ScorePlay’s Post

Are you a Product Manager looking to gain immediate value from unstructured/semi-structured data? (Really ANY business person - but let's stick with the example below) Jonathan Wray from Aible shows how product managers can use Aible to gain market and competitive insights through product reviews. Acting as a product manager at Vapor Games, he analyzes reviews to understand why Echo Bridge Games is outselling them. He identifies issues like technical problems and poor controls in Vapor Games’ products. Aible suggests focusing on quality control, improving controls, reviewing pricing, and emphasizing role-playing games and nostalgic titles to regain market share within minutes. #productmanager #pm #ai4

How do you build an engineering team from scratch in iGaming? 5 main things to keep in mind: 1️⃣ Hire experts with practical experience. If you want to develop a platform, you need teammates who don't require months-long onboarding and can set the rhythm from the get-go. And of course, understanding the iGaming industry itself is a plus. 2️⃣ Take time to grow the vision and strategy. It's too easy to lose a valuable team these days. Explain to engineers why they should be passionate about your project or product. Despite the industry's trends, money isn't usually the best motivator. 3️⃣ Think ahead about your strategic advantages. Focus on what will empower you in the future. For example, specialize in a powerful bonus AI recommendation engine and hire experts for that. Make it a part of your product vision and use it as a distinctive advantage over competitors. 4️⃣ Be ready to spend like your life depends on it. If I had to set up the engineering team, I'd go for 40 people along with 2-3 strong leaders. The salaries only pile up to 240 thousand dollars a month. Multiply it by 3 years, and you know the rough development cost. That's a bare minimum for the industry. 5️⃣ Treat technologies like tools Some tech gets more attention but It doesn't mean it fits your platform needs. Try to cut unnecessary tools and introduce the ones the team can use to enhance the product. When you cover the basics, constantly improve your product offer.  There's no stopping now. #GR8Tech #igaming #sportsbook #igamingplatform #bettingprovider #iGamingSoftware #softwarearchitecture

🚨 Kaedim3d.com is HIRING 🚨 Send resumes to recruiting3d@kaedim.com ⭐ The world's best game studios ship 7x faster with Kaedim3d.com - try it today to turn sketches into game assets in minutes #gdc #gamedev #gdc2024 #GameDevStudio #GamingUpdates #IndieGame #GameIndustryUpdates #IndieGames

I've learned this early in my tech management journey so you don’t have to. Not every feature or idea is meant for right now. When I started managing larger teams, I used to think it was unfair that some of my best ideas didn’t get noticed. But over time, I realized: timing is everything. Some ideas are simply ahead of their time, while others hit perfectly when the moment is right—like when a client comes to you with a very real problem, and suddenly, you know: This is it. Not too long ago, we had a client who needed a lightning-fast launch—two weeks, to be exact. Automation tasks buried deep in the backlog shot to the top of the list, and fixes we’d been putting off became urgent priorities. That deadline didn’t just get things moving; it gave me the perfect window to push forward ideas that had been waiting for their moment. Want to stand out as an engineer or visionary leader? Sharpen your ability to spot hidden opportunities and know when to act. #GR8Tech #igaming #sportsbook #igamingplatform #bettingprovider #iGamingSoftware #softwarearchitecture

Learning Every Day and Loving It! Two months into my journey with Escape Velocity Entertainment, I’ve already had the chance to contribute to operational issues and BAU processes that needed some attention. It’s already an incredible experience to work alongside industry veterans who have contributed to some of the biggest gaming titles, as well as dynamic young talents who share a passion for delivering another successful game that gamers will love. One key observation I’ve made is the comparison between project managers in software development and producers in the gaming industry. While these roles aren’t identical, they require a similar skill set and face comparable challenges. Although producers and project managers might not be directly “productive” in the sense that analysts, testers, developers, and artists are, they play a crucial role in ensuring the team’s success. What always works best, in my experience, is achieving a “consultancy” level understanding of the area you and your team are responsible for. Whether you’re delivering a credit bureau system, an e-commerce platform, an NPC enemy, or weapons for a first-person shooter, knowing how your team works and understanding what the clients, business, sales or creative director (or any other stakeholder) expects from your team’s efforts is key to gaining acceptance and respect. BTW: we are still #hiring.

Just bumping this up (I'm far not the first one mentioning this), please, product team, do something about this whenever you get a chance. No, it's not on the critical path, it's just an inconvenience. As a side note, would be great if I could activate all those flows in one click (which I probably can using Advanced Find or CLI... but, since I don't have to do it often, it ends up being one-after-another every time)

Hey Folks! 👋 Just a little announcement 🙃 Today was my last day at Jamf. It’s been an amazing 2.5 years with incredible people who truly know how to create great products! The learning I’m taking away from this experience is priceless 💎 I’ve learned that managing a global product brings a lot of responsibility and challenges. The SAFe framework helped us along the way – not perfect, but it made managing various dependencies across different levels much easier. Hours spent chatting with customers and gathering their feedback? Always valuable, offering insights on what we can improve 🙇♂️ Here are my takeaways: 👉 Scaling a product is never easy, and every organization has to find its own methods and solutions. 👉 Being an Apple partner is both an honor and a challenge. This collaboration calls for a super agile approach to building a product roadmap that meets user needs. 👉 Fully remote work across multiple time zones is the best way to establish asynchronous communication between teams. 👉 Innovation matters, but it’s not always the top priority for the customers. Listening closely to each one’s unique needs is key. 👉 Growth opportunities for a product manager are everywhere! In every product and team. Just look around and ask yourself, “What value can I bring to our customers and team?” 🔥 The biggest value in any project? The people you work with! 🔥 And it’s those people I want to thank the most ✌️ Przemysław Słota Justin Clark Ernout van Beek Valerian Fedorow Michał Zięba Magdalena Poskrobko - Żurawicka Sara J. Graves, CSPO, CSM Katie English Marko Heijnen Marcin Albrecht Dawid Antecki Molly Moseley Thomas Crowe Witold Bulak Dominik Stocki Francesco Landi Ashley Beard Christie Vick Hernán Romero Jason Prairie Marek Jarmuszkiewicz Sam Allcock Olaf Bańczyk Maciej Trela and many more 🙌 Up next? A new chapter. I’m not heading to another company, though. Over the next few months, I’ll be focusing on building my personal brand, training, learning, and writing a book (not giving away more details just yet! 🫢) It’s been a great time, though, as they say, the best is always yet to come 😉

EDIT: I appreciate everyone's interest, but we've found our new DD. Offer accepted last night. Game Producers: Going fast, but we're hiring a Development Director on my team. This is a mid-to-senior level production role, based in the US working remote (from approved states) focusing on process and general skills. We are actively interviewing, but still open to a last minute unicorn if you'd like to get in to the process before we make our decision. My ideal candidate fills all of the following (READ these, don't just reach out blind): - At LEAST 5 years experience in production (DD, Producer, PGM, TPM) IN the game industry, with a STRONG preference toward LiveOps/MMOs. If you don't have actual experience working on a live service game, that means we have to train you into the role - and I need someone who can not only come in strong, but can help level us up. You've been there, you know the drill, you've learned the hard way what works and more importantly, what does NOT. - Real scrum experience. Our team is undergoing an agile transformation as I write this and that means I need someone to help with that. The CSM or PSM-1 is the minimum price of admission here, but I need actual boots-on-the-ground experience in running agile teams, preferably with experience helping with a waterfall-to-scrum transformation ON a live game. - More than just a "pod leader" or scrum master. If you've got a lot of experience with running stand-ups, sprint plannings, and moving tasking on Jira boards, that's great. I need you to also be able to become an expert in the game, understand issues that relate to player expectations, live market sales, in-game event planning, greenlighting content. The best candidates are more than just production - they're a little bit design, a little bit product, and a little bit magician. - You've got a system for that. I'm going to ask you how you come up with your dates. I'm going to ask you how you validate your reports. I'm going to ask you how you assess risk, how you track your team's health, how you update leadership, how you make sure we're on course. I'm going to want to hear your systems you've created or used more than just how you personally do it all yourself. If we've worked together in some capacity and you'd like to talk to us about this OR you know someone I should talk with, reach out asap. This role is not going to stay up for long as we're already actively interviewing.

We had a new employee start this week. In our first one on one, he asked a simple question: "When building partnerships for Allstar, what sort of folks are you talking to at these other companies?" - and I couldn't hold back my laughter. Why? In gaming and esports, every company is built differently. There is no playbook. He was really asking, "Am I targeting CEOs? Chief Business Officers? Product Managers?" and there was not a good answer I could give. We work with companies building inside of all sorts of ecosystems - #Fortnite, #LeagueOfLegends, #CounterStrike, #DOTA2, #RocketLeague, the list goes on. But, there is never any one single corporate structure at these companies. A site boasting tens of millions of monthly active users, could have 5 people working on it behind the scenes. Maybe the CEO is the lead developer. An analytics platform that is just getting off the ground might have 30 employees, with 5 of them directly working on business development. Every call is different. I could be talking to a seasoned business professional, or some person who made a really cool product in a game their love, and are now beginning their first stages of growth - building the plane as they fly. And that's what I love about this industry. It's literally a RPG - and everyone has a different S.P.E.C.I.A.L. (you know I had to throw in a #Fallout reference here - what a show). If you're a CEO, or a BizDev person, or a Product Manager, or literally anyone building in games that wants to superpower their products with #UGC - hit the DMs. Let's chat.

Here's that blog post I promised a few days ago, sharing my thoughts, experience and what I've learned over the past 6 months. Be warned, it's a long one, but I've included some TLDR links near the beginning so you can jump to the section that most interests you (if any of them do!). Please feel free to comment with your own experiences and whether or not you agree with my take on the topic, or if there's anything I've missed. https://lnkd.in/eXRarsgg #techlayoffs #productmanagement #redundancyhelp