Lead Producer (Unannounced Midcore title)

Position Overview

Zynga, a global leader in social games, is currently seeking a full-time Lead Producer on an exciting unannounced title. Join a growing team building something new to Zynga!

We are looking for a passionate Lead Producer and leader to manage scheduling and coordination for several pods across our development team pipelines on an unannounced title. Qualified individuals are proactive, with excellent interpersonal skills who’ve worked across art, engineering, and design, and have a consistent track record in management of both internal team members and external outsourcing partners.

This lead Producer owns communication between their pods, production team and leads, creating and maintaining work readiness, blocker removals and scheduling information while leading up to a few pods concurrently. A crucial part of the producer role is the communication of the key daily, weekly and quarterly goals, achievements, issues, concerns and features to the development /production team while aligning a group toward a shared vision and supporting a subset of priorities and planning ceremonies.

Under the daily direction of the Executive Producer and in conjunction with the second Lead Producer, work will encompass proactively identifying, describing, tracking and reviewing tasks for development team members, the organization and management of individual, departmental and project-wide scheduling information, identification of task dependencies, production team development, multi-discipline coordination, review meetings, progress and status updates, as well as scrum and agile ceremony facilitation.

Main Responsibilities

• Partner with production and team leads to deliver on the production goals and schedule.
• Proactively Identify and remove dependencies at the pod and cross-team level.
• Manage capacity and understand velocity of a creative and/or feature team.
• Facilitate team and leadership conversations, retrospectives and opportunities to speak courageously, through team ceremonies (including standups, retrospectives, sprint planning, discipline syncs, feature kickoffs) and scrum of scrums.
• Collaborate with your production team and pods to ensure that key developmental and production objectives are satisfied.
• Prepare realistic project schedules for the development team, including key dates and reviews and all readiness workbacks.
• Leverage curiosity data to inspire new questions, behavior, and conversation within iterative development.
• Implement work/project tracking through JIRA and scope management tools and processes.
• Lead and optimize planning efforts for content and release tracking.
• Communicate regularly with team members in all directions on project status.
• Foster and maintain a positive culture and work environment.
• Serve as an internal game critic and champion of quality while advocating for the player!

Desired Skills and Experience

• 5+ years of production experience with one or more complete development cycles in a game production role. Have shipped at least one game or equivalent subset of globally-facing large features.
• 4+ years of experience working with globally distributed team members with diverse personalities and perspectives while creating a highly collaborative and communicative environment.
• Comfortable providing leaders with feedback both on project risks and team dynamics impacting team health.
• Outstanding organization, communication and influence skills, where owning the outcomes is navigated by your ability to wrangle cats aka keep several individuals on track with deliverables.
• 5+ years experience with Scrum/Agile/Waterfall development and rapid iteration cycles, with an understanding of how to best lead teams through various approaches.
• 5+ years of experience using Jira, Airtable, or other project management and task coordination software.
• 3+ years of experience with Trello, Miro, Favro, or other virtual collaboration tools for distributed teams preferred.
• 2+ years experience mentoring and growing other producers through dotted line reporting, using various leadership approaches.
• Familiarity with unity and 3d pipeline including through outsource, preferred.
• Experience leading highly engaged multidisciplinary teams
• Must be a self-motivated detail-oriented problem solver with a strong desire to contribute in a uniquely creative environment.
• Prior experience establishing and being the steward of change management improvements across a team of 20+ people.
• Previous experience in mobile games, core games, and/or live games a plus.

Note: Even if you don’t think you’re a 100% perfect skills fit, our team is looking for attitude above aptitude, and would love to talk if you think your qualifications come close to what we’re looking for.