The Creative Manager is responsible for leading and operating the Creative Department, ensuring it is healthy, scalable, and aligned with the studio’s strategic and production needs. This role focuses on people management, departmental structure, processes, and long-term capability building across creative disciplines, including Game Design, UI/UX and related areas.
Rather than owning day-to-day creative direction on projects, the Creative Manager works in close partnership with the Creative Director, who leads project-level creative decisions, while the Manager ensures teams are properly staffed, supported, developed, and set up for success.
Department & People Management
Lead the Creative Department across all relevant disciplines, ensuring clarity of roles, responsibilities, and career paths.
Own people management responsibilities, including performance management, feedback cycles, goal-setting, and professional development.
Build and maintain a healthy team culture, fostering collaboration, psychological safety, and accountability.
Support hiring, onboarding, and workforce planning in partnership with HR and studio leadership.
Identify skill gaps and define training and development strategies to strengthen the department over time.
Structure, Processes & Operations
Define and maintain departmental processes, workflows, and best practices, in collaboration with Production and Central Dev.
Own capacity planning, resource allocation, and discipline-level forecasting, ensuring teams can meet project demands sustainably.
Ensure clear documentation, standards, and knowledge sharing across the Creative Department.
Partner with Production to improve predictability, efficiency, and delivery quality at the department level.
Monitor department health metrics (capacity, performance trends, attrition risks, skill coverage).
Collaboration & Leadership Alignment
Work closely with the Head of Delivery to ensure project needs are supported by the right talent, structure, and capabilities.
Provide managerial input to support creative leadership, without overriding project-level creative authority.
Align departmental priorities with studio strategy, business goals, and long-term roadmap.
Strong people management and leadership skills, with experience managing multidisciplinary creative teams.
Solid understanding of creative production pipelines, without requiring deep hands-on ownership of creative direction.
Ability to balance empathy and accountability in performance management.
Strong organizational, planning, and operational skills.
Clear communicator, capable of aligning stakeholders across creative, production, and leadership teams.
Strategic mindset focused on scalability, sustainability, and team health.
Proven experience in creative team management or department leadership within game development or related creative industries.
Background in one or more creative disciplines (e.g., Game Design, UI/UX, Narrative Design) is required to ensure contextual understanding.
Experience managing teams in multi-project or co-development environments.
Familiarity with performance management frameworks, career ladders, and talent development practices.
Experience partnering with creative leadership roles (Directors, Leads) is highly desirable.
Experience working directly with AA/AAA game publishers or large-scale co-dev partners.
Background in operational strategy, organizational development, or production transformation initiatives.
Familiarity with studio-level budgeting, forecasting, and resource modeling.
Prior experience establishing or scaling production frameworks, tools, or discipline pipelines.