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OhHello - Ana Milicevic
59 Plays2 years ago
Oh, Hello!
Our chats w/ the OhHello Inc. 🌞☕️ OhHello.io mentors are back!!
Episode 38 of the pod/vod just dropped 🎧
This next ‘Hello’ is an entrepreneur, media executive, and digital technology innovator. She is the co-founder and principal of Sparrow Advisers, a strategic consultancy helping marketers and C-suite executives navigate the data-driven #adtech and #martech waters.
As a woman, especially those of under-represented communities, many are looked at w/ a glare of "she doesn't know tech." "'However, In my head, I'm a 19 y/o Stanford drop-out dude-bro, with all the world's confidence, and this is how I present and this is how I talk.' When that comes in a different package than the audience perceives, it's a fine balance that many have to adapt to. I'm here to help."
A pioneer of digital data management in advertising, this ‘Hello’ was responsible for the development of the @Demdex platform (aka Adobe Audience Manager) from its early days through its successful acquisition and integration into the Adobe Experience Cloud. Prior to starting Sparrow she established TransUnion's Global Strategic Consulting group (fka Signal) and helped Fortune 500 customers adopt advanced and predictive analytics across their marketing, ad ops, and digital content business units at SAS.
Her consulting portfolio includes working for the United Nations, executing initiatives in 50+ countries, and advising companies on go-to-market strategies all around the globe. The mentor is frequently quoted by media powerhouses like The Wall Street Journal and Insider(who in 2018 named her as one of 23 industry leaders working on fixing advertising) as well as industry trades like Adweek, Ad Age, Digiday, AdExchanger, and ExchangeWire.
Two special mentors she wants to give a special shout-out to: Adam Solomon + Bill Stratton.
But, today, Ana Milicevic is most excited to be one of our earliest mentors on the OhHello.io platform…when we launch this summer!
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Transcript
Dancing to the Peanuts Music
00:00:13
Speaker
Oh, hello, Anna. Oh, hello, Jeremy. It is impossible not to move to that music. It's just genetically there's something gets activated and I have to goof when I hear the Peanuts music. As you and I were talking before we started, we are cut from such a similar cloth.
00:00:35
Speaker
And when you hear that mix, that mashup with Jay-Z and the Peanuts, it's pretty nice. It just goes through your entire body with that set. Yes. I know who you are. Can you tell us?
Anna's Tech Industry Insights
00:00:55
Speaker
sounded scared. It did. It really did. So as you're in Boston, I'm in Chicago, we both have been in the in the ad tech MarTech SAS media space for quite a while data technology. You have an omnipresent analytical sophisticated product strategy mindset that I have respected for so many years. So I'm excited to have you here. I know who you are. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
00:01:24
Speaker
who am I speaking with? Who are, oh, hello listeners, listening to and watching right now. Thank you. I'm a little speechless now, which doesn't happen very often and blushing.
The Journey of Sparrow Advisors
00:01:37
Speaker
My name is Anna Melissa Vick. I am the co-founder and one of the two principles of Sparrow Advisors. I'm a long-term product strategy technology, originally computer science, math person.
00:01:50
Speaker
And I've held numerous leadership roles in media, entertainment, startup, scale up, very large company. I've kind of gone through every conceivable cycle you can think of in public and private companies, getting acquired, being on the acquirer side. And I've kind of accumulated all of these business milestones, if you will, that now as a consultant and senior advisor, help me have a very
00:02:20
Speaker
effective way to help companies hit their goals, generally get better about what they're doing and have a clear commercial result. So the helping strategize behind the scenes, the product, the strategy, the commercialization, the revenue, the whole go-to-market plan, essentially. And how did you get into that? It's such a
00:02:49
Speaker
I'm going to keep it at that. How did you get into that? How did you decide to do that? Because from the experience that you've had, I would think that, uh, it has provided just so many different nuggets and insights of information that you have have gone through where you're able to provide so much guidance to so many folks. That, that, that goes straight into my sales deck. Uh, but, uh, yeah.
00:03:14
Speaker
kind of by accident. So my career started as a comp sci math person. I was coding. I really liked that. And then I foolishly kind of raised my hand at an opportunity in computer science class to work on a project outside of class. And I built a company around that as a, you know, just college kids building software. But then this was,
00:03:41
Speaker
back in the day, this is going to date me, but back in the day when things like CMSs and the development world of today were still pretty far out. So everything was done custom. You spent a lot of time talking to your clients and agile was a new and bright thing in the horizon. And very quickly I figured out that there were
00:04:06
Speaker
I could code, but there were people who were a lot better at it than I was. But I had this magic skill, which was being able to talk to very different people and explain to each of them what the other group meant. And that was my superpower. At the time, that didn't really exist as a function. Product management was very nascent. So I didn't know that that's what I was doing, but that's exactly what I was doing.
00:04:34
Speaker
Blissfully, a few years later on, I realized that that's what I was doing. So I started to gravitate towards product and strategy roles officially, as opposed to just having some really silly title attached to it and similar. So it was a little bit accidental, but in many ways, the perfect fit. And knowing what I know now and looking back at, you know,
00:05:01
Speaker
20 year old me, I'd be like, all right, Anna, go and be a product is where you should go. So yeah, it worked out. It worked out for sure. And understanding so being able to tell your younger self, hey, essentially, know how to know how to
00:05:21
Speaker
Be inoperable with people, know how to operate, know how to communicate, listen, being empathetic, understanding how product works, understanding how different technologies can combine into one another.
00:05:36
Speaker
Would you say that when you look back, what you would tell yourself 20 years ago would be just to stick with it? Would it be, especially just being, and you and I talked about this and the purpose of this pod and Oh, hello itself is to showcase vulnerability, to be able to have up and comers or people feeling lost.
00:05:59
Speaker
find others within the tech marketing advertising ecosystem. So would you tell someone, basically, stick with it? Give us a little bit more about what defines you and just how you would characterize that skill set to help by sharing it with younger folks. Wow. How much time do you have? A lot. I think for me personally, I always thought that curiosity
00:06:28
Speaker
is such an undervalued skill and that if you are curious,
00:06:34
Speaker
and have the openness and the ability and willingness to learn new skills, you are going to be fine, no matter where you start, no matter kind of where you're pointing yourself directionally. And I think that's what, if I had to kind of pick one skill set that I'm extremely proud of, that that's the one that I would pick. I think in product and strategy roles, it's incredibly important because you're constantly
00:07:02
Speaker
shifting your purview from here's what we need to get done this quarter to, but here's how this is going to tie into something that we're building three years from now, five years from now, et cetera.
Challenges for Women in Tech
00:07:14
Speaker
And without being able to think through all of those different scenarios, you're not going to be successful. That said, product in general has a bit of a challenge on who
00:07:29
Speaker
to articulate who and what a successful product leader looks like. If you are a woman, if you are from an underrepresented minority, you have to have the thickest of skins because you're going to just, unfortunately,
00:07:46
Speaker
be dealing with a lot of rejection, a lot of doubt, a lot of questions of, well, does she really understand this stuff? And does she really know what she's talking about? And can she articulate this to the board? And before being honest with each other, seeing a lot of folks who
00:08:05
Speaker
don't have to justify their smarts in similar ways because they look a certain different way. If anything, that was something that I wasn't ready for. In my head, I am a 19-year-old Stanford dropout dude bro with all the world's confidence and this is how I present and this is how I talk.
00:08:34
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And when that comes in a slightly different package, that's not exactly how it's received. So I had to learn that the hard way.
Mission of ohhello.io
00:08:44
Speaker
So part of what we're trying to do with ohhello.io with our tribe is change it, is being able to actually walk the walk versus talking the talk. So essentially,
00:09:01
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When you think through your experiences, Ana, looking back, what excites you about mentorship? And also understanding the kind of feedback that you
00:09:15
Speaker
and self-awareness of having been a product and strategy lead that has been an executive that has now had her own incredibly respected advisory and consulting firm dealing with boards of directors, dealing with investors, dealing with startups, and also very large companies too that you work with.
00:09:36
Speaker
If you were to give back, just thinking through the mentorship component, what excites you being part of the Oh Hello community that you're going to give back to that younger Anna, who may or may not be a dude bra? Yes. It's kind of interesting to look back on your career once it all starts making sense.
00:09:56
Speaker
And because you know what your thought process was at every step. And a lot of times you're making leap of faith kinds of decisions that are based on some input, some feeling you have, and sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. But it's kind of easy to tell your story backwards. And what I would love to be able to do is help folks who are in that
00:10:24
Speaker
You know, they're about to make a decision. They're weighing different offers. They're weighing whether to go to this city or this other city. They're trying to kind of
00:10:32
Speaker
find what type of role is going to suit them better and I think it just helps having someone to talk it through and really to listen because there's a certain gut feeling about these decisions that you have already and having someone who's been through that process numerous times just listen and gently guide you through it I think can be hugely beneficial and I didn't come on to
00:10:58
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this until kind of mid-career.
The Power of Mentorship
00:11:02
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I didn't know I should look for mentors when I was younger. I just kind of hot-wired things myself. And thankfully, it wasn't a total disaster. It worked really well. But then when I kind of understood the value a good mentor can have, it really
00:11:21
Speaker
accelerated that clicking of different things in your head for me so much that I instantly needed to do that for somebody else and make sure that other people aren't hitting the same challenges, the same mistakes that I've hit. So well said, Ana. Who were a few different mentors that have had a profound impact on you? Well,
00:11:47
Speaker
I think that the first person that I really identified with as somebody who was working really closely with but also perceived them as a mentor was Adam Solomon. He's now at Amazon, like really well-respected advertising leader.
00:12:07
Speaker
Adam and I got to know each other at a very early paid video on demand startup that he was the CEO of and I was an early executive on. And so Adam gave me the blueprint for what a CEO who has a product and strategy and super strong commercial background.
00:12:29
Speaker
looks like because I hadn't come across some very many people like that before except you know in my first company that was kind of me but I had no idea what I was doing then so you can't really there was no way yeah that was just all luck
00:12:47
Speaker
And it's kind of scary to think about how long we've known each other now. It's a really, really long time. And to have that kind of continuity with somebody as they're going through different roles, what's exciting them versus what you're thinking about and having someone like that. And then the second one is, oh man, so Bill Stratton, who is now at Snowflake, he recruited me into SAS.
00:13:16
Speaker
There are some people in this space that have a skill that manifests itself like magic to onlookers and Bill has an uncanny ability to make things just work in really large, super complex, super hard to navigate organizations and he's done this
00:13:41
Speaker
so many times and I remember one of our first conversations, I was so drawn to this skill set and I was like, I need that. I need to grab onto that and somehow get some of it to grow on me. Amazing. Yeah. It's amazing. Well.
00:13:59
Speaker
Anna, the last question before we wrap this up, you know this, as a hello, you're able to give back and donate to over 40 plus different charities within our
Supporting Healthcare Accessibility
00:14:08
Speaker
platform. What is a cause that is near and dear to your heart? This was so hard to pick because they are all, all, all phenomenal. So at least choice. Yes, but across like 40. But I think
00:14:24
Speaker
health in general is incredibly important and I've been very blessed to have a very, very healthy life so far and I know people who haven't. I believe in the cause of Doctors Without Borders so much and especially their mission to go into regions and places where just basic health care isn't
00:14:50
Speaker
necessarily a given. And so I'm a longtime supporter of that there is and I'm glad to throw some more weight behind that support. Thank you so much for being part of the Oh, hello community. Thank you for being on the pod. Thank you listeners and viewers. We appreciate it. You can find on Oh, hello.io. Thanks, everybody. Thanks.