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Senior Development Director - EA Partners
4 years ago
Senior Development Director - EAP
We Are EA Partners
EA Partners seeks out and discovers the best and boldest development talent worldwide to partner with and supports them to release and publish new and exciting games that our players will love. We constantly look for new and innovative games, from small indies to large independent game studios around the world, who are looking to leverage the experience of EA as both a development and publishing partner. We aim to build lasting, respectful and mutually successful partnerships with all of our independent studios.
We are looking for self-motivated and driven individuals to drive the EAP business forward and grow our already experienced global production team.
The Opportunity Ahead:
You will be a person who focuses on and enjoys working with a variety of independent studios on the execution of a number of games. You will be responsible for ensuring there are credible plans and budgets in place and that the studios are set up for success to deliver on them. In addition, you will be accountable for building relationships with the studios’ development management team to ensure that there is an effective and efficient development process for the projects that allows them to meet their objectives of on-budget, on-time and to quality game releases. You will be using your experience to help influence, coach and develop the partner studios, ensuring they are connected to the right people and teams within the EA organization to achieve successful launches and ongoing support of amazing gaming experiences.
What a Senior Development Director does:
You need to be someone driven to get things done as well as being a creative, enthusiastic and natural leader. As a leader you will set your own priorities and manage your time accordingly; a typical week could include:
- Being present in the main local EA studio at the start of each week to connect with the rest of the EAP team and other EA stakeholders. Attending team meetings, updating on your project priorities and building great internal relationships.
- Travelling regularly to partner studios to build strong working relationships.
- Working with your assigned development teams and where necessary, providing coaching to help leverage your experience to develop the partner studios’ Producers and Development Directors to achieve our collective goals.
- Collaborating on process, understanding different studios have different ways of developing games, you should be comfortable analysing what is and isn’t working and suggesting alternative development processes or methodologies to suit the project needs.
- Ensuring that the development partner studio is connected with and talking to the right people and teams within EA to help mitigate risks and keep development on track.
- Identifying, communicating and managing project risks and driving mitigation planning.
- Providing effective feedback to both people they manage (if applicable) and members of their team.
- Nurturing a healthy and collaborative relationship between EAP and the independent development studio.
- Managing project budgets in line with studio priorities.
- Acting as the main point of contact, managing cross functional teams within EA, co-ordinating deliverables, timelines and dependencies to ensure all teams are aligned to execute flawless launches of successful, quality games.
- Ensuring that projects are effectively set-up, through initial launch and ongoing live service where applicable, ensuring sustainability of studio teams to support on-going launches.
- Collaborate effectively with Studio Leadership and the Director of Product Development (DPD)
A Senior Development Director needs passion for:
- Coaching and facilitating people to achieve studio, project and personal goals
- Applying, defining and implementing suitable development methodologies that best fit individual partner teams’ needs and project goals.
- Looking at different ways to achieve results, challenging themselves and their partners, understanding that change is a necessary part of success.
- Asking appropriate questions and being open to new and innovative solutions to achieve common goals.
- Collaboration, a desire and inherent need to work with others to achieve great things, develop ideas, plans and strategies.
- Building strong relationships both internally around EA and externally with Partner studios.
- Innovating in the gaming and entertainment space, with a keen eye for new business opportunities.
- Adaptability, comfortable with new business models as well as traditional game development/entertainment content distribution models.
Senior Development Director attributes
- Experience of managing large projects and playing a prominent part as a studio leader.
- Experience of implementing and managing project management principles and practices.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Ability to work on complex problems where analysis of situations requires an in-depth evaluation of various factors.
- In-depth knowledge of game operations acquired from a minimum of 10+ years’ experience in project management on AAA game franchises or similar software development projects.
- Ability to manage large project teams over development cycles of varied periods of time.
- Experience of building and maintaining high performing teams.
- Experience of working with external partners.
- Proven track record of defining, building and managing a world-class / AAA rated game production team.
- Previous experience of managing multiple production teams (both internal & external) that have successfully launched games.
- Ability to travel both domestically and internationally to support partner studios in ongoing productions and potential evaluations of new projects.
- Experience in building new business or franchises a definite advantage.
- BA /BSc or equivalent experience. Post graduate qualifications a bonus.
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