IGP Portfolio Company Leadership Q&A
Fluency's Eric Picard, SVP of Product, shares his perspective on AdTech's hardest problems, AI's role in media orchestration, and why leading with kindness is a product strategy
Meet Eric Picard
Leading with Kindness
Before stepping into your new role at Fluency, you spent time at a variety of other scaling companies and consulted with other AdTech stack products. What unique qualities ultimately drew you to Fluency?
I've been working in the ad-tech space for more than 20 years now. I've either worked at, partnered with, or competed against every major company in the space. I've had plenty of opportunities to help companies through the lens of product.
Fluency is tackling one of the hairiest problems in the ecosystem. The intersection of national/local, conditional decisioning, and trying to be an orchestration layer across every ad platform and every walled garden is an ambitious goal.
So, one reason certainly is that we are trying to solve the hard problem, and I know I can be helpful. But as I got to know the team, I also found myself completely aligned, philosophically and culturally, with the humans involved in the company. That is one of the biggest reasons I was interested in pursuing this role.
AI is reshaping creative, targeting, and measurement all at once. Marketing is one of the areas of greatest upheaval in AI adoption. As Senior Vice President of Product, how are you thinking about where Fluency fits in and makes that transformation a success for its customers?
LLMs are evolving super fast. They're great at probabilistic problem-solving. They are not great at predictable, deterministic decision-making. This is by design.
The Operating System Fluency has built includes agentic orchestration capabilities that are plugged into every media surface. But importantly, Fluency started with the very hard problem of governance. They built deterministic agents that plug into every large walled garden and DSP, and understand how to execute properly on each platform.
This is a system that was sitting ready for LLMs to get smart enough to plug in and provide context, creativity, pattern matching, and true intelligence. Now that they are here, they need someplace to connect that provides the governance needed to execute media at scale.
I firmly believe that Fluency will be this platform.
What does a great product culture look like to you, and what's the first thing you're doing to build or reinforce that at Fluency?
One of my leadership principles is to lead with kindness. As I met with companies and interviewed for various roles across the ecosystem, when I would say that sentence, the reactions I got told me everything I needed to know about the culture of the company I was talking with. Sometimes I would get a little uncomfortable shifting of the eyes and a tightening of expressions. Sometimes I would get challenged — with my statement about kindness read to mean not being performance-driven.
The reality is that leading with kindness does not mean being weak, and it does not mean being "nice." We can hold people accountable for performance. We can drive organizations toward performance, innovation, and execution excellence without losing sight of the need to operate with kindness.
When I said this to Mike and subsequently to the rest of the leadership team, I didn't see any uncomfortable shifting. I didn't see any concern that my position indicated weakness. I saw enthusiasm and immense engagement. Frankly, I found my people.
This is maybe a little broader than what you were asking, but it reinforces the question of how we build great products at Fluency.
We build great products by having immense empathy for the customer. Kindness, empathy, and integrity are intrinsically linked. We deeply understand their problems and their needs, and then we innovate at scale to solve them.
There are all sorts of answers to this question about product culture that dive into having a good process, building capabilities that are predictable and repeatable, and delivering value at speed. Those are table stakes. But building a team that trusts each other — that our internal and external partners trust and value — is the critical path.
We are living in a world that is becoming supercharged with AI. This brings us incredibly valuable thinking partners that can speed up development of world-class competitive research, product specifications, and can automate the product development pipeline ahead of software development.
This is also becoming table stakes, because when engineering suddenly has capacity amplified five to ten times because of AI, the product team needs to be amplified five to ten times to ensure they are being properly fed direction and requirements to build the right products.
So we are building tooling for the product team that brings the same sophistication and automation that software development teams are using to agentically write code — applied now to the product process itself.
Culturally, we need to be driven to solve these problems so that we can operate at scale in this new world.