By Zach Lenchner, Sr. Director, Product Management at QuantumPath | JWX
A lot of agencies talk about the trader shortage.
It is hard to hire experienced programmatic talent. It takes time to train new people. Strong traders are expensive. The best people are often stretched across too many campaigns, clients, platforms, and internal requests.
That is all real.
But I do not think the problem is only a talent shortage.
A big part of it is an operating model problem.
Agencies rely too heavily on expert traders to carry work that the system should be helping with.
The best traders should be focused on judgment.
Teams are not just asking how a campaign should be structured. They are trying to understand where the risk is, what is underperforming, what is worth scaling, what requires client approval, and how to balance delivery, quality, and performance without losing control.
That is where their experience matters.
But in many teams, expert traders are also spending too much time on repetitive operational work.
Building the same structures. Applying naming conventions. Checking fields. Comparing setup against briefs. Finding missing inputs. Updating spreadsheets. Pulling reports. Hunting through DSPs to understand what changed. QA-ing line items one by one.
Those tasks matter, but they should not consume so much expert capacity.
When senior people are buried in manual process, the whole team becomes harder to scale.
When campaign volume grows, the default answer is often to add headcount.
Sometimes that is necessary.
But hiring more people into the same fragmented workflow does not solve the underlying problem. It can actually make the operation more complex.
More people means more handoffs, more training, more variability, more room for inconsistent process, and more management overhead.
If the workflow still depends on each trader remembering every rule, checking every setting manually, and translating every plan into every platform by hand, the business will keep running into the same constraints.
The team may get bigger.
But the operating model does not really get better.
The real opportunity is to give traders more leverage.
A better operating model should reduce the amount of manual work required to manage each campaign. It should standardize the setup process. It should enforce naming rules. It should surface missing inputs. It should support QA. It should monitor risk after launch. It should help prioritize what needs attention.
That does not remove the need for traders.
It makes their judgment more scalable.
A junior trader can work inside a better process. A senior trader can spend more time reviewing exceptions and making higher-value decisions. A manager can see where risk is building without manually inspecting every campaign.
That is how teams increase capacity without simply adding pressure.
Experienced traders are valuable because they understand complexity.
They know where campaigns break. They know what settings matter. They know how platforms behave. They know which issues are urgent and which ones are noise.
But if all of that knowledge lives only in people’s heads, the team becomes dependent on individual experience.
That creates bottlenecks.
A better system should capture more of that operating logic and make it available in the workflow.
Not to replace expertise.
To distribute it better.
That is the shift agencies need.
QuantumPath by JWX is built to help programmatic teams operate with more leverage.
It gives traders and managers a more structured way to handle setup, QA, governance, monitoring, and recommendations across platforms.
The goal is not to eliminate the need for skilled traders.
The goal is to stop wasting their time on work that software can help manage.
For agencies, that matters because capacity is one of the biggest constraints in the business. If teams can handle more campaigns with the same people, while reducing errors and improving control, the entire operating model changes.
The trader shortage is real.
But the bigger question is whether we are asking traders to do too much of the wrong work manually.
That is the problem worth solving.