The Role

Reporting to the VP of Development at Splash Damage, the Product Lead will be the driving force behind the game vision and supporting roadmap, and responsible for the overall P&L.  You will be responsible for leading SCUM’s growth through game updates, quality-of-life improvements and high-impact paid DLC.

This is a key leadership role requiring a blend of genre understanding, market experience, creative vision and commercial acumen.  Your primary objective is to transition the project from its current baseline into sustainable growth for the coming years while exploring the long-term future of the franchise.  You will act as the product-focused bridge between Gamepires and Splash Damage, establishing a robust Live Ops mindset that allows the local team to operate independently and proactively.

Success in this role requires someone who can navigate the complexities of a long-life survival game across both PC and console markets, balancing commercial opportunity with player value.

You’ll play an important role in ensuring our Croatia site feels supported, connected, and aligned with the wider studio, while recognising and working effectively within local context.

What You’ll Do

Own the Franchise Vision and Roadmap

• Lead the 12-18 month PC and console live plans, ensuring a consistent cadence of diverse DLCs, reactivation beats and other campaign initiatives to drive acquisition, CCU and revenue through regular updates.
• Define and optimise the player journey and lifecycle, from onboarding and engagement through to conversion and retention.
• Take ownership of game systems, driving engagement through the strategic enhancement of existing systems and the development of new features.
• Design and implement compelling engagement loops and reactivation triggers to improve acquisition and player win-back via regular content, marketing, promotion and community beats.
• Balance trade-offs and set priorities across content creation, quality of life, DLC and longterm investment.

Drive Financial Performance and ROI

• Take accountability for hitting profit targets, specifically moving the project towards our ROI target and raising monthly baselines.
• Identify and ship changes that improve player retention, win lapsed players back, reduce refunds.
• Improve performance across all KPIs including retention, CCU, DAU, attach rate and LTV.
• Collaborate with our publishing partner to define a marketing and community roadmap to leverage updates and release beats to maximum potential.
• Use promotions, pricing and bundle strategies to maximise the lifetime value of both core game and DLC content.
• Develop platform-specific growth initiatives for PC and Console, ensuring live beats and storefront presence are optimised for the player behaviours of each ecosystem.

Establish a Modern Live Service Mindset

• Coach and equip the Gamepires team to act independently, using data-driven insights from both in-game and market sources to validate and adjust roadmap direction as appropriate.
• Reinforce the build, ship, review and assess rhythm to ensure successful content is developed and built-upon, and unsuccessful content is quickly learned from.
• Scale up use of A/B testing to validate hypotheses and understand the players’ ‘why’, balancing accrued knowledge of audience insight and game knowledge with demonstrable data to make informed decisions and reduce riskier investments of time and effort.
• Continuously benchmark SCUM against the evolving survival and extraction genre landscape, identifying new opportunities to differentiate the product and capture market share from competitors.

Collaborate with Group Leadership

• Work closely with leadership at both Gamepires and Splash Damage, to ensure team size, overheads and roadmap deliverables are aligned with the overall financial and quality goals.
• Partner with Technical and Production leadership to refine Live Ops tooling and pipelines, keeping process lean and increasing the team’s ability to deploy high-quality content beats with efficiency and predictability.
• Collaborate with our publishing partners and BizDev leadership to identify opportunities for transmedia and brand partnerships that help boost and invigorate the SCUM brand.

 

What We’re Looking For

• Proven track record in a Product Lead or Senior Product Manager role within the PC and Console Live Ops environments
• Experience managing and optimising multi-million-dollar P&Ls, understanding the complexities of ROI-driven targets and utilising both in-game and external tools to drive commercial success without compromising game quality
• Ability to build and sustain a roadmap that drives confidence in both short-term deliverables and long-term opportunity
• Deep understanding of the Live Ops mindset
• Familiarity with data analysis and experimentation to improve community engagement and sentiment.
• Proven ability to work with and understand large and diverse player communities to drive product decisions.
• Comfortable operating with a high degree of autonomy, while knowing when to seek input on more complex or high-risk situations
• Experience working in a fast-moving, project-driven environment where pragmatism and strong relationships matter more than heavy process
• A practical, solutions-focused approach, with the ability to balance consistency with local context
• Able to build trust quickly across the studio and handle sensitive situations with professionalism and cultural sensitivity
• Fluent in English
• Located in, or able to relocate to, Zagreb (Croatia) full time