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Form of workJob Description
WHO ARE YOU?
You love building and growing teams! You love to work closely with the development team to help build the plan for upcoming goals while tracking progress along the way and creating mechanisms to communicate that progress to the game team and publishing leadership.
You love puzzles: the game development and game studio kinds, where we've encountered a problem that has countless solutions, and you dive in with leaders across the dev team to help illuminate the best answer for the moment. You enjoy the process of building and growing connections between teams and companies from co-development to outsourcing to console certification to ensure a game can accomplish its production goals and get to launch.
When you start work in the morning, one of the first questions you ask is: what complicated cross-team dependency do we need to account for so our teams can iterate rapidly without distraction? You measure success based on speed of iteration in how quickly we can test new ideas in the game. You believe process should only exist if it helps the development team move faster and better. You believe different disciplines and teams work in different ways and help support them to work in the way that's best for them.
You find joy in mentoring and growing both individuals and a team. You find yourself constantly exploring the problem spaces and are hungry to learn because you're passionate about making the best darn workplace anyone has ever seen. You value a person's ability to meaningfully contribute as a team member over their own personal deliverable skills.
You take personal pride when the team delivers a product on or above quality expectations, on schedule and at cost.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
- Guide and mentor a team of producers and program managers across development of a major AAA game title from early development to launch and beyond.
- Mentor a future studio leader to build the experience and knowledge-set to be a production director on a future project.
- Support and mentor program managers in their design, prioritization, deployment, and futureproofing of innovative programs designed to solve game team and studio difficulties. Support them in testing new ways of working in a global environment to seek developer efficiency while simultaneously maintaining developer engagement, autonomy, and ownership.
- Support and mentor producers in their construction of milestones, sub-milestones, estimation, prioritization, scheduling, and coordination of cross-team dependencies.
- Work closely with platform partners to build operational plan leading up to launch for the product across multiple platforms, meeting all platform requirements and integrating schedule with 3rd party marketing schedules.
- Coordinate efforts between development, release management, platform, infrastructure, operations, and QA to build an effective release, hot-fix and patching cadence based around ArenaNet's unparalleled up-time and seamless patching structure.
- Coordinate with publishing team to build integrated development and publishing plan from announce to launch to live coordinating across all channels (marketing, PR, community, preview events, betas, regional publishing, etc.)
- Coordinate with studio operations team to ensure core elements of studio operations and game development are in alignment across game team and studio.
- Partner with studio external development team to build ramping development plan to support required outsource and co-development pipelines.
- Collaborate with individuals and teams across all disciplines to create long-term, large-scale project schedules, budget resources, drive milestones, and scope the project within budget.
- Partner with Game Director to create yearly resource and budget planning for team.
- Identify and mitigate risks throughout the product lifecycles.
- Identify risks in advance to minimize impacts on the product lifecycles.
- Partner with related stakeholders to develop policies and work processes to address specific risks and perform after-incident recoveries.
- Report to the publishing team on the status of development on a regular basis.
- Clear communication with the publishing team is a key to ensure alignment, there are a million obstacles in game development, as long as we communicate issues in advance, we have the maximum range of options for solutions!
- Develop effective reporting formats and structures to improve communication with publishing.
WHAT YOU'LL NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL
- 12+ years' game industry experience
- 7+ years' video game experience managing product related teams.
- 5+ years' experience in publishing, and live operation for free-to-play online games.
- Have been a Production Director or EP leading the launch of at least 1 new AAA title on console and PC platforms.
- Have previously worked closely with console partners on carrying an AAA product from development to launch.
- Have played MMORPG genre games and have a basic or better understanding of the genre.
- Have significant experience working closely with a publishing organization and reporting to top level management across publishing.
- Ability to create project schedules and milestones and monitor the progress of department milestones and specific tasks against those schedules.
- Passion for games and desire to create fun and engaging online experiences.
- Excellent organization skills, attention to detail and the ability to multi-task
- Strong knowledge and understanding of game design fundamentals with the ability to prioritize feature and content improvements, work as a partner across teams and regions, and deliver measurable product improvements to a live product.
- Strong communication, collaboration, and management skills with a proven track record of working in successful teams.
- Analytical skills – comfortable with a wide range of industry standard analysis, e.g., multivariate testing, linear regressions, time series forecasting, ANOVA. etc.
- Exceptional Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint skills
- Excellent execution skills that will realize strategies and tactics.
- Deep knowledge of the online free-to-play games from user data analysis to monetization planning
- Experience or knowledge of gaming industry and/or online entertainment companies
- Comfortable presenting complex findings to varied groups in a concise, digestible way.
- Experience managing multi-functional teams.
- Ability to foster open communication, influence others, and write and speak with impact
This is a hybrid position based out of our Bellevue, WA office.
Total compensation is salary plus annual bonus potential. Please note that the listed pay range is a general guideline only. We take into consideration your experience and qualifications when determining final salary. This role is also eligible for medical, dental, vision and life insurance, short and long term disability, 401(k), flexible and dependent care spending accounts, PTO, paid holidays and parental leave.
