SSP

A supply-side platform is where the supply half of the ad market lives. Suppliers list their inventory; demand-side platforms represent advertisers; the two meet in a real-time auction that fills an ad slot in milliseconds. Almmox was building the supply side, and I designed the product suppliers would use to list, manage, and sell their inventory.

The month split in two. The first half went to defining the product, not drawing it — the work that usually sits with a product manager. Here it sat with me, and it shaped the design more than any visual decision did. Four artifacts came out of it, on one FigJam board, before the first screen existed.

• Research — how SSPs, DSPs, and real-time bidding actually work, and what a platform has to get right for suppliers to trust it with their inventory.
• User stories — what suppliers needed to do, written as jobs, so every MVP feature traced back to one.
• Information architecture — how listings, inventory, and bidding data organise into a structure a supplier can navigate without knowing ad-tech internals.
• Flows — the paths to list inventory and track what sells, drawn end to end before any screen.

The second half turned the definition into screens — the surfaces suppliers use to list inventory, watch the bidding, and see what sold.

The product is down and the backend retired; there is no way to dress that up. What survives is the part that transfers — taking an unfamiliar, technical domain from nothing to a shipped MVP in a month, with the product definition and the design done by the same person. That is the shape of work I keep going back to.