Magic Gems

Apr 2014 – Nov 2014

Al’s Role

  • Project Manager

Responsibilities

  • Manage Scrum Process
  • Facilitate Key Scrum Meetings
  • Team Management
  • Scope Management
  • Backlog Prioritization
  • Change Management

Project Highlights

  • Soft-launch to A-Countries: CAN, SWE, AUS
  • Soft-launch to B-Country: PH

Screenshots

Download The Game

Backstory

I was hired back at Wooga from Vancouver to help support the Pocket3 team in their production phase. The idea of the game was to bring a fresh experience for the usual match-3 game mechanic. The concept was about matching gems to make them grow and explode to solve puzzles.

The team had gone through all the approval stages from prototyping to pre-production. I came on-board as they just finished pre-production .

What the Product Lead, Florian Steinhoff, needed was a Project Manager who could support him managing the product roadmap by scoping the deliverables based on the team’s progress.

I came with my formally trained experience in Scrum to put all the key ceremonies in place to shape the team into high-performance.

Overall, it was a very good project and we had all the internal team resources needed to execute the project well. We managed to soft-launch the game but we decided not to move on further to global launch as we could reach a profitable bar in our test markets.

Our team did very well and we had many high moments of reaching internal goals. Unfortunately, we didn’t find the confidence in going to the global line.

I had an amazing experience working with very talented people. We built good tools for level creation/management, we had automation tools in place and we had a constant rhythm that allowed us to inspect and adapt in our journey.

Using the concept of maintaining rhythm was a breakthrough for me to manage digital projects. On top of it, that’s when I received recognition for running effective retrospectives to produce meaningful actionables that would overcome many of team’s issues at Wooga.