product marketing manager - game

What does the typical day look like for a marketing manager at a top social-gaming company?

To find out, Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Victoria Black spoke to Daniel Helmhold, a 2011 ESADE MBA grad, who holds that position at Kabam in San Francisco. Before enrolling at ESADE, Helmhold worked in online ad sales at Google (GOOG) when it was still a private company. 

6:30 a.m. I get up and get into my workout clothes and have a quick breakfast bar so I have enough energy to work out. I do this before I do anything else—before opening my computer and turning on my cell phone.


7:30 a.m. I usually sit in the back yard with my laptop and a big cup of water to cool down. I don’t drink caffeine, so it’s pretty much all water, all day. I check my e-mail to see what has come in overnight from the offices in Beijing and Luxembourg.

8:00 a.m. After checking in and seeing that there’s nothing crazy going on, I shower, do my hair, and get dressed. Then I leave to go to work.

8:30 a.m. I listen to the Wall Street Journal morning edition podcast while I commute to work. My commute consists of a two-block walk to the train and then just five minutes on the train to downtown San Francisco. From there it’s just another two-block walk to the office.


9:00 a.m. I get to the office, which is completely empty because few of our engineers are here by 9 a.m. I go to a meeting with the senior director of product marketing and the community management team. There are associates dialing in from Luxembourg. We get together to discuss the review results of all events that have occurred recently, and we go through the metrics of the program: the number of people that engaged, the revenue generated from events, key learnings of what we should execute again and what we shouldn’t. We also take a detailed look at what we are executing in the coming week. We are running a big event on Twitter, for instance, and want to increase the number of people following us by a given number. We take a look at our four-week plan, which is relatively long term—we work in one- to two-week sprint cycles and like to produce new content once a week. So four weeks is a major horizon we work with.

10:00 a.m. I go through my e-mails and catch up on daily correspondence—understanding what people need and getting back to them. I spend about an hour trolling through e-mails asking and providing deliverables.

11:00 a.m. I have a weekly team meeting for one of our games, Dragons of Atlantis. This game team meeting is made up of our front- and back-end engineers, 2D and 3D artists, PX player experience, and quality assurance, who test the game to see new features. Then there is product marketing (me), community management, and our monetization team, and we all go over exactly what is going on with the game. We go over the road map—when we are releasing new features and what’s going live. And we talk about major issues: blockers, bugs, problems, and their status. Every group gives an update and we have strategic discussions for specific plans. If there’s something large coming up, I will build a plan. It’s lots of coordination.


12:00 p.m. Time for lunch. We get lunch catered free at work every day. I eat at the office probably nine out of 10 days. I eat lunch at my desk pretty much every day, just grabbing it from about 20 feet away and sitting back down.

12:30 p.m. I sit and play our games on Kabam.com and the games of our competitors to keep an eye on what everyone’s doing and to know our competition.