Product Resident, NPE - Social Gaming at Facebook

Job Description

• New Product Experimentation (NPE) is a community of entrepreneurs at Meta building new experiences that will meaningfully improve people’s lives. Our goal is to innovate from within Meta by testing and iterating on a diverse set of products, each with their own hypotheses, people problems and target audiences, that can eventually mature into meaningful new opportunities for Meta. The NPE Residency Program (NPE-RP) is NPE’s new way of enabling Global tech entrepreneurs to make their ideas a reality.
• Through the course of this 6-month program, you get the opportunity to work with experienced tech builders to ideate and test your product ideas to solve an important problem experienced by people while partnering with mentors who will support you with a combination of real-world experience, design thinking processes, and access to Meta’s resources.
• You will be trained in design thinking processes while prototyping new products through a capstone project, which is part of the curriculum. Our ideal resident has the ability to work collaboratively in small teams to research a target audience, ideate, prototype, and bring key stakeholders along on the journey. One area of focus for us is building impactful zero to one social gaming products in Nigeria.
• This effort is focused on addressing user needs around games that encompasses not only achievement and social connection, but also radical forms of agency.
• The successful resident will have deep interest in exploring and designing games around themes and gameplay that are relevant to Nigerian audiences.
• They will have a passion for playing and making games and a deep understanding of several aspects of design including levels, control, retention and game-feel. We operate from the principle of building local before thinking global, and primarily view Africa as a multi-country market starting with its largest economy, Nigeria.
• The successful resident will collaborate closely with the resident manager and other cross functional teams to:

Responsibilities

• Conduct formative research to identify and fine-tune the right user needs around social gaming in Nigeria.
• Proactively identify opportunities to translate the user needs into highly engaging features and products.
• Design and execute iterative design research needed to mold early product ideas into testable prototypes.
• Conduct creative evaluative research to improve, refine and prepare the early prototypes for build.
• Plan and execute systems mapping, customer journeys and service blueprints.
• Facilitate workshops with different user panels, clients and stakeholders.
• Take broad, conceptual ideas and turn them into something useful and valuable.
• Create new interactive prototypes, test and refine them with users.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Product Development related fields such as HCI, Computer Science, Business, Design, Psychology, Social Sciences etc.
• 2+ years of experience in designing and prototyping games within or outside game engines.
• Experience in early-stage concept development and creating games from first ideas.
• Experience in a start-up or a fast-paced product development environment.
• Ability to work within a self-directed culture and navigate ambiguity.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with rapid prototyping and fast iteration through feedback and user testing.
• Solid knowledge of industry trends on game genres, gameplay, as well as development and financial models.
• Able to showcase your end-to-end design process across multiple projects, that include interaction and visual design artefacts, multiple iterations, and high-fidelity prototypes.
• Relevant experience in taking a novel idea from concept to delivering a new customer product.
• Experience developing games for mobile devices (iOS and Mobile).
• Experience using game engines such as Unreal Engine 4, Unity3D etc.
• Experience with storytelling to get traction with various audiences.
• Experience with data and utilising data to define and support hypotheses.
• Communication skills to influence stakeholders throughout the design journey.