Senior Project Manager / Producer

We are looking for a full-time Senior Project Manager/Producer, preferably working on-site in Vienna, Austria. You’ll support our production team, managing work-for-hire projects and our very own development (such as Howl or other unannounced projects). Read on below for details!

This is what you do

As a Senior Project Manager (or Producer, in game development nomenclature), you are the person responsible for a project coming together. Supported by our board of directors, you pro-actively reflect on our creative ambitions and the feasibility thereof to plan accordingly and ensure your teams deliver the best possible product - on time and on budget.

This includes shaping products, starting with game concepts from Mi’pu’mi Days, setting up all the necessary planning to take them through internal and external stage gates, supporting our directors in maintaining a strong identity throughout all our products and accounting for the creation of quality PR materials.

For this to happen, you identify and itemize explicit and implicit requirements, plan for the people, time and budget needed and consider the trade-offs involved. Of course, none of this happens in a vacuum, so you can look forward to support from designers, artists and technicians on your teams, but make no mistake: Even the most experienced developers occasionally lose track of project priorities and boundaries. It’s on you to recognize this and make a constructive, positive case for reigning in the rampant creativity to get your team back on track. Or better yet, know the signs and prevent the rabbit-holing altogether. Throughout all of this, you’ll be adjusting schedules and accounting for the consequences as you go along.

We found there can be a tendency among project managers to strongly defer decision-making to specialists on their teams. This can easily lead to bottom-up project-planning, putting too much faith in estimates that are hard to verify. As a Senior Project Manager, you understand this tension and you are comfortable setting and enforcing time boxes, handling most of the resulting conflicts autonomously. On the flip side, you know what creative challenges to escalate before there’s a problem.

Some projects require reporting to and gathering feedback from external stakeholders. In those cases, you’re the enforcer of due process - proactively shielding your teams from spurious requests while managing expectations and giving our clients confidence that their wants and concerns are well cared-for.

When a project needs external help, you’re the one finding and approaching independent partners and help negotiate availability and compensation. You facilitate review and approval through colleagues in the respective fields and, finally, make sure nothing is blocking our cherished partners from getting paid on time.

Most of the time, you will be managing several projects simultaneously, anywhere from three to fifteen people each. Therefore, organizing your projects efficiently is very important: You can’t get lost in any one project’s hygiene or details.

You will be instrumental in our shared journey towards project management excellence. Not only will you coordinate with our Production Director on bigger-picture topics regularly, you’ll also guide and mentor Junior Project Managers.

Some of what you’ll see

Working in a varied and dynamic environment, it is tough to properly convey in general terms what your job will be like. Therefore, we’d like to give you a couple of examples of situations you may encounter:

• A publisher wants us to create a platform port for an existing game after their initial developer withdrew from the project. You’re asked to consult with Engineering and Content department leads to determine if and how it can be done.
• A Mi’pu’mi-Day project is advancing to a limited pre-production stage. You’re asked to establish a way forward with company management and project champions on-board.
• You have trouble clicking with a person leading a department on your project. You sense this is hampering project progress.
• We seek to contract out trailer production on an unannounced project to show to publishers at an upcoming trade show.
• The art department is behind schedule delivering assets for a scene. Lots of dependent tasks are stalling due to this.

Here’s what you bring

Organized and structured work is a matter of personal importance to you. You like proactively establishing systems for planning, measuring and reporting project progress.

Being the center of your teams comes natural to you. Your ability to read between the lines helps you actively seek out any impediments and regularly check in on individuals. Your written and verbal communication is guided by empathy, diligence and a desire for clarity.

You are curious and inquisitive. We don’t expect you to know everything, but we expect a willingness to keep honing your skills on the job: Project management methodologies, game development workflows and techniques, the lot.

You are familiar with workflows and processes in software development and/or creative projects. Equipped with this knowledge, you strive to pro-actively identify, mitigate and manage project risks.

You have at least five years of experience in project management or professional team leadership and are able to talk to us in detail about several completed projects.

You understand your role in supporting and guiding others, leading by example, recognizing mental blocks on your teams and effectively dealing with or escalating these topics where necessary.

Job postings often underscore how important it is to have a passion for video games, presumably as a means to depress worker wages. When we talk about passion, we mean: Knowing what the medium can do. Wanting to make the most of our opportunity to speak to people. Genuinely and personally caring about delivering a quality product.

An unprecedented global virus pandemic did not make a dent in your willingness to travel and meet people. A readiness to work flexible hours on occasion to facilitate a meeting across time zones will be appreciated.

Even though English is our official company language, informal office conversation can sometimes happen in German. People will readily switch to English when you get involved. Communication with external partners is almost exclusively in English.

We understand the above can feel like a tall order. And though we are committed to learning and growing together, we feel it necessary to say this role doesn’t only ask for skills, it asks for confidence. Add a healthy but not overbearing dose of self-reflection and any team should consider itself lucky to have you. And if anything you learned about us spoke to you, we’d love to be that team!