Jade Raymond

Jade Raymond studied computer science in Montreal and began her career as a programmer, but her gift was for the harder, less visible work of production: marshaling huge teams, budgets, and technologies toward a shippable game. After early stints in the industry, she joined Ubisoft, where she would make her name.

As producer of the original Assassin's Creed, released in 2007, Raymond helped shepherd an enormous, technically daring new franchise from concept to global phenomenon. The game's fluid free-running through meticulously reconstructed historical cities set a template for open-world design that the industry spent the next decade chasing, and it launched one of the best-selling series in gaming. She went on to help build and lead Ubisoft Toronto, establishing a major studio from the ground up and overseeing ambitious projects including entries in the Splinter Cell and Watch Dogs universes.

Raymond's significance is partly about the work and partly about the ceiling she kept pushing through. Executive production and studio leadership at the blockbuster tier had been almost entirely closed to women, and she moved into those rooms while also enduring an ugly wave of harassment when she became the public face of Assassin's Creed, an experience that laid bare how the industry treated visible women. She met it with composure and kept building.

Her career since has been a study in ambition at the highest levels of the business. She led new-studio efforts at Electronic Arts, founding Motive Studios, and later at Google, where she oversaw first-party games for the Stadia streaming platform. When those corporate bets shifted, she founded her own independent studio, Haven, backed to build original games with creative autonomy, later aligned with PlayStation.

Her signature is the producer's craft raised to an executive art: the ability to align technology, talent, and money behind a coherent creative vision, and the persistence to keep founding new studios rather than merely running existing ones. Repeatedly named among the most powerful people in games, Jade Raymond has spent her career proving that a woman could not only make blockbusters but decide which ones get made.