by Hannah Levy
October 10, 2019

The internet is vast and limitless but thanks to DoubleVerify (DV) and companies like it, at least it can also be made legible. The tech-first company helps businesses better understand how users are interacting with content online while helping with viewability, fraud protection, accurate impression delivery and audience quality. 

We caught up with some of the employees behind DV’s product to understand what goes into their adtech software and to hear what’s next for the NYC-based team. Here’s what we learned. 

 

DV office lobby
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEN PAO
DV office
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEN PAO
DV office
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEN PAO

 

FOUNDED: 2008

EMPLOYEES: 400, 200 in NYC 

WHERE THEY DO IT: New York City 

WHAT THEY DO: DV helps companies get the most value out of their media spend with best-in-class digital solutions. 

FULLY STOCKED: Employees at DV enjoy weekly lunches and breakfasts as well as an always-stocked kitchen. 

 

Photo of MARCIA BARRAN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEN PAO
Portrait of MARCIA BARRAN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEN PAO

 

Marcia Barran, Director of Product Management

Marcia oversees DV Pinnacle, the company’s self-service campaign setup and analytics platform. 

 

You’ve been with DoubleVerify for nearly eight years. Do you remember what initially excited you about the job? 

When I interviewed for a product manager position at DV in 2012, I’d only worked on the publisher side and knew very little about the ad verification space. I was most attracted to DV’s product and tech-first focus as a company and how that has played a pivotal role in the company’s mission and core values. DV has grown tremendously in the years since I joined, and I’m proud to say that we continue to dominate the space because we’ve stayed true to that focus.
 

As we continue to expand our global footprint, we are already tackling newer obstacles that come with this territory.


Walk us through your growth at the company. How does DV position you in a place to succeed? 

I have been very fortunate to be part of a company that encourages both career and personal growth, and that’s allowed me to take on some very unique challenges. I started as a product manager, working on tools for our sales operations team. From there, I moved into a senior product manager role, where I became in charge of client automation and internal integrations on a wider scale. In my current role as DV’s director of product management, I oversee the company’s self-service platform. 

 

How has the DV platform changed in the years you’ve been with the company? 

The development of DV’s self-service tools over the last few years has allowed our internal teams to focus on more specialized use cases and tackle more complex challenges. As we continue to expand our global footprint, we are already tackling newer obstacles that come with this territory.

 

Nisim Tal and his team
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEN PAO
Nisim Tal portrait in office
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEN PAO

 

Nisim Tal, Chief Technical Officer 

Nisim is responsible for implementing the company’s product roadmap and ensuring technological resources are aligned with DV’s business needs.

 

What’s one thing that people might not realize is a part of your job as CTO?

I oversee DoubleVerify’s software development, IT, technical operations, quality assurance, and information security across all product lines, offices and subsidiaries, but I also deal a lot with regulations, compliance and contracts. I am also responsible for helping protect DoubleVertify’s IP by filing patents and trademarks. 
 

My team’s goals are directly derived from the company’s goals — but much more fun to talk about.


What are DV’s company-wide goals right now? 

DV’s primary goals are to expand our international footprint, continue leading the programmatic trading space, increase the coverage and offering in social, and to bring connected TVs to feature parity with other media types.

 

How do your team’s goals factor into the larger company's vision? 

My team’s goals are directly derived from the company’s goals — but much more fun to talk about. We need to hire great engineering talent in NYC, Tel Aviv, Belgium and Helsinki. We need to rewrite our traffic system as microservices leveraging Akka, Kafka, Kubernetes and other exciting technologies. Other goals include building a new caching infrastructure and further scaling our system to handle several millions of requests per second.

 

Pieter portrait photo
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEN PAO
Pieter portrait
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEN PAO

 

Pieter Mees, VP of Product Management

Pieter works with the product team to make sure DV’s offerings continue to lead the market while working with the engineering team to build systems that are highly reliable and scale as fast as the company.

 

You joined DV after the company acquired your own. Tell us about the company you launched and the opportunity you saw in joining the DV team? 
 
In 2010, I co-founded a company called Zentrick that built advanced video technology that we licensed to large companies under something like a SaaS model. As we were looking into how to bring a new generation of products to market in the coming years, we realized that our growth plans would benefit from being part of a larger organization with built out sales and marketing teams.

As one of our long-time customers, DV was the perfect fit for us to accomplish exactly that. We’d worked with the product and engineering teams for years and were really impressed by the talent, quality and ability to execute. All the checkboxes worked out on both sides, so here we are!
 

DV has given us an impressive level of autonomy and freedom to keep the things intact that has allowed our team to execute fast and with high quality.


What was the transition like going from running your own shop to joining the leadership team at DV?
 
I founded Zentrick straight out of college, so I had never been an employee in my life. The biggest parts of the transition for me were having a boss to report to (luckily I have a good one!), learning a new area of the business, and working with other teams each with their own goals and responsibilities.  

But despite some big changes, the transition was a remarkably smooth one. DV has given us an impressive level of autonomy and freedom to keep the things intact that has allowed our team to execute fast and with high quality. It’s been great to get support where you need it and freedom where you like it.

 

What systems does your product management team use to keep teams on track? 

We employ a cascade of ever more granular objectives to plan our work starting with our goals, which we break into: yearly strategic goals, half-year OKR-style goals, quarterly major product releases and biweekly engineering sprints. DV’s engineering teams use an Agile methodology and a collection of tools, ranging from Jira to manage tickets to GitHub for pull requests. 

 

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