FarmVille

The context

FarmVille was one of the largest live games of its era, a service measured in tens of millions of daily players, and a game that introduced a huge new audience to gaming. Zynga set the bar for running a live product: monitoring, release discipline, and experiment testing against a live game at that scale. I didn’t invent much of it. I ran it at the source, and years later I recognized the same practices in how Google ran its programs. That experience is what makes me a live-service specialist.

I joined Zynga after Sony and was able to leverage that experience, the QA methodology and release management discipline Sony holds its titles to, to quickly become a trusted producer and release manager for the studio. For my first 2–3 years I ran release management for every FarmVille release, producing for 2–3 dev pods, covering on-call emergencies after hours, and improving the on-call practices as I went. I was one of two producers when I joined; there were twelve when I left, most of them trained by me, and I finished as the most senior producer on FarmVille.

At peak the studio ran 120+ developers, more than 35 of them engineers, and my job was keeping all of that output on one cadence: new content landing for engagement and monetization, viral moments timed for growth, and production metrics healthy through it all. Two major releases a week, every week, into the live game.

What I owned

• Live release cadence. Planned and shipped multiple content drops a week plus platform updates, on schedule, to a player base in the tens of millions.
• Roadmap prioritization. Drove studio roadmap prioritization across live operations and new features, deciding what shipped now versus what waited.
• Release & QA process. Owned release and QA processes for both live and new games, and ran large-scale playtests to put real player feedback in front of design before features locked.
• Team leadership. Led a team of up to 12 producers, training and mentoring incoming producers as the studio scaled.

The content pipeline (CMS)

The CMS work is what I’m proudest of, and players never saw it. FarmVille’s item data, every unique item that appeared in-game or in the store, lived in one giant XML file, and every release added 5–20 new items to it. With releases stacked back to back, that single file became a constant source of merge conflicts. Not every contributor was equipped to resolve them cleanly, and at our cadence it was expensive to keep qualified reviewers babysitting repetitive data merges.

I produced a CMS tool to take that whole class of problem off the table. The project was the CTO’s: he approved it and led the design, focusing on the auto-merge. I produced it, turned feature requests from the artists and designers who lived in the tool into the design, and fixed the merge model itself:

• Automated, order-aware merging. Releases often carried upstream dependencies that hadn’t shipped yet. If Release A introduced a schema change and Release B was scheduled three days later, the tool automatically integrated A’s schema changes into the future releases that needed them, in the right order, so every dev build stayed clean and testable throughout development.
• Surface changes immediately. The original design merged upstream changes only when a developer chose to pick them up, so a schema change three releases ahead could stay hidden until it went live, then blindside a team mid-crunch. My rule: entering the tool means picking up every release ahead of yours. The tool knew the release order, so upstream changes were exposed immediately, never delayed.
• Two ways in, one safe pipeline. The UX met people where they were. Designers could author an item entirely through pickers and dropdowns; contributors comfortable with XML who only needed the auto-merging could import it directly. Both paths fed the same conflict-free pipeline, with bulk-input shortcuts for the large releases.

The payoff: 90+ development days saved per quarter for a 100-person content team, and an entire category of merge-conflict risk and reviewer cost simply gone. At FarmVille’s scale, removing friction from the content pipeline compounded across every release that followed.

The outcome

At peak the service held 3M+ concurrent players, 36M daily and 100M+ monthly actives, 250M+ lifetime reach, and it generated over $1M in daily revenue. I am grateful for the experience and to have worked with so many great developers.