Yair Melamed: From Engineer to Running 1,000+ People at Zynga

In this episode, we sit down with Yair Melamed, SVP Games at Zynga, to explore what it really takes to lead at the highest levels of mobile gaming. Yair shares why even while managing over a thousand people, the best executives stay obsessed with the details, and how that obsession is what enables strategic thinking, not the opposite. From his early days as an engineer at Playtika to Chief Games Officer at Wildlife and now running multiple studios at Zynga, Yair's career spans every phase of the mobile gaming journey. We discuss launching new games in an era of rising CPIs, the fight for players against aggressive APAC competition, how to scale a game into a real business, and the personal moments that shaped his leadership including the decision to bet on himself and leave his comfort zone.