Linden Lab Hiring Senior Product Manager to Improve First-Time User Experience — Here’s Who I’d Recruit

Here’s an ideal job offer for a UX designer/product manager who is up for the challenge of accomplishing a task that hasn’t been solved in near 20 years*: Improving Second Life’s first-time user experience so it drives retention.

Tasks include:

Overseeing, planning and execution of projects: production schedules, resourcing, and quality assurance against quantifiable goals. Immerse yourself in Second Life to attain a deep understanding of the feature set and use cases and learn the culture by getting to know the user community.

Promotion of the value of core experience of Second Life to other parts of Linden Lab, and help ensure Product leverages the ideas and resources of the larger organization.

The wording above makes me nervous, because it implies they’re not looking for someone who already has a deep understanding of Second Life. Linden Lab once had dozens of people recruited from the SL user community, but that’s since dwindled to a handful.

Anyway, I believe the ideal hire has both experience in Second Life and other virtual worlds:

For instance, from either Roblox or Fortnite, either as a community creator or someone employed at Epic or Roblox Inc. What’s sorely lacking at Linden Lab is someone who deeply understands Second Life at its best and also understands how other immersive platforms have managed to grow their user base. 

In fact, I feel so strongly about this, if you believe you’re qualified, hit me up on LinkedIn and I might write an endorsement! (No promises, either on an endorsement or whether it’ll help, but I’d love to help if I can.)

I’m not exaggerating about the 20 year challenge: Linden Lab has tried many multiple improvements to the user experience since 2003 and nothing has significantly improved retention. It’s so vexing, someone should write a book about this. Oh wait.