Beyond Mobile: Integrating Product Management into AAA Development Teams

[Music] hi everyone greetings in this remote presentation in this covered 19 world that we're living in query to be Livi today my name is Devin I'm the senior director of product at EA the APAC region and I'm gonna be talking to you today about integrating product management into development teams specifically teams that have not had mobile experience before they may be working on new global games now or other platform games but they don't come from a mobile background and that presents some interesting challenges so let's get into it shall we I'm first gonna talk to you today just give you an overview my journey I'm going to talk about the PM disciplined in general I'm gonna talk a bit about games as a service and PMS and how they fit into that I'm gonna talk about some

common challenges and solutions to integrating pianos into these types of Triple A teams and let me give you some closing thoughts so a bit about me first so my journey act pls started on the M&A and capital side where I was raising money for a lot of free-to-play gaming companies in the infancy of free-to-play worked with companies like Zynga grief Anzio etc I really developed my interest in free-to-play at that time I then took a sabbatical to pursue a passion for a while of playing magic professional professionally which didn't work out so well and soon after that landed at Kabam where I was fortunate to come on during the sort of first web game days and the first mobile revolution where we were just getting started on mobile where user acquisition CPI's were you know less than a dollar and everything was the totally different landscape but gave us an opportunity to define a lot of

what mobile free-to-play would look like and a lot of what product management analytics would look like in the industry stayed on a command in what I like to call the second mobile revolution where we started leading in more to data science launching more contest of Champions which I'll talk about later and venturing eastward where I moved to our Beijing office build out the product function there and actually launched a fully culture alized version of contest in China for the Chinese user base soon after that I had the opportunity to join EA and a sort of a broader role all which I fully embraced and dived into moved to Shanghai and went deeper into Asia with EA was a large sort of IP based portfolio and really excited about the sports titles like FIFA and NBA which we were going to launch in Asia

and I've since been fortunate to work with a lot of other brands from Sim City and red alert 2 PBZ and so very exciting time at e8 and very gratifying for me and I've learned a lot over my time here so I'd like to share something with you so going into the PM discipline in a little bit more detail hey product management in gaming is a young Emily it's well established in technology companies for you know more than three or four decades now Google has a very strong PN program where they bring in associate PMS and groom them into product leaders Microsoft as the program manager function where they grew young grant and rather than to future leaders of the company you know Facebook obviously very strong in PMS and all over the org from from ads to gaming to social etc and that's where sort of the agile manifesto came from these

technology companies product managers and getting into an agile sort of scrum based way of doing things so it's very well-established in in bigger technology companies but in gaming it's actually quite young daming p.m. function sort of gained prominence after free-to-play and social came more prominent in in the gaming industry so you may recall in the early sort of late 2000s I guess Zynga started taking off with these games and Facebook games in the mid-2000s really started taking off where developer certain development on the Facebook platform Zynga and fondle series when it caught fire and had other sort of social gaming platforms like crowd star Kixeye Kabam came soon thereafter Rovio but one of the reasons why it gained prominence is because it realized with the amount of data we were

getting from these free-to-play and so games the types of real-time engagement metrics and micro transactions that we're starting to take shape with a free-to-play business model you could really analyze and optimize in real time and build the type of experience that you use is fondant and PMS were walk stars to do that and we are rock stars actually that so the phone sort of goes off after after that sort of flexion point in the game history so what is P DMing and what are amazing PMS I always like to say that PMS our Swiss Army knife may be an overused phrase but I still use it a lot PMS use cross functional business skills to elevate game teams and they do it through a few different pillars the first pillar is designing strategy having a strategic vision of the roadmap that maximizes the lifetime value of your games leverages monetization design best practices looks at competitors and

competitive intelligence and balances player wants with team capabilities right the resource requirements and resource costs and the business needs and PMS amazing PMS I like to see have a very strong ability to extract a lot of times come from you know consulting and strategy backgrounds and we're excited about gaming and came into gaming from there and are very good at this sort of long term view of you know a strategic vision of the game and the product and also very good at looking into designs that work and designs that don't work and surfacing why those things happen the second pillar is live operations so being not always the the one pressing the buttons but the guiding voice in monetization and engagement planning owning problems of came upon a balance and lifecycle management and having that sort of semi aggressive almost proactive revenue mindset being the guardian of game

performance a game teams will trust the PMS to show them you know how is our game doing what's the game performance what should our game be doing in terms of revenue and KPIs in the next six months those are questions for your KPM eye and for this reason the game PMS is the sort of guiding voice in the live operations sometimes they're actually executing it themselves sometimes you have LiveOps GM's and game masters and other people actually what I call pressing the buttons but that function of live operations that the killer doesn't doesn't change much the third one is Linux and optimization and this actually goes hand-in-hand with live operations but using data to drive outcomes over helpless a lot of times I think teams can get caught up in producing content in shipping features and all mostly the amount of content of

the amount of things like it shipped is an indicator of six stats however if those things don't hit if they don't move the needle in terms of revenue and other engagement kpi's how effectual was that content Bush and PMS can be relied upon to use data they're wizards with data very strong in data analysis and optimization they come from those backgrounds to keep the team honest in terms of the types of outcomes that these changes are making so outcomes over outputs having that growth and optimization mindset backed by behavioral data so always thinking about how can I grow the player base what are some creative or innovative things that I could do in the game to try to grow the product and not always pulling from gaming pulling from other tech products and pulling from other best practices and and using that sort of strategic and almost disp expertise and in doing so having effective and rapid communication with the team and with

outside stakeholders a lot of times the PM is almost the guardian of the team the team doesn't want to be distracted by a bunch of his execs coming in and asking questions and a lot of times the PM can serve as the face but that type of communication so that the team can focus on making the magic so that's the PM discipline as I see it in terms of these two pillars but I also like to sub to show that the PIA the pillars of product management almost mapped to a games lifecycle if you look at the game and feature lifecycle over the course of concept pre-production production testing launch and life service and you see that the product manager pillars almost change over time right early on you will need strategic and design clarity and the PM's will work across functionally with designers and consumer insights and publishing to define what the product should be once the product launches you have this live Ox excellence pillar where the PM will collaborate with the analytics function

and with live buffs game masters and other executors to optimize the product in real-time and as the team is looking toward their next adventure PMS play a very you know a very pivotal role in that roadmap guidance right not only the next feature or large content update but also even the next game right and that sort of comes back to this product definition phase but in terms of live features and content updates PMS work with analytics and CI and publishing functions to know analyze what players are saying how players are feeling how things are behaving in game and use that to provide the roadmap guidance to the rest of the team the guidance for the future in terms of what content and and client updates we need to push in order to move the so what are some quick examples of OPM success in free to play so spanning these different functions these are just some very you know sort of random

examples that that I pulled from from different products so a feature impact is something that we do on FIFA very often where we analyze the KPI impact of leases we surface that information back to the team I'll talk about a little bit later is it then a big wins for us in terms of improving the KPI impact of art are live releases so that's one example is feature impact another example is you know deconstructing individual games and business models to guide our design teams it's I think is if they're gonna be very good you can start deep systems and thinking abstractly and then also I'm doing so the design teams embedded them in terms what are these games doing well what are the core loops what are these new features what are these

business models things like that'll pass what is this new emergent genre like auto chess one of the things that are driving daily game these are some things that over the course of my you know career that in one of the strengths of teams is deconstructing and providing guidance to design teams and game teams on being sort of latest and greatest it's another very very specific example from murdering contest a champions but I'm working with analytics teams in very close proximity allows us to uncover some really incredible things and I marvel you know we uncovered the importance of a new metric which we started out calling subscribers and then eventually called Wreckers players that basically played every day and we've you know we brought this I brought this metric others with us to EA and the terms of committed players but it was so staggering to us how a player who played

seven days a week was so different from a player who played six days and and that was something that we uncovered working closely with the analytics teams of Marvel it's something that I've taken with me into any game that I've worked on that I've been a part of analyzing we've shown that it really moves the needle and I'm driving sustained lifetime value increases so just another example of collaborating with with analytics very closely to to drive very impactful and powerful insights so this is a service he ends one of the reasons I'm talking to you today is not about the p.m. function overall but it's how no PMS a lot of these winds that I've talked about before are in the mobile gaming industry and in the mobile platforms but you know our industry as a whole if you talk about HD and console games it's a PC game subscription games

all of these games are universally moving to what I call it games to service more consumer packaged goods are phasing out like we stood packaged this is still a big business for us at EA obviously the majority of our business but you know a lot of these things are moving even these packaged goods are moving - against to service my players are going to expect content updates over the course of the life of the game right they're not going to want to play a 20-hour you know PvE experience if they be done with it they're gonna want to play with other players in PvP another multiplayer you know sort of situations with players subscription is another business model is intact on Qi console games now so games are becoming more of a service inherently not just endemic to mobile but something that's happening across different platforms in the industry and because of that the value of PMS and the importance of PMS is

becoming more pronounced across platforms in console HD PC online now one of the PM's superpowers and what I like day is the PM's problems face the problem that that we generally own in these games as a service scenarios is extracting a game into its business components and this is something that which I'll get into a little bit later something that is unique I think in terms of how PM's think about a game and think about the business is breaking it down into these that's right being able to you know and not acknowledge the creative portion of the game but also being able to break down the constituent parts as a business through the funnel of acquisition from different sources to retention and the factors that allow you to keep your acquired users down to monetization and back forward through

the funnel through acquisition so maximizing that position minimizing shirred maximizing retention optimization right and abstracting a game into these components is the first thing first step to optimizing game and this is the PM's problem space in addition so this is something that becomes more important I think as games as a service takes hold of our games right the other thing that I find as games the service becomes more and more prevalent is that team composition also needs to change in pre-launch of a games as a service game or you know in production before you launch the game this is generally how we have our routines destructed right there is the feature team the development team consisting of designers engineers artists QA etc and there's also a live team a lot of times they're working on other parts of the game so they're working on the live content pipeline

making sure there's enough content in the game water launches they're working on developing line box tools right the tools that allow us to go in the band and basically deliver the content to our users and they're working on live service readiness right what is the calendar like what does our first month gonna look like what is there for six months to live like in terms of events and content etc that's what the could the live content team is working on right and in pre-launch the PM will often play a supporting right like I said they will about front of definition in front of direction live this readiness free to play running anything about new features and pre launching a feature that that evidence to the future now what's a game launches the team competition tends to change you still have the exact producer who is managing feature team managing all the engineers artists designers cetera and these guys are designing core game plan features major gameplay

systems have long term things now the PM once a game launches generally becomes more hands-on and a lot of times elevates their stature in the game team to be an equal store business partner with the exec producer and will generally take control a live team right so that team will work on LiveOps roadmap they will continue to produce live content oftentimes with staffing with analysts and we'll look at Linux and we will execute live offs via game masters or live producers etc we'll also sort of look at how we can augment our life tools to create more nimble ways to interact with players and deliver content to players so in a post-launch life service fee a lot of times the p.m. as I said comes more hands-on and comes from a prominent team and a healthy team as I see it is one in which the executor and the p.m. are equal business partners and trust each other to make the right decisions and you know the EPS were

pressed to PMS this sort of business voice behind the product while they EP sort of take center stage in town halls and summit steadily to talk about the game still in triple-a games and because many triple-a teams have spent years shipping games and then starting the next one um as we move into games as a service the model in which you have to work sometimes it's for right and as a result integrating pm's into the team and adopting that iterative development mindset can sometimes prove challenging and this is easier for some teams and others but for those teams that have challenges well the purpose is here to talk about how to overcome this let's go into some common challenges and solutions of integrating you've got PM's you hired your first P he's really excited he wants to contribute but you're going to start to run into some

challenges as a VP or GM as an EP whoever hired the PM as you integrate these guys into your teams now the first sort of acceptance of a theorem so as I said PMS in game PM's who've had experience will calm for the gaming companies but a lot of times junior PMS will come from other backgrounds like in solving strategy sometimes financial industry and most non mobile teams don't really understand the role of the PM in the development process a lot of times because they have not once in the life service product before they have enough I worked in games before and they won't understand the PM's role that they won't know how to interact with the PM initially and as a p.m. for those pins and audience you have to accept the fact that in a triple-a team you'll often be viewed as the outsider you'll often be viewed as as sort of the black sheep and that can

have challenges to not only team onboarding but also just team chemistry morale and also just the value of the PM engine right if the PM is sort of viewed as someone that team wants to sort of hide away in a corner and not have them be a prominent voice at the table it will definitely limit their value and a PM's value is directly correlated to the team's buy-in of the PM function so this is something where you know early on team acceptance of the PM role is gonna be a challenge and I've learned this team is that a lot of these teams um you know maybe have worked on a Live service before in a different way maybe they've worked on a game that shipped by DLCs you know or add post launch content at launch and because of this they developed a sort of

pride in us right and when you come in as p.m. you'll say I'm a PM I look at business I look at design and strategy live execution with the data etc teams will often feel and they'll often say that they have the PM role covered by other functions and this is a little bit dangerous sometimes but they'll say you know we we've got live producers that produce our live content we're good we've got this we have data analyst we're working with the CI team of the data analysts we're good we got this and you know it kind of Stonewall's the PM's right away and this is something that it needs to be need to look out for very closely I would say for team leadership as you want or DMS on your team's because this is quickly something that could stone all your PMS candy motivate them etc if you if your team doesn't know how to interact and and does feel that they have the PM don't cover by other functions you know sometimes it's

the case they do but most in times it's the case that that they actually don't and you know they're standing there I couldn't hear and the house is burning yeah so this is something that you have to be mindful of so how do you circumvent these challenges and there are ways to do it one of the things that PMS can do and I like to think of business with Bottoms Up approach versus a top-down approach one approach is always the GM and the VP saying these are your PM's listen to them they do XY and Z and you can't rely on them for this that's definitely a top-down way if you're a PM I would approach this as a bottom-up way and one way is to involve the dev team in qiyam processes this is something that we've seen a great deal of success with on products over mic review so FIFA online is one example where we instituted the feature impact assessment

process it was a process that we set up to instill rigor in you know shipping our client releases and the types of releases were shipping looking at the KPI impact of the of the releases were shipping and the rest of the team was fully involved and we made sure to do it this way we set up different milestones for these feature impact assessments that integrated into the development process each milestone so at the beginning of a milestone we would come in and look at the design Doc's with a team we would get you know a full sort of download of what the feature was trying to achieve and then we would come with our KPIs and say what do we think this is good it would be a brainstorming process will team gauge meant to the monetization and by how much and then after the feature was released and after we had sufficient data we would come back and you know you would task the analytics team with plan on what data we would put together and you know we would

do a post-mortem of okay how did this feature actually perform versus what we expected and so for FIFA mobile in China we've extended this to a weekly program analysis because you know a lot of our live content is in the form of programs and it's it's a faster content cadence because it's mobile so we have this weekly program analysis with the dev team to understand the why behind different decisions so featuring impact assessment program and impact assessment cetera and doing it at regular kids and doing it in the same timeline mean degraded into the milestone the build process of the team and involving the team early on so they can get exposure to you as a p.m. and they can see the value that you bring early on in the discussions to the to alignment and then later on once with the data and showing what impact these features actually how so that was a very

positive way for us to do it another thing that you know I've implored all my PM's across there across different aims to do it's something that you know other teams like pent up team which very closely communication with them does as well is to work for the team rather than trying to beat and there's a lot of literature on the PM function out there bloggers it related to other tech sort of parts of the tech industry then sometimes I view is erroneous and sort of damaging a bit in gaming is that a lot of times PMS are you know paraded around as the CEO of the product and you've got these eager PM's that come in and they try to lead right away and oftentimes this is a wrong approach as I said you could accept the fact that you're gonna be viewed as an outsider when you come to these teams so one great way to build equity is to work for that she rather than tried to lead and one of the things that we've done you

know across the products that that I'm across across like products that other heads of p.m. across at EA is to embed PMS directly in the dev team and require them to split time between sitting with a centralized p.m. odd and sitting with a core team oftentimes we'll just have our p.m. sim directly with the core team all the time and you know you wouldn't think this is important where they sit but it's extremely important to sit with the team and then we'll come back to the PM pod maybe one day a week or just during our scrums etc but you know all PMS will sit with the team and they'll begin onboarding onto the team by basically listening to team talking to team leadership and tailoring their tasks to the team needs and this is something that I've observed is that you know four different projects PMS the needs of the pyramid sometimes you've got the team with designers that

are very you know quantitatively motivated and you may need to do less hand-holding with a design team and setting them on board with analytics sometimes you'll have to be more right sometimes it just depends on how the project shakes out but because p.m. skills are so cross functional and so broad-based PMS can often tailor their tasks and tailor their function to the team needs and should be doing so this is something that we see a lot of success with a de da both on products that that I'm across and product that other has a p.m. across the company and in EA Mobile and you know Maxie viola and access also have had success with he's working for the team rather than trying to you know take the lead anyway so another thing beyond team acceptance of the PM role is ownership and accountability right and this is something that Triple A teams are very you know they'll harp about this a lot

I've noticed more more so than the mobile teams is what are you actually accountable for what do you actually own and what a harsh reality is that because again the PM role is very cross-functional there will be confusion about what PM's own and are accountable for and you see this sort of you know the the cameo from office space tier thena you've seen that David sings but you'll actually get these questions from people on on your dev team a guy from QA will come up and say what are you actually doing here you know or designed our creative director will say you know what value are you adding times you know it's it's on you to to educate but it's also can be damaging to the morale new PM's being met with this type of attitude I guess from people on the team that that they're you know actually excited to be a part but it's a harsh

reality that you have to accept that there will be confusion and there are definitely ways to solve so how do we solve for this one of the things I learned in my years as a SPM leader is that the strike team approach is a very popular sort of approach to the emic where you'll have PM's in a central pod who will you know whenever a project has problems whenever a game is including their kpi's they'll come in as a strike team or they'll move from project project and this is something that I've learned is actually better off abandoning and no because as a strike team approach teams come in as consultants they come in as advisors and you know then they roll off so not only does the team not always understand what they're doing what they're accountable for but you know they're gone from the project six months later or a year later and were they actually part of the team

so abandoning this approach and actually making them part of the team is I think a really good thing to do so in in FIFA one of the things that was done very early was you bifurcated the team into dev and lie right so as I said before the feature team and the live content teams and you know early on the the PM team actually assumed direct ownership of the live content team and the live roadmap eliminating ambiguity as to what they are responsible for if someone says what you do when you accountable for I control my decision-making for the White team that's a very short answer and it was one that we had a lot of success with FIFA mobile and China was a project that launched very fast and very aggressively but it quickly sort of bottomed out and once we did this sort of bifurcation of the team and gave PM's control of the live team our performance started coming up considerably we we nearly doubled our

da you and we've been on a very good sort of trajectory ever since so it's something from a performance standpoint that worked and it's something from a sort of team function standpoint worked because the team was able to gel was able to work very quickly without you know sort of scratching their head as to what is the PM actually oh yeah in the bio our team with anthem they had talked about with you know we had a senior leader that was higher now a couple years ago Bioware who's a great guy hired for that PM function reporting directly to the VP GM of that studio and had his PM's assume you know accountability for the library now in a similar way right so one part of that was having been the leader come in to sort of represent the PM function in Bioware for anthem and another one was to have you know other PM's come in candidly over things like you know game economy and the live

roadmap and other things that the team will quickly saw I had massive value as you know anthem was you know at that point of games to service and life service product another way to sort of you know circumvent this harsh reality was talking about before is to use sign-off and the reason you sign off is it forges dependencies within the team right and this is something that a lot of times the the GM or the VP will have to do as a top-down thing but it's very powerful once it's done and this is something that we've done across our FIFA products are free to play fifa products in in Asia with FIFA mobile and FIFA online and even though these products were Bulls free to play on the teams working on them we're not mobile teams these were teams that came from triple-a so that's why I'm including them here but we were quickly you know had this sign-off built

in where you know we align the inner inner off-site the PM's would own all engagement metrics for the game and I also designed them on use for forecasting and operational modeling I mean how we basically lock financial forecasts Oh targets so because financial targets have to be long every month PMS have to be consulted as long as they only engagement metrics it's a force sort of dependency in order to sort of involve PMS in the operational modeling in you know looking at the features I'm using feature impact to assess what those engagement metrics would be etc right another thing that PMS directly owned is as I said the feature impact assessments for each client release and this is something that is mandated as part of milestones and it's something that gets presented back to the team in the spirit of iterative development right and we've instilled these processes we develop muscle memory around them and we've used sign off to port to those dependencies

so even if the dev team may be confused and the start they have to they do know that there's a sign-off dependency and they have to go to PMS and work with and that sort of forcing function has allowed the team to better understand what PM's do and what value they bring so a third sort of bucket of challenge is creative versus data-driven decisions and this is one that you know is I think a bit harder to get out even if team understands what PMS do moving to an in-service mindset moving to a more analytical mindset is often very very hard for teams not only play teams but also you know mobile teams as well depending on the function so the harsh reality is that you know I think I feel and maintaining morale quote/unquote will often take precedence over data-driven realities and I mentioned maintaining morale is one because now

I've been in situations where the KPIs were not great or you know we were not focusing on the right things in terms of long term retention do we have the older game features we're seeing noce where there's smoke there's fire right and some of the PM's will see smoke and they'll want to call it out and they'll get you know the response that well we don't want the team to focus on this right now because we don't we want to maintain them around this this isn't great for routine morale to see you know once we launch this great game we should be celebrating but you're you're talking to us about you know how the kpi's aren't good and I think that is a little bit dangerous and it's something that really has to be kept at bay because the inter driven realities of something that should be positive the team even if that data is not proving out what we want because it's a learning experience and if you adopt a test and learn my own set then it's just an opportunity to get better right so harsh reality how do we get around them one way to get around I

think I feel is to use frameworks to maintain rigor and fact-based decision making now this is something where you know the anthem team again had a really good way to do this and this is something that I actually bar for them it's worked very well we need to is speaking in frameworks right maybe we don't all agree on what the right decision is maybe we don't want to talk about retention that's lower than we thought it would be or reverie that's lower but can we all agree that as a team we all have the same shared goals can we all agree that our goal is to maximize traffic and to maximize revenue it's to grow Mau as much as possible it's to grow our monthly revenue as much as possible and oftentimes when you get down to that very simple fact-based decision making and that that simple

framework those goals are irrefutable the rest of is empty I don't think anyone's gonna tell you no we want to minimize traffic so you break it down into first principles and you establish those shared goals and once you've aligned on those shared goals what you realize is that magic starts to happen right once you can agree on those shared goals you can move to the brainstorming phase about what the best ways are to get there instead of arguing over the goals themself so now that we know that Mau is you know something that we want to maximize how do we do that and then that's where PMS start to shine because PM's can bring proposals for how to maximize Mau and a lot of times in our meetings with teams where we bring in those plans the team's response is oh we've never thought about it that way oh yeah that's actually true that's not something that's top of mind for us and they start to realize the value of the different perspective of data-driven reality that PMS will bring into the

team when they're thinking about things in a little bit different way right so this is something that I would highly recommend is speaking in frameworks and using frameworks to maintain rigor in fact based decision making I think I feel is something I think everyone actually sort of refers to but it's something that has to be keep that kept in check on a more regular basis their way to win is begin to use business realities to pressure test decisions right so sometimes the team will you know make a feature decision or make a design decision based on I think I feel and that client release will get shipped and you know p.m. a little sad or someone on the team will send me I don't think we should be doing this because XYZ and the team should sit anyway however if you have the right processes set up you can pressure test those decisions so on all our products now we we have bi-weekly business reviews every two weeks we have a business review

which are high visibility comprehensive reviews of the business the live um performance and how we're tracking versus targets and this is very simple this is something that I think a lot of teams that are listening to this probably already do in some shape or form but I would encourage these to include a lot of cross-functional people in the team not just the PM's and you know the producers but across the team and I would actually encourage you to include execs in these in these reviews to the extent that you can okay when you do that and when you have execs present execs will want to talk about objective things right it makes it hard to hide in the gray area I think I feel and very quickly it starts to change the team's mindset in terms of what's important and in terms of who needs to be consulted before decisions get made and that can have some very powerful sort of impact in terms of how the team approaches releases how the team approaches live content development

cetera and I think we've seen that proved out across our products FIFA mobile I'm using as a as an example here which is where we seen a profound impact but we've seen the same impact on FIFA online we've seen the same impact on on Red Alert and it's something that I would highly recommend another winning formula I would say is on the org structure side is maintaining an unbiased view through central party lines but at the same time staying embedded within the core team and sit together right I go back to sitting together and I think it's really important um so it's a fine balance right a lot of times you know the PM function is well staffed on a lot of teams a lot of times you'll see PM's reporting into the exact producers of these different games which can work in some cases but can also be dangerous in others and the reason it can be dangerous is because the PM you know as

a great communicator of data and business realities can sometimes become a tool to mask business realities or sort of you know use data to basically communicate whatever message the exec producer or the creative director wants to put forth versus the actual sort of unbiased truth so for that reason especially in orgs where the PM function is not that true yet I recommend a central reporting line structure so structure more like this where you have a director of product that reports into a VP or GM or other exec that person has Tam's under him and those PMS are embedded within the team they sit with the team they tailor their tasks to the team's needs and they dotted line into the team leadership however they report back into the head of product who reports back into the GM which serves as

a nice sort of check and balance on the team in terms of as I said again I think I feel over data-driven realities right and it sort of keeps setting Wow and I think one of the reasons why these bi-weekly reviews have been so strong for us why feature impact in these other central processes have been so strong is because of this matrix based reporting that said I think on teams where you know PMS have sat there for years where you have EPS who are very fast and agile and have worked on several those sort of games as a service or free-to-play games before this structure can work not saying it can't work when you're introducing the function specifically I do think this structure is a bit so some closing thoughts for you as they do want to leave time for would say questions but this is a recorded session so no questions unfortunately however I would encourage you to reach out to me afterward for questions if you have them

on LinkedIn or through email etc so my first closing thought is that p.m. and games the service play is a mindset first and foremost aside from you know the business model having this mindset so so important and even on games where you know you're even on a game that was not games to service I think this mindset is so incredibly valuable and I would just you know this is the one thing that I would take away from from everything is that it's a mindset and the quicker you can get everyone on the team into thinking about this mindset from exempt producers to producers to art directors to create a direct to designers to QA to everyone into this spirit of iterative design and rapid experimentation informed by a behavioral data how many people adopt this testament of mindset it elevates the creative process it absolutely elevates

it right now PMS are at the center of I guess owning the problem that this minds our souls 4 p.m. zone the problem how do we maximize for engagement how do we maximize monetization etc right and act as the stewards and evangelists of this for the rest of the team but you know the sooner you can get the team thinking this way the better it's gonna be for your game so some rules of thumb as part of my closing thoughts rule one after you've adopt that mindset aligned on shared goals and it can be very very simple best way to get past differences between p.m. and their iterative mindset slashing with other big personalities on the dev team is to establish with shared goals and you'll see that once you do that magic starts happening with the rest of the team you can start simple life is to identify your Northstar metrics that both creative and business types can rally around prove

the value of the discipline by optimizing it as a p.m. take ownership of optimizing your metrics as a VP empower your PMS to optimize these to run AV tests and run experiments and provide the communication to not only your internal dev team but to outside stakeholders in the form of air cover the dev team will thank you because they'll be able to focus on creating great games my second rule is to adopt service based support mindset so as I said a lot of this literature about PM's being CEO of the adduct is I think bit toxic when it comes to games and the best PMS are great at working for the team rather than viewing themselves as the scene so put your head down deliver great results listen to the team's needs and tailor your function to their needs think about how can I use my you know amazing Swiss Army knife with tools to

help the team deliver on what it means right now leading to influence and doing this goes a long way and you know it may sound a little bit harsh but come in with a mindset that you will have to prove your value first before you're able to foster a fundamental mindset shift before you're gonna be viewed as a member of the leadership team and getting bad into those leads meetings etc you're gonna have to prove your value so coming in with that mindset and adopting that service based mindset is gonna help you a lot as a p.m. the third thing I would say is that as I just said p.m. reporting structure depends on team maturity so when beginning to hire for the p.m. function a make just reporting structure I think is ideal and p.m. serve as that check and balance the team is a new mindset and training wheels once the team becomes more mature pm's reporting directly into EPS and game GM's and makes sense and p.m. value you know when it doesn't be policed by a functional head like a

header product reporting Lions can become more flexible especially in a full buying scenario I think director of product header product becomes more of a career coach for PMS that hones their skills and impact and doesn't really have to micromanage Piett workflows with their respective dev teams because the dev team is doing that with the PM [Music] laughs singer say is that um you know the PM function overall is gonna require buying and blessing from execs and needles there's gonna be a blessing from the VPS and GM's or exact producers is required in order to maximize the PM function convincing the dev team you know involves getting early buy-in from the game team in studio and I have to get that I am without displaying it's gonna be difficult for the PM to shine their valiant voice will be greatly reduced I've seen teams where they have a PM but that PM is relegated off into a

corner and this guy came in excited you know he came in from you know McKinsey or another gaming company another you know free-to-play company like king or supercell and he's now working on this triple-a team and he's in a corner and you know the rest of team is laughing and high-fiving about this great game they shift and you know within six months this great talent is gone on he's quit the company right because he didn't have the buy-in and the blessing from leadership so that leadership blessing is really required and that's basically it um and I would just leave you with again this mindset is really much hatred of the bellman mind stats work on fostering that within your teams if your leadership if your PM's coming off the team remember these realities remember the ways to solve for them and try try and try to work for the team influence to get them to adopt that mindset as

soon as possible it's gonna lead you to releasing much more impactful features thinking long term and really maximizing your business thank you very much [Music]