About Me

Hi, I'm Jenny Tai. I'm a Director of Product with over a decade leading mobile games at Scopely, Zynga, and Jam City. I've built and rebuilt product organizations, shaped multi-year roadmaps, and led teams responsible for $200M+ annual revenue games. I came into this industry from consulting and business school, which gave me a foundation in professional rigor that most people in games learn the hard way, if they learn it at all.

I care deeply about how we build, not just what we ship. The decisions that define a product leader are rarely the obvious ones. They are the ones made under pressure, with incomplete information, inside organizations that are figuring it out as they go. I have been in those rooms for a long time, and I have learned a lot from what went wrong as much as what went right.

What I Believe

Great product leadership in mobile games requires three things most people do not talk about together: analytical rigor, genuine empathy for players, and the ethical clarity to know where your line is when business pressure pushes against it. I have spent my career trying to hold all three at once. This blog is my attempt to make that work visible.

Why I Started Modes of Play

The mobile games industry builds some of the most complex live products in the world. The people building them deserve better resources than they have. Most PM content is written for B2B software or early stage startups. Games are different in ways that matter, and the knowledge that closes that gap mostly lives in private Slack channels and closed postmortems.

I started Modes of Play to change that. It is the resource I wish had existed when I was growing up in this industry — frameworks and systems for running live service games, leadership lessons from the harder middle parts of a long career, and honest conversations about the decisions that do not have clean answers.

The goal is to uplevel the mobile games product community. If you are serious about this work, you are in the right place.

I wrote more about this in my first post, Why I Started Modes of Play, if you want the full story.

Beyond Games

I mentor with Minds Matter, a nonprofit supporting high-achieving, low-income students on their path to college. Expanding access and building confidence matters to me on and off the roadmap.

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