Creation Foundations org

Facebook Commerce org

The With Friends division includes the massively successful Words With Friends game as well as Boggle With Friends and Crosswords With Friends and new casual initiatives with Puzzlescapes and LetterPop both in soft launch. The division is a $250M+ business and has enjoyed double digit year-over-year revenue growth over the last two years while under my helm at engineering. Responsible for running the entire engineering, production, and QA org in the With Friends division of over 80+ members between San Francisco and Toronto. Grew the Toronto studio by over 4x through aggressive recruiting and strategic planning. Groomed a team of technical leaders with direct reports including a director, several senior engineering managers and EMs, as well as a senior architect and multiple architects. Member of the core leadership team defining strategy, planning, and the product roadmap for the division.

Took over EP role to officially own the product roadmap for CityVille alongside the Director of Product.

Grew the CityVille team starting from 18 to 42 at its peak across multiple disciplines (engineering, art, UX, design, production, product management). Led the product through various development stages from Concept & Design, Pre-Production, Production, through Soft Launch in Dec 2015, and ultimately sunsetting the app in Aug 2016. Managed the engineering and production teams. Partnered with the Director of Product to drive the product roadmap.

Transitioned the art team from launch mode to LIVE operations growing the team to 50+. Strong focus on predictable schedules, effective costing, and career development emphasizing high ROI art creation in-house and outsourcing everything else. Grew six first time art managers in each discipline (concept, animation, character, environment, UI, and outsourcing) to manage direct reports in their respective areas. Trained managers on effective 1:1s, giving feedback, delegation, and coaching as well as conflict resolution. Attrition on the art team is best-in-class in the company. Partnered with studio leadership to create a strong culture of cross discipline collaboration, moving away from “art as a service” to art involvement early-and-often in the feature development process.

Responsible for execution, management, and hiring of the entire art team for Zynga's first real-time 3D game. Grew the team from five initial artists to a 35+ member art team through aggressive hiring across all art disciplines – concept, animation, character and environment modeling, tech art, UI, and VFX. Drove tools and pipelines to empower artists to have full control of asset creation. Established production processes for managing and tracking of assets through asset lifetime (i.e. daily scrums, Kanbans, JIRA, Google docs).

Started on the original FarmVille to train on the day-to-day operations of a LIVE web game. Oversaw the feature production team and release management for all features. Direct reports included two feature producers and a release manager. Each feature producer managed two feature pods consisting of 3-6 Engineers, Product Manager, Designer, and Alpha QA. Supervised my own feature pod responsible for revenue related features. Partnered closely with QA to ensure stable and timely releases, including resolving emergencies and setting up on-call processes.

Led cinematics production team on this 90-MetaCritic sequel, creating 210 scripted events and over 160 minutes of dialogue, tripling the cinematics content from the original Dead Space. Planned and managed entire production flow, from performance capture in Los Angeles, data solving in Canada, animation in three different geo-locations, and final asset integration by local level designers. Led the team which included 22 animators at different locations worldwide, five Technical Artists, eight Level Designers, and two Development Directors.

Led execution of this direct-to-consumer PDLC project. Shipped game seven weeks ahead of schedule, exceeding target review scores, and post-mortem ratings as one of the best led projects. Led cross-functional team of 20 people coordinating tasks across disciplines and differing schedules. Ran twice weekly stand-up meetings providing team and Studio updates. Conducted regular scope/schedule/resource validation discussions with Sr. Producer and Lead Designer to cut or simplify features to ensure hitting street date to quality. Coordinated with Marketing, Customer Support, Infrastructure, Legal, and QA to guarantee a smooth Day-1 launch. Aligned Compliance and QA to manage bug tracking system and team bug trends. Managed all other PDLC offerings while base game was still finaling.

Led the game team, including seven leads at EA and 80+ developers at Eurocom in the United Kingdom to create this critically acclaimed, 82-MetaCritic prequel to Dead Space. Conducted monthly reviews with Studio executive management (GM, COO, CTO, finance) reporting milestone pass/fail rates, project risks, and mitigation plans. Maintained entire project budget including milestone approval and payments with Eurocom. Oversaw Eurocom’s schedules for every discipline and milestone. Introduced new processes to improve quality and schedule predictability (regular build stability, team dailies, quick iteration, organic scheduling). Managed bug trends to hit a smooth finaling while achieving extremely high quality goal. Only one of two EA Games Wii titles in 2009 to pass Nintendo on first submission in all regions, allowing us to launch one week ahead of schedule in Europe. Audited Eurocom’s technical plans and provided guidance on enemy behaviors/gameplay as well as an integration plan to use existing Dead Space assets in Eurocom’s pipeline.

Managed the gameplay engineering group (eight local engineers and three in Melbourne, Australia) for the full project cycle, staying on schedule, and achieving an 89-MetaCritic score. Architected enemy behaviors, weapons, level mechanics, and player controls. Represented the engineering team in weekly Leads meeting. Conducted regular code reviews with gameplay engineers as well as mentored their career development. Ran weekly engineering meetings to facilitate communication and to set team priorities. Managed bug trends for entire engineering team leading to a smooth finaling process and shipping two weeks early.

Architected a suite of tools used by multiple internal and external Studio products including: The Godfather 1 & 2, From Russia with Love, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06, Superman Returns, The Simpsons Game, and Dante’s Inferno. Led and mentored a team of four engineers to build tools and engine-agnostic runtime libraries that streamline creation of in-game cinematics.

Designed and implemented content pipeline for artists/designers to easily create in-game cinematics. Over 45 minutes of cinematic content was created using this technology for The Third Age.

Shipped titles:+ Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone+ The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers+ Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor