Leadership at DV does not always come with a VP title attached. It can show up in how someone mentors a colleague, brings teams together, builds trust with clients or helps turn a new idea into something real. We sat down with two women from very different corners of the business, Amanda Carlton and Giovanna Grandoni, to talk about what leadership looks like in practice.
Amanda leads product strategy for DV Scibids AI™, DV’s AI-powered optimization technology, and leads a global team out of our New York HQ. Giovanna Grandoni leads a client-facing Account Management team out of Madrid and serves as Global Communications Lead for Women@DV, DV’s largest employee resource groups (ERG). Together, they show how leadership at DV can take many forms, from client partnerships and product vision to community-building and everyday accountability.
Amanda’s day job sits at the center of one of DV’s most technically complex teams, in an industry in which women are still underrepresented. “I don’t walk into a room leading with the fact that I’m the only woman. I’m focused on the problem we’re solving. But the imbalance is real, and I’d be lying if I said I never felt it,” she says.
The organization she leads was founded in Paris by a highly technical team, and she led the DV side of the acquisition as a product person, not an engineer. “The thing that shifted it for me was realizing I didn’t need to out-tech anyone. My job was to connect what the technology does to what clients actually need.”
Giovanna’s clients in Spain and Italy are her first point of accountability in her role. Everything else, including her global role with Women@DV, surrounds that business imperative. “There are weeks where client priorities completely take over, and days where a big ERG moment needs my full attention. What makes it work is having a remarkable team around me, both in my day job and within Women@DV.”
And the relationship runs both ways. “My Global Lead role has made me a better communicator and a more empathetic leader in my client-facing role, too. The skills transfer in both directions.”
Both women lead teams and initiatives in multiple regions, and both have learned that trust comes from small, consistent actions rather than grand gestures.
For Amanda, that meant checking in on someone’s weekend over Slack, being mindful of cultural differences in communication and simply showing up in Paris. “Sitting with the team, grabbing a meal, brainstorming on a whiteboard. Once you have that in-person foundation, everything virtual gets easier.”
Giovanna has learned a version of the same lesson at a broader scale, coordinating Women@DV events in multiple regions, including a Pink October breast cancer awareness campaign in Madrid, that rapidly scaled to a global DV campaign, as well as local events in Southern Europe.
“Collaboration for me isn’t a value on a slide. In Account Management, I’m coordinating between Spain and Italy so clients get one consistent experience. In Women@DV, I’m doing the same thing at a much bigger scale. It’s just how I get anything done.”
Amanda’s role is firmly rooted inTrailblazing, one of DV’s core values. She brought this value to life with the Scibids acquisition by ensuring a smooth acquisition and integration. “We had to figure out go-to-market, packaging and client education for an AI company all at once, while the technology was still evolving. You’re going to be wrong sometimes, and you have to be okay with that. The alternative is waiting until the path is clear, and by then someone else is already there.”
Representation is where both women find commonality albeit from different vantage points in the organization. Giovanna, sharing her perspective in this piece alongside senior product leaders, admits it gave her pause. “There’s a tendency to think leadership stories belong to people with a certain title, and I’ve felt that myself. Being included here is a reminder that leadership is genuinely broader than a job title.”
Amanda thinks about representation through mentorship. Early in her career, Marissa McArdle, SVP of Product Management and Streaming TV at DV, gave Amanda the space to run with a big idea instead of telling her to stay in her lane. That idea eventually became the Scibids acquisition, which Amanda now leads as the VP of Product. “That mentoring experience shapes how I try to lead now. I want the people on my team to be visible for their work, not steered toward the softer stuff while someone else picks up the technical credit.”
Ask either of them what they would say to a woman who does not feel like her role is “big enough” to lead from, and the answer lands the same way, just in different words.
Giovanna: “Your impact isn’t determined by your job level. It’s determined by what you choose to do with what you have.”
Amanda: “You don’t need to have written the algorithm to lead the org.”
Two very different jobs, two very different offices and the same conviction: at DV, leadership is defined by impact.