Product Manager | Candy Crush Soda Saga

Craft:

Games Design & Production

Job Description:

The Product Manager for the Stand Out in the Market theme will help make Candy Crush Soda Saga a more distinctive, compelling and relevant choice for players.

Working in the Kairos team, you will shape and deliver experiences that create memorable reasons to return, play and progress in Soda. This includes exploring and scaling differentiated event formats, mini-games, competitive and social experiences, and other product bets that help Soda stand out in priority markets and against an increasingly sophisticated puzzle-game landscape.

You will work closely with a cross-functional team to turn player and market opportunities into clear product hypotheses, well-scoped tests and high-quality launches. You will use data, player insight and competitive understanding to decide where to invest, what to iterate and what to stop.

This is an individual contributor role with no direct line-management responsibility, but significant influence on the direction, focus and effectiveness of the Kairos team.

Your role within the Kingdom

The Product Manager is accountable for:

• Product impact — Delivering differentiated player experiences that create measurable value for players and contribute to Soda’s engagement, retention and monetisation ambitions.

• Team effectiveness — Working with cross-functional peers to create clarity, momentum and a healthy, high-performing delivery environment.

• Learning and decision quality — Ensuring the team develops useful evidence quickly, makes clear choices, and focuses investment on the opportunities with the strongest potential.

Key Responsibilities

Product Strategy & Planning

• Translate the Stand Out in the Market strategy into clear opportunities, hypotheses, objectives and team priorities.

• Develop a strong understanding of player needs, market trends, competitor products and the distinctiveness of Soda’s proposition in priority markets.

• Identify opportunities to create compelling, repeatable experiences that complement the core game and differentiate Soda.

• Define success metrics and guardrails, connecting feature-level outcomes to broader engagement, retention and monetisation goals.

• Partner with the Product Director and team leads to refine the roadmap based on evidence, capacity and changing business context.

• Surface key assumptions, risks and dependencies early, and design proportionate tests to validate them.

Execution & Delivery

• Lead the product development process for assigned initiatives, from problem framing and concept development through experimentation, launch and iteration.

• Collaborate closely with design, engineering, art, analytics and other partners to create experiences that are fun, understandable, technically feasible and commercially effective.

• Balance discovery with delivery: move quickly enough to learn, while maintaining the quality required for player-facing experiences at scale.

• Ensure initiatives have clear player value, defined scope, measurable outcomes and an actionable delivery plan.

• Maintain focus on the most valuable work, helping the team make effective trade-offs and reprioritise when needed.

• Coordinate dependencies across Meta, LiveOps, Marketing and other Soda teams.

Insight, Experimentation & Decision Making

• Use quantitative data, qualitative research, player feedback and competitive analysis to inform product decisions.

• Define clear learning agendas for experiments and assess results rigorously, including both intended impact and player or business risks.

• Recommend whether to iterate, scale, pause or stop initiatives based on evidence.

• Document and communicate product decisions, hypotheses and outcomes clearly, ensuring stakeholders understand the rationale and implications.

Team Leadership & Collaboration

• Create clarity and alignment by communicating the product intent, priorities and success criteria for the work you lead.

• Build strong working relationships across disciplines and actively resolve ambiguity, misalignment and operational blockers.

• Contribute to a culture of constructive challenge, ownership, learning and continuous improvement.

• Support team planning and ways of working that improve speed, quality and decision-making.

Communication & Stakeholder Management

• Communicate product strategy, progress, learnings and decisions clearly to both team-level and senior stakeholders.

• Adapt communication to the audience, from detailed working sessions to concise leadership updates.

• Build alignment across teams whose plans or priorities intersect with Kairos’ roadmap.

• Represent the player perspective and commercial rationale consistently in cross-functional discussions.

Skills to create thrills

• Experience as a Product Manager in free-to-play games, mobile games or another high-scale consumer product environment.

• Strong product judgement, with an ability to connect player experience, business value and delivery reality.

• Demonstrated experience taking a product initiative from insight or hypothesis through testing, launch and iteration.

• Strong analytical skills and confidence using data to frame opportunities, evaluate impact and make decisions.

• Curiosity about player behaviour, game design, LiveOps, monetisation and competitive dynamics.

• Experience working effectively with cross-functional teams in an iterative development environment.

• Clear, concise communication and stakeholder-management skills.

• Comfort operating in ambiguity, with a pragmatic approach to prioritisation and problem solving.

• A genuine motivation to build experiences enjoyed by millions of players globally.

Why Join Us

At King, you will join a creative, data-driven team focused on bringing Candy Crush Soda Saga back to growth.

In Kairos, you will have the opportunity to help define the experiences that make Soda feel meaningfully different: creating new reasons for players to choose the game, return to it and talk about it. You will work with talented partners across Barcelona and Stockholm, with the space to turn promising product ideas into real, measurable player impact.

About King

With a mission of Making the World Playful, King is a leading interactive entertainment company for the mobile world with more than 20 years of history of delivering some of the world’s most iconic games in the mobile gaming industry, including the world-famous Candy Crush franchise, as well as other mobile titles such as Farm Heroes Saga. Around 200 million people play a King game every month. King, part of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), has Kingsters in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Malta. More information can be found at King.com or by following us on LinkedIn and @lifeatking on Instagram.