An Interesting Job Opeining AT Linden Lab

[Sid Nagy]

14 minutes ago, Nick0678 said:

"enable a delightful user experience..",

They should have added: "Look how we handled that in our forums, weep for a second silently and apply swiftly elsewhere."

Edited December 19, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Sid Nagy]

.

Edited December 19, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Kavarek]

As much experience as I have in gaming platforms and deployment, I am a tad old for such a position.  I would love to continue helping Linden Labs expand Second Life, however its more work than I would need when I am semi-retiring early. 

[Nick0678]

34 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

and soundproofing.

So you are "the noisy" type...

[Prokofy Neva]

On 12/16/2022 at 8:21 PM, Perrie Juran said:

I need to credit New World Notes for bringing this to my attention.

https://gamejobs.co/Senior-Product-Manager-at-Linden-Lab

What is most interesting in the job description is:

"Tasks include:

Overseeing, planning and execution of projects: production schedules, resourcing, and quality assurance against quantifiable goals. Immerse yourself in Second Life to attain a deep understanding of the feature set and use cases and learn the culture by getting to know the user community.

Promotion of the value of core experience of Second Life to other parts of Linden Lab, and help ensure Product leverages the ideas and resources of the larger organization.

Collaboration across teams to define and prioritize easy to use product features that enable a delightful user experience to drive revenue, adoption, and usage"

I've been in Second Life since fifteen years and if there has been one common gripe I have heard many times it is that Linden Lab doesn't do a very good job of listening to their users. Sometimes certain officers have left us feeling marginalized.

James also has some interesting comments in his Blog.

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2022/12/sl-job-product-manager.html

Various Lindens have been called "product managers" for ages. Patch has had that name in his title, for example. It's not new.

At least we aren't the product here.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 12/17/2022 at 11:58 AM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I think this is kinda big, potentially. Have they ever tasked a manager solely with overseeing development of "the user experience" before? And insisted upon someone willing to embed themselves in the community in order to gauge what is needed, and what will work?

It's also important, surely, because it's more evidence that LL wants not merely to keep this platform alive, but to grow it. Companies holding on to a dying asset with a view to merely wringing every last drop of profit from it don't create positions like this. This isn't just a "holding action": it's an attempt to be forward thinking.

And finally . . . it'll be interesting to see if this means that LL intends to be more "hands-on" in terms of the continued evolution of SL over the next while. The tendency, as we all know, has been for the company to leave, for all intents and purposes, the actual experience of SL up to resident creators, community-builders, and so on. Does this signal a slight shift in that paradigm? And what are the ramifications of that?

Scylla, that's what Patch and Grumpity already do. And this job would be under them if I understood correctly.

[Nika Talaj]

On 12/17/2022 at 8:58 AM, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I think this is kinda big, potentially. Have they ever tasked a manager solely with overseeing development of "the user experience" before? And insisted upon someone willing to embed themselves in the community in order to gauge what is needed, and what will work?

It's also important, surely, because it's more evidence that LL wants not merely to keep this platform alive, but to grow it. Companies holding on to a dying asset with a view to merely wringing every last drop of profit from it don't create positions like this. This isn't just a "holding action": it's an attempt to be forward thinking.

And finally . . . it'll be interesting to see if this means that LL intends to be more "hands-on" in terms of the continued evolution of SL over the next while. The tendency, as we all know, has been for the company to leave, for all intents and purposes, the actual experience of SL up to resident creators, community-builders, and so on. Does this signal a slight shift in that paradigm? And what are the ramifications of that?

I don't see any paradigm shift here.  Let's not forget that Patch was a resident well before he joined LL, and still keeps a toe in fashion and inworld events.  That experience is what enabled the ACTUAL paradigm shift that took place before Bellisseria was created - a belief that the most important driver of retention is involvement in communities. To actual residents this has been gospel for so long that we take it for granted, forgetting that it wasn't so long ago that Patch championed this view within LL, winning permission to build Belli, which has been a convincing demonstration of the importance of inworld community-building and contact with LL/moles.

So it makes sense that Patch would insist that any new Product/Program Managers cultivate inworld knowledge.  The job title seems to indicate that this person will report to a "director" level supervisor in Grumpity's organization, but since Program Managers work across functional borders, I think one could as well report to Patch's group, or even to engineering (I hired a few directly into engineering in my time).  Program Managers exist to eliminate finger-pointing and gaps in accountability that frequently occur BETWEEN functional areas, as well as to target dependencies between groups, so it's not so very important which group they report to.

[Nick0678]

2 hours ago, Nika Talaj said:

....  Patch was a resident ....  Patch championed ....  Patch would insist.... report to Patch's group,....

Interesting... are you in love with him? You wrote his name 4 times.. you can use he/his/him..

 

[Ingrid Ingersoll]

Jack Linden used to be the Director of Product at LL a little over 10 years ago. I don't think it's a new position.