Ryan Raffel

About Ryan Raffel

I\'ve been a software engineer and I\'ve been a sales rep. I\'ve written production code and I\'ve written cold emails. My career hasn\'t followed a straight line, but it has followed a consistent thread: I keep ending up at the intersection of how things are built and how they\'re sold. That intersection is where I do my best work. I can sit in a room with engineers and talk about API architecture, caching strategies, and system design. I can sit in a room with business leaders and talk about pipeline, free cash flow, and go-to-market. Most people live on one side of that line. I\'ve spent a decade learning to be useful on both. Right now I\'m a Principal Technical Partner Manager at NextRoll, where I build the integration partnerships that connect AdRoll to the broader marketing and sales ecosystem — CRMs, AI agents, MarTech platforms. It\'s technical work with strategic consequences, which is exactly where I want to be. But the title is just the current chapter. I\'ve deliberately spent time in sales, engineering, product, support, and partnerships — not because I couldn\'t pick a lane, but because the most expensive problems in a software company happen in the handoffs between departments. I wanted to see the whole map, not just my corner of it. I write about the frameworks and operating principles I\'ve picked up along the way — not because I have it all figured out, but because I\'ve found that putting an idea into words is the fastest way to find out if it\'s actually any good.

Experience

1. Principal Technical Partner Manager

   Nextroll

   Dec 2025 — Present

   Every skill I\'ve built — sales, engineering, product, partnerships — converges in this role.I own the technical partnerships and API integrations behind AdRoll\'s Connected Ecosystem strategy. The work falls into three areas.The first is high-leverage white-label partnerships. Partners like Yelp and Automattic white-label AdRoll\'s advertising infrastructure to extend their own reach. The upfront cost is significant — finding the right partner, building the business case, architecting the technical integration. But once the APIs are connected, every new customer and every expanded budget flows through with minimal overhead. No dedicated account managers, no commissioned reps. It\'s some of the highest-margin revenue at NextRoll, and building and maintaining these integrations is one of the biggest contributions I can make to the company\'s enterprise value.The second is CRM and MarTech integrations — HubSpot, Klaviyo, Iterable, Braze, ActiveCampaign. This is the steady-state work of expanding our reach, making customers stickier, and opening new markets through bi-directional data integrations and identity resolution.The third is positioning AdRoll for what\'s next. I\'m leading our work around AI-powered integrations and Model Context Protocol (MCP), preparing for a future where customers may not buy ads through a UI at all — where an agent orchestrates a campaign on their behalf. That future is closer than most people think, and the platforms that are ready for it will win.

Education

• The Aji Network

  BPC-56, Linguistics, Offers, Innovation, and Business Strategy

• Indiana University Bloomington

  Bachelor of Science, Information and Process Management

Skills

• Salesforce.com
• Microsoft Excel
• Public Speaking
• Project Management
• Microsoft Sql Server
• Email Marketing
• Visio
• Data Analysis
• Java
• Sales
• Saas
• Customer Service
• Consulting
• Software as a Service (Saas)
• Marketing Automation
• Customer Relationship Management (Crm)
• Stack Sprinkler