Context
MCN, a regional media network within the Omnicom family, relies on Admod for financial reporting and business intelligence across multiple offices and agencies. Over time, the system had accumulated friction: workflows that didn't match how finance teams actually worked, integration gaps between offices, and compliance requirements that were satisfied through manual workarounds rather than by the system itself.
The challenge
- Streamline reporting workflows used by finance teams in different offices with different local practices.
- Improve integration so data flowed between entities without manual re-entry and reconciliation.
- Embed compliance requirements into the workflows themselves, so being compliant became the default path, not extra work.
My role
I led product discovery and requirements across the finance stakeholders in each office, mapping their as-is workflows before proposing the to-be state. I prioritized the optimization backlog against business impact, wrote the functional specifications for each workflow change, and coordinated delivery with the development team through sprint cycles, including estimation reviews and change request management with the client.
Different offices wanted different things, and everything could not be first. I used a structured prioritization based on financial impact, compliance risk, and user pain, and communicated the reasoning transparently. Stakeholders don't need to win every argument; they need to trust the process that decided.
Approach
- Workflow mapping first. Documented current processes per office before specifying changes, so optimizations addressed real behavior instead of assumed behavior.
- Integration requirements. Specified data flows between offices and systems, eliminating duplicated entry and the reconciliation errors it produced.
- Compliance by design. Turned compliance checkpoints into system validations and approval gates within the workflow, rather than external checklists.
- Usability improvements. Applied my design background to simplify screens finance teams touched daily, cutting training time and input errors.