery to cross-functional stakeholders.
Data strategy for streaming requires integrating viewing behavior, ad performance, content metadata, platform signals, and business KPIs into a coherent measurement system. Without that integration, different teams optimize for conflicting signals — and no one wins.
Personalization & ML Recommendations
Machine learning-driven personalization and recommendation systems that improve content discovery and viewer satisfaction at scale. Building recommendation systems in streaming requires connecting content metadata, viewing history, behavioral signals, session context, and platform-specific constraints into models that actually change what users watch next.
Personalization strategy that frames ML as a business tool rather than a research project: tied to measurable outcomes in viewing time, engagement depth, return rate, and content utilization.
Audience Growth & Retention
Product strategy oriented around growing and retaining streaming audiences. Viewing time, return rate, session depth, content completion, and re-engagement are the metrics that matter — and they require product work across onboarding, content discovery, notifications, personalization, and cross-device continuity to move.
Audience growth in a free streaming context is different from subscription growth. There are no paywalls and no cancellation events. Retention is purely behavioral — the product has to earn the user’s return every session.
Content Discovery & Merchandising
Connecting the right content to the right viewer at the right moment is one of the core value propositions of a streaming platform. Content discovery strategy spans editorial curation, algorithmic ranking, search architecture, homepage merchandising, content carousels, metadata quality, and the interplay between human editorial judgment and algorithmic surfacing.
Merchandising strategy in streaming is analogous to retail merchandising: what you surface, in what order, in what context, determines what gets consumed. That decisions directly impacts content performance, ad inventory value, and audience satisfaction.
Product & Platform Operations
Streaming platform operations encompass the systems, processes, and workflows that keep a complex multi-surface product running at scale. Incident response, release management, QA processes, partner integrations, content operations, and the operational infrastructure that connects product decisions to business execution.
Platform operations leadership means building the connective tissue between product strategy and delivery — the processes, tools, and team structures that turn roadmap priorities into shipped product and measurable results.
Entertainment Technology
Broad fluency across the technology stack that powers modern streaming and digital entertainment. Video delivery infrastructure, CDN architecture, DRM and content protection, ad insertion (client-side and server-side), streaming protocols, device SDK development, metadata standards, and the evolving landscape of streaming platform technology.
Deep enough to evaluate technical tradeoffs, collaborate with engineering leadership, and make product decisions that don’t create technical debt — without pretending to be an engineer.
Cross-Functional Executive Leadership
GM-style connective leadership across product, engineering, data science, design, editorial, ad sales, marketing, legal, finance, and executive stakeholders. Building alignment across functions with different incentives, different timelines, and different success metrics.
The most valuable thing a product executive does in a complex organization is not write the best PRD. It’s creating the shared understanding and shared measurement system that lets a diverse group of teams make faster, better-coordinated decisions together.
Professional vocabulary
Topics, technologies, and frameworks Zach works with regularly across streaming product, data, and monetization.
See these areas in action
Specific accomplishments, metrics, and results across each of these domains.