Development Manager

Job Description

Development Manager - Maxis

At Maxis, we thrive on outrageous thinking. It's the fuel that inspires the best games in the world. We're innovators and great storytellers. But it's not just about amazing your peers – it's about amazing yourself. Take risks. Collaborate with brilliant minds and dare to dream big. Together, we can change the way millions play every day.

What a Development Manager does at Maxis:

As a Development Manager, you will be responsible for managing a development team. This can range from artists, designers, software engineers, QA and other production staff. You are the keeper of the project schedule and play a vital role in successfully moving the development team from one project phase to the next while ensuring a strong focus on quality, collaboration and communication. You would partner closely with producers (our product owners) to ensure that they are managing the project on time, to quality, and within budget.

Specifically this role will be working directly with our internal tools and performance teams, helping to coordinate work with multiple cross-discipline stakeholders.

To be a successful candidate for this role, you need to be great at:

Leadership:
• Builds and evolves an effective team; identifies resourcing needs, provides challenges and developmental opportunities to ensure that all employees reach their potential.
• Builds and maintains effective working relationships with the immediate team and those outside of the immediate team that have an effect on the successful completion of the project.
• Provides line management to employees across our internal tools and performance teams.
• Maintains regular communication with various disciplines and leads, coordinating dependencies with multiple stakeholders and external partners.

Responsibilities:
• Collaborate with project stakeholders to establish and assign tasks from defined project goals.
• Partner with team leads to manage backlog and priorities.
• Determine the resource requirements to meet the tasks and/or project requirements
• Proactively assesses and mitigates risk for the team's assigned scope.
• Tracks progress of team's deliverables and provides regular status reporting and capacity plan updates.
• Actively partners with product owners, tech and craft leads to resolve problems that surface for the team.
• Run stand ups and backlog planning meetings effectively
• Work with subject matter experts of your team and ensure all workflow is clearly defined, processes are documented, and the team understands expectations on the development workflow.
• Manages career development of direct reports, including development of individual development plans, and conducting regular one-on-ones.

Creative Qualities:
• Prioritizing and resolving issues through creative problem solving skills.
• Recognizing and balancing priorities of eliminating the root causes of problems.

Requirements:
• Minimum of 2 years of project management or team leadership experience and a minimum of 3 years in software development environment.
• Education requirement University degree Bachelors or equivalent professional experience;
• A good understanding of game development, interdisciplinary dependencies and associated development risks.
• Effective communicator and listener.
• Experience in various project management methodologies such as Waterfall and Agile
• Ability to work in a dynamic and collaborative team environment.
• Some people management experience is preferred.
• Familiarity with JIRA.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-gq54xz-3-149-230-44-42 in your application.