Thomas Snyder
- LinkedIn hired a three-time world Sudoku champion to create games that spark chatter on its platform.
- The platform is betting on puzzles, like “Zip” and “Patches,” to boost engagement and keep users coming back.
- Snyder left a career in biotech to turn his passion for puzzles into a full-time profession.
LinkedIn wants its users to do more than scroll. Thomas Snyder’s job at the networking platform is to make that happen by giving them mind-bending challenges to solve — and maybe even brag about.
The 46-year-old handcrafts logic games meant to give its millions of users a shared daily experience they can bond over. Initially hired as a consultant, he joined LinkedIn full time in October in a newly created role with one of the rarest of titles: principal puzzlemaster.
“It’s definitely a conversation starter,” said Snyder, a three-time world Sudoku champion and an author and editor of more than dozens of ebooks such as “The Art of Sudoku” and “The Art of Puzzles.”
LinkedIn, a unit of Microsoft, introduced games in 2024. Today it has seven, all puzzles, including “Queens,” “Zip,” and its latest entrant, “Patches.” New variations of each are released daily, and players can check a leaderboard to see how quickly they solved each one compared to other players in their network on the platform.
“It’s a very intentional path we’ve taken,” said Laksh Somasundaram, senior director of product at LinkedIn. “When we look at the world’s best workplaces and how connections and bonds are formed between colleagues, fun is always a core part of that.”
The daily hook
Games have become a fixture on media platforms in recent years. The New York Times has credited its 2022 acquisition of the word-puzzle game “Wordle” for bringing millions of new users into its ecosystem.
Platforms add games to drive engagement, said Michael Pachter, a games-industry analyst at Wedbush Securities. The strategy can be effective because “the achievement of solving the puzzle, the achievement of beating your friends with a higher score, validates that the time was well spent.”
Snyder, who serves on the board of the World Puzzle Federation, an international competition organizer, said few companies employ full-time puzzle builders like him and instead rely on freelance talent. He handcrafts or edits new versions of all of LinkedIn’s puzzles, and estimates he’s made more than 10,000 puzzles throughout his career.
At LinkedIn, Snyder said he aims to make games a daily brain warm-up for users akin to “your morning coffee” — and fodder for users to discuss, similar to watercooler talk at an office.
“LinkedIn isn’t a games company, but we are a workplace connection company, and games as a means of fun are a way to really get some of that dialogue,” he said.
Testimonials from players — on where else but LinkedIn — speak to how the platform’s games are doing just that.
Joshua Lee, a software engineer in New York, said in a recent post that he and two friends share their results from several of them each Sunday for fun and to unlock weekly bonus puzzles.
“The best products bring people together and drive conversations, not just activity and usage,” he wrote.
Turning puzzles into a profession
Before making puzzles for a living, Snyder spent more than a decade working in biotechnology, leading research teams focused on genomics and disease detection. He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University and studied chemistry and economics as an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology.
“As a child, I wanted to be a video-game maker,” he said. However, Snyder said he ended up pursuing a different path because the high school he attended “had a really great chemistry department,” and his parents were teachers. “Doing science, teaching, these were kind of the goals that were around my childhood,” he said.
Snyder started making puzzle games as a hobby, and in 2012, he left science to launch a puzzle-creation business, Grandmaster Puzzles.
“If I took puzzles seriously, how far could I get?” he said he asked himself at the time. “A lot of us were publishing things for free on weblogs. Very few of us were able to get into newspapers or magazines.”
About a year later, though, Snyder said Grandmaster Puzzles landed a regular feature in Penny Dell Puzzles, a publisher of puzzle magazines. Eventually, large companies began seeking out his work, including Netflix and LinkedIn.
“It’s been tricky to think that puzzles can be a full profession,” he said, yet creating and solving puzzles has always been “my favorite thing to do.”
While computers and AI can help speed up some of the mechanics of puzzle production, Snyder said the heart of the work is creative, meaning it requires a human touch. The best puzzles, he said, are thought-provoking, surprising, and unique, similar to a great work of art.
“We have a human author for every puzzle,” he said. “AI is not yet there.”
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