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General Manager, Developer Platform

Skillz
Seattle, Washington, United States
2 years ago
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About Skillz:

Skillz is the leading mobile games platform connecting players in fair, fun, and meaningful competition.

The gaming industry is larger than movies, music, and books, with more than 2.7 billion gamers playing monthly and 10 million developers worldwide. Mobile is the fastest-growing segment of the gaming market, expected to increase from $86 billion last year to $161 billion in 2025.

As the first publicly-traded (NYSE: SKLZ) mobile esports platform, Skillz has pioneered the future of the gaming industry. The Skillz platform helps developers build multi-million dollar franchises by enabling social competition in their games. Leveraging its patented technology, Skillz hosts billions of casual esports tournaments for millions of mobile players worldwide, and distributes millions in prizes each month.

Through its philanthropic initiatives, Skillz has harnessed the power of its platform to transform the way nonprofits engage with donors, enabling anyone with a mobile device to support causes such as the American R ed Cros s , Susan G. Komen , American Cancer Society , and NAACP by playing in Skillz tournaments.

Skillz has also earned recognition as one of San Francisco Business Times’ Best Places to Work , Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies , Parity.org’s Best Companies for Women to Advance , a two-time winner of CNBC’s Disruptor 50 , one of Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups , and the #1 fastest-growing company in America on the Inc. 5000.

The Position

The General Manager, Developer Platform, will be responsible for a developer’s end-to-end experience and the full life cycle of interaction of a developer with the Skillz platform. This extends from a developer’s initial interaction investigating Skillz, to their process of signing up and onboarding on the platform, to the tools and capabilities provided to a developer that comprise the SDK leveraged to develop games, to their experience of the APIs provided that allow a developer to launch a game on the platform, their ability to successfully market the game, and their experience of being able to successfully monetize their creation.

The Developer Product organization, like the Consumer Product organization, is composed of multiple teams that are delivering a complex set of capabilities and functionalities that all interact and integrate with each other to form the Skillz developer platform. Contained within these capabilities and functionalities are core platform components for Skillz. The exact organizational and product responsibilities the General Manager, s, Developer Platform will have for this complex ecosystem, and decisions made around the direct reporting and/or matrix reporting structure, will depend to a significant degree on the finalist candidate’s experience level and seniority.

However, regardless of the finalist candidate’s experience level and seniority, the General Manager, , Developer Platform will instill a passionate commitment in their respective product organization to create products that the Skillz’ developer community loves to interact with. The outgrowth of this commitment will be that the Skillz platform continues to be viewed as the dominant vehicle for a game developer’s ongoing success, and that an increased number of developers are registered on the platform and developing and launching successful games.

For the General Manager, Developer Platform, the metrics for determining success of the finalist candidate will be:

Right now, there are over 30,000 registered developers and just under 10,000 active developers. There are over 30 million global game developers. Skillz is committed to 10X the number of active developers over the next three to five years on their platform, 10X the conversion rates, and 10X the number of successful games. The General Manager, Developer Platform will be responsible for achieving these results.

The Person

The General Manager, Developer Platform will be a seasoned and experienced executive with a track record of successfully building, shipping and monetizing software. The ideal candidate will have minimum three years’ general management experience, e.g., managing a multi-functional team spanning different elements of product management to product development, and if not directly responsible for sales and marketing activities associated with the products under their management, minimally has been held accountable for the business results of their products and managed accordingly on a P&L basis.

The General Manager, Developer Platform will have a demonstrated track record of successfully leading multiple product teams, each a multi-functional team focused on the articulation of a product strategy, roadmap and launch of successive products that have been proven to powerfully resonate and delight their targeted customers. The ideal candidate will have directly managed a minimum of three Product Managers, and matrix managed, including accountability for the product engineering organization, at least a 100 plus person organization. Our finalist candidate will be committed above all else, to leverage data and analytics to create and launch innovative products that delight and surprise customers, engendering the strongest levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The finalist candidate will ideally have gained this experience in the design, delivery and business management of a gaming development platform (B2B), or the production and delivery of a major gaming title(s) as an Executive Producer. Even though the GM’s possible experience as an EP moves more to the DTC as opposed to the B2B model, if the finalist candidate’s experience set is fundamentally as a EP, it is essential that the GM has been in working with developers, helping to design and implement tools, practices and methodologies that empower developers/creators to deliver more engaging and successful games.

To this end, the General Manager needs to be equally grounded in providing tools and a platform for developers/creators to build engaging, exciting, and fun games, and understand the trade-offs between simple to complex features, fun, player engagement, time to release, and monetization. Regardless of whether the finalist candidate is more focused on gaming developers from a B2B or DTC perspective, the finalist candidate will have successfully developed and launched products that have grown from $0 to $100 million plus.

It is also possible that the GM has focused on building and launching successful tools and a platform for developers in general, but not specifically gaming developers, and has been employed with a software/technology company that has a strong developer ecosystem and a development environment platform with a fully developed and mature SDK at its core. If this is the case, it is essential that the finalist candidate personally loves and plays games.

Lastly, the General Manager, Developer Platform will ideally be well versed with the ecosystem of game developers and have an obsession of making game developers as successful as possible.

Skillz embraces diversity and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As part of our commitment to diversifying our workforce, we do not discriminate on the basis of age, race, sex, gender, gender identity, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, citizenship, veteran status, or disability status, and we operate in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance .

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