GAMEDEV INSIGHTS #6 – Product Management – Guy Zaidenband

Welcome to Gamedev Insights #6, where we dive deep with industry stalwarts. This episode spotlights Guy Zaidenband, an independent Product Management & Game Design Consultant based in Israel. Before branching out on his own, Guy was associated with Toya – an Israeli UGC game studio renowned for producing non-linear, open-ended games on Roblox. Join our Senior Recruiter, Ljubica Garic, for this enlightening conversation. Dive in!

LJUBICA GARIC, SENIOR RECRUITER AT 8BIT

Welcome to another Gamedev Insights. Today I have the pleasure of hosting Guy Zaidenband. With hands-on experience across product and production roles, Guy has made waves in the digital gaming sea since joining Toya Games Studio as a VP of Product Management. He has been the brains behind ads for their Roblox games, and his work led to the creation of the Miraculous RP, a hit game that pulled in over 1 million daily users and another 50 million new players in just six months. But Guy is not just about big ideas, though. He has always been at the heart of the studio’s day to day, juggling art, game design, technical bits, and also business calls to keep things running smoothly. So, Guy, welcome to Gamedev Insights. 

GUY ZAIDENBAND, PRODUCT MANAGEMENT & GAME DESIGN CONSULTANT

Hello. Yeah, I agree. I totally agree. It’s just juggling everything. 

LJUBICA GARIC

Doesn’t it sound really great, to hear other people talking about you, don’t you feel? 

GUY ZAIDENBAND

Depends. It really depends. But, yeah, it’s hearing it from aside, like “yeah, I really did do that, yeah”. I have meaning now. Yes. Hello. 

How to become a gamedev Product Manager

LJUBICA GARIC

Awesome. So come on, let’s talk more about the things that you did throughout your career. So let’s open where you’re actually telling us more about your career path.  How did you actually start off in the games industry as a Product Manager?

GUY ZAIDENBAND

Actually that was I think over 20 years ago. I started as a QA engineer in a company doing video games. I think it was one of the first companies that I had the chance to work for and I remember that I was like the coolest guy in the room between my friends, because I was playing video games and getting paid for that. So I started as a QA and I moved around inside the company into a role of marketing since I was the gamer and it was the gamer industry. I was the face talking to publishers, quickly joined the marketing department and basically became Publisher Relations Manager kind of guy. That was six years until I was like 27.

And then I was working with so many game developers and publishers, I just wanted to be a part of it myself. I wanted to move out of marketing. I moved to Amsterdam and studied game design because there was no school in Israel for game design and basically learned game development. Then I started working with a few startups. Like I had the chance to work with Barcelona FC the club, creating a mobile game for them. Being a producer, I was responsible for a team developing an amazing game. I think it was in Unity back in the day.

And from that I joined Ilyon as a Product Manager. I was responsible for Bubble Shooter. So for three and a half years I was working on casual games, free to play, and then I had the chance to join Toya and really move into Roblox, which was something completely new. By then I was already doing product work for about six or seven years and I had to do a lot of research. Toya was joining this incredible universe, this metaverse that’s called Roblox and nobody really knew a lot about it. There was a lot of research to be done. It was an insane 20 years. 

LJUBICA GARIC

This is actually a great story because we always hear about how tough it is to actually enter the industry and how very common path is actually starting in – let’s put it like this – support departments like marketing, then working your way up to actually into development itself. Obviously your path sounds like a path of constant learning. Could you tell us more about the most crucial skills that you have learned and have developed along your way that actually brought you to the VP of Product role?

GUY ZAIDENBAND

There was a lot of learning in that process. From my perspective it was first of all having the ability to see everything from the marketing side and really understanding the business part of things. And that’s how it connected from going into game design, into becoming the product manager, the person who communicates between the outside world and the creative team, the development team. But a lot of people that I have interviewed for product roles and stuff that they usually come from a tech support or QA or some kind being a part of the development cycle. We usually are on that point in that frame that we have this vision, that we can see what is happening in the whole process. And then, getting to a point where we decide that we want to be the people managing the process itself and managing the product. 

Higher education in gamedev career

LJUBICA GARIC

Do you feel that your official education, game design studies were crucial for your development? This is the question that we really discuss often. Is the educational system good and programs and courses are they good enough? Are they actually following the market trends? Is it worth spending three or four years in an institution?

GUY ZAIDENBAND

There’s the idea behind that concept. I think for a lot of people that I saw is self-confidence in a way that being responsible for product, you need to look at things from a wide perspective. Having the tools in your arsenal or having the experience in your arsenal are both just things that you want to harness when you’re making decisions, when you’re setting priorities. You want to have the education and you can get it through working and you can get it through education, basically through working or education. I get asked a lot about it.

How do you start to hire juniors? How do you get through a pile of CVs and which ones you want? One of the main things that I’m looking for is people who worked on games and have experienced actually working on the games. Or people who have already published games and released something. It could be just nonsense that you’ve done as part of the education that you’re getting. But taking the tools, taking the knowledge, taking the experience, whatever it is and actually doing stuff with it is the difference point. I guess it’s between actually doing and the self-confidence of having those tools. So both options, both options are completely balanced between.

Product Management Recruitment Process – Dos and Don’ts

LJUBICA GARIC

Okay, awesome. And thank you so much for moving the conversation into hiring part! You have mentioned what’s the most important thing for you when you are screening CVs. But could you tell us anything more about your process? What makes a person stand out? What are some good practices that you have encountered and actually started applying in your hiring process? And also let’s discuss some bad practices that you have encountered and learned from or are still noticing candidates or other companies are doing. 

GUY ZAIDENBAND

Yeah, this could be the “good ideas – bad ideas” on so many different levels. I think it is also connected with the fact that right now in last few years I was mostly doing hiring and expanding the Toya team. Toya itself was expanding. And Ilyon where I was working before that was also doing the same, expansion from about 20 employees to 120 within a year and a half. Toya was also expanding from just us – six people in one room – to a company.

During those kind of stages, you’re looking for different things in your CV and especially for a Product Manager. Product Manager as the role can mean that you’re basically not doing anything of the development itself, yet you are there to do everything and anything that is needed in order to support. That’s mostly true for small units and teams and small companies where you have 6 – 10 and up to 50 people. And actually you don’t have a person doing every position. So somebody has to be the person looking at the wide picture and helping where it’s needed.

Adding to that, getting new people that had experience in Roblox was almost impossible. We needed to hire people without experience in Roblox. And then you have to actually try to understand from a CV, which is impossible. So what you want to have is a meeting and a discussion with almost every person that you can about how does their learning process works and how interested they are in learning a new platform and really getting to a point where you’re mostly just examine if mentally that person will be a good fit for the company. So it’s trying to see in the CV if you had jumped from roles to roles within the same company, talking a little bit about how adjustable you are to different situations and then also asking the candidate if they liked those kind of changes.

Sometimes changes can happen because you love the product so much. So today you’re doing the audio or something or today you were working on an Excel sheet just punching in numbers, just because you are that part of the product. Seeing that the person is okay with those kind of changes, that they see the whole picture are things that we were trying to notice. To see if we have people who are more interested in learning and then adjusting and seeing the big picture.

LJUBICA GARIC

Are there maybe any bad practices that you have encountered in this industry, these processes? Regarding the person’s CV or the way that they answer questions? Is there any advice that you can yet share with them regarding certain behavior, regarding which behaviors at an interview could be better? 

GUY ZAIDENBAND

I really am the worst person to ask that, I usually don’t take anything negative.

You get to meet the person for the first time and you probably don’t know him. It’s normal to me that as Product Managers, people try to come up with “how can I help you” on our first meeting and in our intro interview. And what I am trying to see is what kind of a person you are and what are your thinking habits and your personality and how are you adjusting to product. Because product is mostly communication. And they were mostly coming from “we have played your game and this is what we think you should change”. In “notice me”, “try to see I know something” way and I’m like, thank you for the great game design suggestions or UX suggestions.

I was trying to see how their thinking process went to, why do you think this should be changed? To get something positive out of that experience. But I guess from that side, I do not expect someone to understand the complete catalog and the complete insights of why we took every decision with a game. So I don’t think it’s a bad practice, but is something I noticed. And I’m putting it aside and going like, okay, thank you for your feedback, but let’s go back to the interview. 

LJUBICA GARIC

Yeah, this is the feedback box, you know? 

GUY ZAIDENBAND

It’s “thank you very much, yes”. Yeah. 

LJUBICA GARIC

Cool. And are there any methodologies that you have implemented that you have been using that actually help you be better at your thought process? That actually help you see the entire picture and work as efficiently on spreadsheets, on audio or marketing or managing a team?

GUY ZAIDENBAND

I think in all of those situations, what you’re doing is growing from a small team to a large team. Methodology wise, the first of all we always, all of us, we work in Scrum and we work in Agile development and the way we do our own sprints is we see what fits the team itself and trying to get feedback and get as much retro meetings and communication to take this adjustable methodology but actually understand what is fitting to the team itself.

It’s a lot about communication. I think there’s no smart methodology that I can say that’s the system you want to do, but what you want to have is a lot of pens and you want to have a lot of drawing helping materials and you want people to be able to express their ideas in the best way it’s possible. Also, I don’t think that you should, a part of growing is thinking about the processes you need.

A big help for us are situations where I was looking towards seeing when problems start to reoccur instead of trying to find a way to create some kind of a process for the whole team to work. See what problems become a day to day thing and those things are what you want to create a process around. We used some kind of a standard operation process which is just okay, once we start hitting the same problem over and over again, we want to create some kind of a process to feel that thing won’t happen again. Having those retro meetings, I also used a book that I really like that it’s called “Sprint”, but it’s basically a really good product management book, which is kind of how to break down any goal that you want into subgoals and actually limit the time.

So you have brainstorming meetings but actually limiting the time between the thought process and doing process and making sure that they’re small enough so you don’t invest too much time in doing something. You don’t know what’s going to be the result. Or you spend too much time thinking about something instead of doing it and working on what was actually happening and not what the team was discussing again and again. Keeping things short, shipping iterations, and finding your own way because we’re not talking about 300 or 400 employees. We’re talking about companies growing from 10, 20 to 100. 

How to Grow a Game Studio?

LJUBICA GARIC

So since you joined Toya, you have almost quadrupled in size. Also in your previous company, the number of employees grew to 125, if I remember correctly. So could you tell me more about the process of how do you come to this decision? Like, now we need to grow our team at this amount of time, these are the proposals that we need, this is how we will work. How do you make the decision and make sure that everybody on the team is aligned on this vision and this plan? 

GUY ZAIDENBAND

I want to say that it’s a smooth process. It’s not a smooth process. It’s pain mostly. And yeah, it’s the normal connection to the growing pains, right? But it does come to a point where you can’t do everything and you want people to do what they need to do and you have to hire someone to get a specific role in a specific build. Then there’s the whole communication part where they need to start fitting everything.

One of the big challenges is not getting the results or cutting down on the performance of the company while growing the company. And that’s something that I think I can still do better. I think that there’s a lot of things in Toya over the last four years that I have encountered for the first time. I’m just learning from process. When you’re trying to estimate development time, you always get to a point where it took double the time. So when you’re trying to expand over 100% of your own size within a timeframe, it will take double the time.

Having only this communication and having these processes, in the beginning it’s fine to have a chat every morning, but when you have 50 people, it becomes a logistical problem. So, those kind of things are things that you get hit for the first time and going “oh, that’s completely different. That’s something new”. So I think you need to be very careful and very acceptable with your time and maybe try to create that kind of iteration situation where you’re actually retrofitting about how does the company grow.

The second part of it was actually performance because the company is hiring and everybody needs to sit and work together and understand process. You still need to develop and release things. And when there’s more hands on each product, there’s fear that is also coming into the picture. There’s a lot of people doing things for the first time. There’s this share between people who have methodologies that worked in different companies or on different platforms, and now they have to adjust to this company, even though they came with experience. We know what we’re doing on mobile games, but now you have to adjust to Roblox and this whole process becomes very, very messy and it really contributes with fear of releasing versions or fear of not doing enough tests. Or generally fear of having the performance drop.

It’s impossible to grow and not stumble and it’s impossible to run for the first time without stumble. What’s working best for us is actually just think, push things forward, release things as much as possible, learn from mistakes, be acceptable of a failure and just take it easy for those first few months because there’s a lot of people and there’s a lot of emotions and really yeah, just be gentle with this process. 

Know Your Audience

LJUBICA GARIC

You mentioned how developing games for Roblox has its own challenges but also opportunities. Could you tell me more about that?

GUY ZAIDENBAND

Roblox is a unique experience and if you’re looking at it like a Product Manager, you need to do your target audience research, right? If you’re responsible for a new product and you’re trying to get to the audience, you need to research what is happening and coming from mobile games. I saw a lot of companies coming from different types of industries, AAA, mobile games, trying to release games on Roblox and failing for the first time. Trying to come up with information and knowledge about how to develop games and finding out that Roblox is completely different.

Roblox has a few tens of millions of daily active users and they formed their own community. And that’s really the closest I have ever seen to a working live metaverse where people are actually living, communicating there. It’s all connected between playing and just living and becoming an entity in Roblox. Doing the research for Roblox was insane to me, because that’s the world we wanted to live in when we were kids. We would have another world to live in, have our characters, all of our games. And then it became our job to translate those points of what does it mean to develop a game on Roblox to the game developers, to the company itself and really live in knowledge.

I think the strongest connection we had is through the community, talking to the players and having our Discord channel with people, having playtests and trying to get as many of Toya’s employees playing with the actual players and having this communication as close as possible with the players. 

LJUBICA GARIC

Can you share an instance where actually the community and the feedback has significantly influenced a Toya project?

GUY ZAIDENBAND

Definitely. We had that happened in so many cases. One of the first was with Miraculous Ladybug. We had this discussion internally and we had only a few months to develop the game. During that time we wanted to understand what is the art direction that we’re going with.

What we did is actually created a playtest where we created just three different characters in three different styles, only with one room for each character or one environment for each character.Mmaking sure that we’re doing the research and getting the answer really quick is something that we just went up to the community and created a playtest for 45 minutes. And gave the players the ability to choose what environment and what art direction they have. That helped all the artists and helped a lot of questions that we had, we had a lot of discussions about. And after that 45 minute session, I think everybody was very aligned. The quickest way to get to the user is to release, to publish. To get the feedback as soon as possible.

That was one of the cases. Another case where we had a different game. We had a game where you would develop a house and then from that house you would go out and you would go through a road and go to town and just do some playing in the town. We’ve created a playtest where we took 30 minutes and we decided that for 10 minutes we’re going to ask the kids questions about the house, then about the road and the communication to the connection to the town, and then about the town. There were three steps, three parts of that experience. We let the players start playing with their house and start editing their house and ask them questions about the house. And then we moved to the town.

What happened is that when we started asking about the road or about the town, some players were like nah, I’m still editing my house. I haven’t gotten to the road yet. And this whole session broke down, we didn’t get a lot of feedback about the town. But the feedback that we got was: okay, obviously something is working with the house. That helped us change the priorities of the next month of development based on the fact that something just automatically clicked. That’s not something that we could have gotten by data, there was just some of the players feelings and they were, no, I’m just going to stay in the house. And that’s cool, that’s like we should work on that. 

Diversity and Inclusion in Gaming Industry

LJUBICA GARIC

Toya, being a female-founded, female-led company, with its community being mostly kids, teenagers, is very big on inclusivity and actually redefining the gaming space and the way that we actually don’t look at games. There’s a lot of social responsibility towards your target audiences in the way that you communicate. How did you actually approach that and made sure that your values are rooted in every step of the process of making the game?

GUY ZAIDENBAND

One of the important things that you want to do in those situations and make sure that you are aware of is the diversity within the characters and within the options that you give in the game and making sure that every player can see themself in in the characters. And there’s no any bias or the situations that we were trying to address. That’s making sure that you have choice about gender and generally having every style and color and every type of body size or body shape you want to have inside the game. And that actually became just a fun part of avatar editing, which connects in a very beautiful way.

But we did have one specific project that we were working with, Dove self-esteem project, and we created a game called Super U Story. In that game, when you get your superpowers and you’re working in a team, something changes in your avatar physically. You can see that some of your team members have different types of changes to their physical shape, wild, evil character in the game is mostly trying to harass you about how you look and trying to actually create something that is more resembling reality, but also resembling how you should behave, or how you should receive bullying or like self-esteem issues as a character within the game, but actually how you should accept those in real life.

So being aware that you have representation for most of what is happening in reality and not just some kind a fake structure of some Photoshop situation and also making sure that we pass on the messages. And that was most important in that situation is that bullying is happening in a certain way and you should be able to arm yourself with tools to protect yourself from that or at least understand the situation and not take that as a negative thing. I think that was what we actually accomplished with that game, which was a beautiful part.

LJUBICA GARIC

The diversity has also been reflected in Toya’s team structure. How studios can adjust their practices to be more diversity friendly? Could you possibly share any actions that you as a part of Toya have taken to ensure that you fostered this this culture of openness and being super respectful and accepting? 

GUY ZAIDENBAND

I’d want to say that it was my leading agenda coming to Toya from the beginning, but it wasn’t. My eyes were opened up during the process in Toya and I think that it’s mostly Anat’s, the CEO of Toya, responsibility. She was leading the way for all. When we started hiring people and doing the game design plus the research, I realized that there’s a lot of things I did not notice and they were clear to me like, yeah, this is A to B, this is fine. We will get some CVs and we’ll get some new employees and some product managers. Everything is normal, everything is fine.

Then I realized I have seven white, blond, blue haired characters in the game. And then I was struggling for a single digit number of female candidates. While we could have been swimming in tens of male candidates. And that then became noticeable to me that this is a situation and I understand that people looking at us in social media and in Discord will notice that a game studio usually is is constructed of the male game developers and making sure that they see that there are female game developers and seeing that can only help solve a problem that I didn’t even saw from my narrow perspective until I joined Toya. I’m seeing different things today. 

LJUBICA GARIC

So being open to actually see the other people’s perspective on things. 

GUY ZAIDENBAND

Yeah. And to answer your question, for me and for a lot of people that was enough to make that change. Once the team has diversity and once you start communicating with those people on a day to day basis and have fun time together, but you also have work discussions and you’re basically also, you know, in a real life meet, you realize that you have not seen a lot of the things in the picture that you’re now seeing. So there was no process in my mind, that was pre-written. But because that started to happen, things happened automatically. And you know, people look at the world. I hope that Roblox players who have played our games, but also Toya’s employees have a different perspective now. 

Living in Metaverses

LJUBICA GARIC

Awesome. Thanks. Speaking of different perspectives and changes and in the game development space. Are there any emerging up and coming changes that you are seeing now shift, that you are preparing for? 

GUY ZAIDENBAND

From what I’m seeing right now, the world should be moving much more towards metaverses like Roblox. And I know that it’s a buzz word as well. But to see the theory behind it and making sure that everything is connected in a multiplayer situation where you’re also have this identity of yourself within this world, is going to change how entertainment is defined. This could not be defined as a single, linear situation. I think it’s going to be a big mash of everything. I have no idea how it’s going to look, maybe like a tasty pizza with 10,000 different types of toppings. 

LJUBICA GARIC

Yeah, pepperoni, pineapple and, and Nutella spread. But yeah, we will keep an open mind. 

GUY ZAIDENBAND

In different dimensions as well. Same pizza in different dimensions.

LJUBICA GARIC

But I’m pretty sure that with all the skills that you have acquired, and you keep emphasizing this ability to adjust, you should be fine with all these pizzas that are already available or that are yet to come.

GUY ZAIDENBAND

Keep an open mind. Just keep an open mind.

LJUBICA GARIC

Awesome, thanks, Guy. You helped share a crucial advice for all game developers out there, no matter the platform they want to want to work on. For the end of our conversation, I wanted to ask you what is the most valuable piece of advice that you have gotten in your in your career. And would you like to pass it to us?

GUY ZAIDENBAND

Yeah. I think aside from my career within those 20 years, there were also weekends. And on the weekends I would deejay. 

LJUBICA GARIC

Are you playing only video games OSTs? 

GUY ZAIDENBAND

Yeah, definitely. My first way of getting new music was for video games. That’s why I like everything is metal. Anyway, so I think that a big part of deejaying at clubs is understanding the audience that is coming tonight. And I think that whether it’s development or whether it’s research, it’s the audience. You need to know the players, you need to know Roblox players. Or you need to know the genre of games that you are currently working on. You need to know those players and they’re probably going to be the people guiding your development, not the ideas you have in the room of 6 people by yourselves up to 20, 60 people. Still, you need to communicate with your audience. And the best way to do that as well is to release things.

As a Product Manager, you want to release iterations, you want to release better versions. That’s something that’s happening on Roblox all the time. Then you want to cancel the fear out. You want to release dirty versions that things are breaking. Yeah. And not just keep that thing happening inside your brain and inside the team itself. You get much more information from real users.