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August 14, 2013 05:24 am GMT

What Zynga's Management Shake-Up Under New CEO Mattrick Means

66-MattrickJust a month and a half after he was announced as the new CEO of Zynga, former Microsoft executive Don Mattrick is cleaning house. He restructured the top level of management in a move that will see COO David Ko, CTO Cadir Lee and Chief People Officer Colleen McCreary leave. Mattrick explained the move, saying that senior executives could work more directly with product. He said in a memo today, “We are taking layers out of the executive rank to get senior leaders closer to important product initiatives.” Lee and McCreary are very, very long-time Zynga executives who have been with the company for more than four years and have a complicated history. Lee was close with co-founder, former CEO and now chairman and chief product officer Mark Pincus, while McCreary was infamously associated with a brouhaha over how Zynga was attempting to claw back equity from employees. Ko joined the company more recently from Yahoo. He had started off overseeing Zynga’s mobile efforts, then was promoted to chief operating officer later after former COO John Schappert resigned. When Ko had talked to us in previous calls, he emphasized that Zynga was simplifying its slate of games and re-evaluating prospective titles in the pipeline, which has led to an intentionally thinner set of launches this and next quarter and lower revenues. While he has a reputation as savvy political operator, he lacked the years of direct experience in game development that many other longtime Zynga managers have had. Mattrick also said the changes should embolden studio leads to take more initiative on product and game decisions. There are now three overall divisions: 1) studios, 2) technology, live ops and publishing and 3) functional areas covering legal, finance and human resources. One observer said that the changes with studio leadership effectively put everyone in a horse race where they’re more transparently and directly responsible for the performance of their units. In about two quarters, it should be obvious who is underperforming and who is not. The studios are getting consolidated withSteve Chiang overseeing theVilles and International, which could be interpreted as a demotion since it doesn’t include FarmVille. Meanwhile, Tim LeTourneau, who successfully oversaw the launch of Farmville 2, gets to continue to oversee Zynga’s crown jewel franchise. Travis Boatman, a longtime EA Mobile executive who joined Zynga under Schappert’s tenure, also continues to oversee mobile titles that fall under the

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