Afterword – Moonshots

Moonshots, by definition, don't have good odds. I am under no illusions about this one. The standard recruiting pipeline exists for a reason, and the person most likely to receive this book has a full calendar and limited patience for unsolicited materials, however carefully bound. I know that. I made it anyway – because the alternative is deciding that something matters to you, running the probability calculation, and concluding the numbers don't warrant the attempt. I wasn’t okay with giving up before I’d started.

So the question was: “what would it look like to actually try?”

Not to apply through Workday, or to submit a resume through appropriate channels and hope to get a response. To really try – to make my case the way it deserved to be made, in a form that couldn't be automated, parsed, reduced to a keyword count, filtered, or ignored. To do the thing that the standard process makes very difficult: let the work speak first, and trust that the right person would hear it.

That's what you've been reading.

What it's been trying to say – and what I'll say plainly now, since the evidence is already behind us – is this: I am a program manager and delivery leader who has spent his career building, running, and rescuing large-scale technology programs, and I have spent thirty years loving the worlds that Blizzard builds with the specific, informed love of someone who gets it. I am not looking for a job that happens to have games in it. I am looking to bring what I know how to do to the place that makes the things I care about most.

I want to work at Blizzard. Building and delivering the things that make these worlds real – managing the complexity, holding the timeline, keeping the people moving in the same direction – so that the people whose genius creates them can do that without the machinery breaking underneath them. That is the work I know how to do. That is the work I want to do here.

I watched Chris Metzen walk back onto a stage in Anaheim in 2023, and something that had been suppressed for a long time got loud again. Not because of who he is, though that matters. Because of what he was: a man who had found his way back to the work that meant something, who was lit from within by it, who couldn't have hidden that even if he'd tried. I recognized it. I used to have it. I've spent the time since building my way back toward it. This book is the proof of that direction. And a request for the conversation it warrants.

Thank you for reading it.