Riot Games was established in 2006 by entrepreneurial gamers who believe that player-focused game development can result in great games. In 2009, Riot released its debut title League of Legends to critical and player acclaim. As the most played PC game in the world, over 67 million play every month. Players form the foundation of our community and it’s for them that we continue to evolve and improve the League of Legends experience. 

If you want to accelerate your career growth, you need to stop thinking about the Day One stuff. Instead, think Year One, and Beyond.

For example, take this search we’re working on now. We’re seeking a Development Manager to lead the design and implementation of cutting edge development practices, processes, metrics, and discovery within the high impact domain of player behavior. We strive to unlock the best possible game experiences through human factors design, encouraging fair, competitive and social play. If you pull this off in year one, you can expect to gain additional scale to your role and everything that comes with that.

If you’re interested, here’s what Year One is all about. For a manager this is the stuff of dreams - enhancing in-game sportsmanship and creating a more enjoyable experience for players around the world.

• Within 6 months, while partnering with the existing leadership, become an effective leader of the team by regularly providing an open ear to team members, keeping a good pulse check on interpersonal issues, any team health related issues and a build full roadmap of team health improvement work, all based on a well tuned EQ.

• Within 4 months, deliver a robust discovery process for the team that becomes a systematic part of the team’s workflow. This should be repeatable, scalable, and baked into their normal rhythms.

• Within 6 months, identify and build the production metrics to provide repeatable measures on value delivered, team happiness, throughput and more. Ultimately, leading the team’s decision-making to become so data informed, you’d think they had a crystal ball.

• Within 3-6 months, identify gaps in the team's development processes and begin to roll out enhancements in a way that is palatable to the team. This may cover dependency mapping, risk mapping, and other methods you put forth.

You’ll need to bring expert knowledge of agile software development practices and years of experience leading team process. If you merely want a clear task to execute... this is not the role you’re looking for. This role requires someone to identify, investigate and drive the solutions that will support the team. You’ll also want to be data savvy and know how to set up metrics to measure the team’s development work system and diagnose any issues you find. Finally, you’ll want to have spent time honing your leadership craft both in terms of driving teams to done and mentoring them with compassion.

While this is all of the Year One and Beyond stuff, Day One is pretty good, too. These are the things like compensation, company culture, the people, and the location. However, none of this matters unless “Year One and Beyond” makes career sense for you.