Pulling It All Together: Production in These Changing Times

Uh I'm Carol Shaw. Uh I've been a producer for a long time. I'm going to talk like years, like 15 years or something. I'm going to talk about different specializations in production um today. And specifically, I'm going to do you It's a more pragmatic and practical presentation about the seemingly endless new and different types of production roles and how to match up a particular role with your skills and interests. So, this is more about uh you don't want to just be a general producer, but you have maybe something special great out and you want to figure out how to leverage leverage that into a specialized production role. It's also a talk about how to adapt your production style. This is all about style uh to different situations before and uh and during and after development. And uh it's also a talk about uh production methodologies and how to work with them when you start uh or in start a a new project or join a

project that's already in. This one's represents Agile and we're also going to talk a little about waterfall. I'm going to adjust one thing really quick. Uh or I'm not. Um but that's cool. Uh in larger projects, we're going to dig right in. In larger projects, producers end up supporting um uh many different disciplines. In smaller projects, they can support many uh many multiple areas. When I joined Spore as a producer, I was managing different parts of the project, but by the end of the project after we'd ramp the team up, I had, you know, moved my interests into the two areas where I I had more expertise. So, I had some time while the project was spinning up to work on lots of different areas, but by the end of it I was fairly specialized and working mostly with the online components and uh and working with PR and marketing. So, I was a producer that was a little bit more focused looking outward from the project rather than looking inward at the project. The four primary areas we're going to

talk about disciplines regarding disciplines in game development are going to be art. Uh and that includes both uh external outsourced art, uh internal art, and UI. We're going to talk a little bit about engineering. Oh, there it goes. That's what That's what engineers look like when they code. Producers didn't know that. Uh we're going to talk a little bit about design and production for design specific production for design. And we're going to talk about online and and it's kind of hard to see that slide, but it's um a slide of uh cert available servers for an online game. Um before we jump into all that though, I want to talk about the different gradations of uh game development uh within organizational structures. So, initially you Whoa. Hey, guy. Initially, you have a game. Um it's a single game or a single project based around one IP. Um and that's kind of the most fundamental uh project that would need some sort of production help. Um a good example, I mean there's a million of them, but like Gone Home is one game by one studio that

is about one IP. But then you start adding in other things and you have uh a franchise. So, this would be multiple games or products that are related to one specific franchise. So, this is a good example I like to use this The Sims, which I worked on as well. And that one's a game where like there's multiple iterations of The Sims. There's Sims 1 and Sims 2 and Sims 4 and maybe a Sims 7 and and then there's all of the content packs that come along with it. franchise. Hey. That's going to be a franchise. So, that's going to be multiple uh products that are based around one IP. When you add a bunch of those together, what you end up with is um a studio. So, that's going to be multiple games or projects based around multiple IPs. Um so, a good studio that's an example of that I think is Double Fine. So, they released Psychonauts 1 years ago. They're working on Psychonauts 2. They just released a VR product that's a Psychonauts and the Rhombus of Ruin. So that you can look at them and say like they have and then they have other one-off games like

Broken Age and and Headlander that they made that Sorry, I have a little bit of a sore throat cuz it's GDC. So hang on. So you can look at them and and understand that they're more of a studio with different different IPs with different products around them. And then next you end up if you have lots of different studios that are all grouped together, um that's a more of a corporate entity. That's going to be something like an EA. So with an EA there's a lot of different studios. So one example is Visceral. But Visceral has many projects that have multiple games based around individual franchises but also do multiple franchises. So Visceral does Dead Space and there's multiple Dead Spaces, they did Godfather, there was multiple Godfathers, but they also BioWare is also part of EA and they have Mass Effect and all the Mass Effect products and then they have Dragon Age and all the Dragon Age products. So that's what you kind of get up to the the corporate level. And then next

um this is supposed to represent publishing which I had a really hard time figuring out how to represent a publishing producer. Um but publishing a video game publisher is a is a company that publishes video games that they've either developed internally or they publish those created by an independent video game developer. So they might draw in games from other studios that they help publish. And typically they manage the marketing. Sometimes they help out with the QA and and user experience testing. Um and they often handle distribution. Um so you know Sony and and Microsoft have big publishing arms. So they're big corporate entities that have multiple internal game studios typically. They also make hardware but they also have a publishing arm and you'll see stuff published by Sony. Like Journey was published by Sony. If you played that game. You should. It's a great game. Now that you have a good overview of uh what the different corporate structure and all the different of the all the different game development opportunities that are out there, what I want to start doing is talking about the different specializations that you'll find within

some of those different companies. And basically I'm going to go through it the way I I talked about those disciplines. So, art, engineering, design, and online. We're going to talk about the different specializations of producers within uh those different disciplines. So, we're going to start with art outsourcing producer, which is a very specialized version of an art producer. Um typically art can be produced in lots of different ways and very few, unless they're very small studios, produce all their own art anymore. Um often they outsource art to um cheaper uh overseas organizations. Doesn't matter where you live, somebody's always going to be overseas from you. Um and basically they need somebody who's going to run that uh part of the business. So, the things that you're going to spend your time in if you do an art outsourcing producer job, you're going to be in email a lot. You're going to be in Excel a lot, both to keep organization of your project, Excel or Google Docs. Um cuz you're also going to be worried about the budget. Um you're going to have to work in all different time zones, cuz you're going to be having calls and meetings to review stuff at

all different times. Um but you're also going to need to have somewhat of an art eye. So, you're going to need to be able to give the art director feedback on on the art that you're receiving, whether it hits his quality bar his or her quality bar that you're looking for. Um because basically uh the art outsourcing producer might say, "Okay, we're going to do all the concept art internally and then we're going to outsource the modeling and the rigging and then we're going to get it back and do all the texturing and animation." So, coordinating all of that isn't going to be an artist's job. That's going to be an art outsourcing producer's job to make sure that everything kind of goes down along that path. Um you're you're going to the skills that you're going to want to bring to that are you going to be like a very very highly attuned attention to detail um cuz stuff can just get lost, particularly when you're dealing with uh outsourcing houses that don't necessarily have English as their first language, if English is your first language. Um, but you need to kind of be able to manage that and keep things in order. Um, there's some good and and bad things about each one of these and and I talked to a lot of different people. I've never

personally been an outsourcing producer. Um, but I have a friend named Sarah who was one for for for me at another um game company I worked at called Inch Moco. Um, and I asked her what she liked about it and she said her favorite thing about it was managing the relationships cuz she got to meet people from all over the place and help manage the relationship to get something done together as a group. And working with people and understanding their needs and what fulfills them. Um, that was, you know, her reason for wanting to do that job. But, you know, for her the negative was that she felt really external to the game team. Like she was often isolated in her work. She didn't really work on the game itself. And uh and that felt somewhat isolating to her and it wasn't an ideal career path for her. But, if you're somebody who's like maybe a little bit more introverted and you like art, but you're not an artist, it could be a pretty good role for you to think about. Um, next is sort of an art adjacent producer. You're not an art producer, but UI is a type of art. Um, so you're not doing environment art, you're not doing character art, but UI art's a really

important part of the uh of the game development process as anybody who's made a game. Unless you've made one that had no UI, which there are some of those that work. Um, but it's really challenging. It's a good challenge. Um, you're going to focus on both 2D and 3D art typically. You're going to have uh some uh experience working with user experience design. And you're probably still going to work with engineers. So, I did this job a little bit when I was working at Telltale Games and uh I found that it was a really interesting interesting role for me because I liked working with both artists, the UI artists and the developers who were actually um doing the the UI engineering. Um and I really enjoyed my time there and my background in uh doing user experience was super helpful there. So, if you've done some user experience uh learning at some point in your career, this is a really good area cuz the first time user experience is an extremely important part of um the UI process. And I loved working on that. Like for me, I worked with a producer for a while and

uh she always said like the first 5 minutes of the game. This was more for triple-A games. They're it's compact for mobile games now. But the first 5 minutes of the game were the most important cuz that was when the player was going to either play the game or quit the game. So, the first-time user experience is a really important part of the game to develop. And the UI team is typically in charge of that, you know, entry tutorial. Um and for me it was really interesting cuz I got to mediate a lot of discussions between a UI artist who wanted something beautiful and and really cool and really interesting and the UI engineer who said, "Yeah, we don't have time and our engine doesn't do that." Um so, you know, you you kind of become that person who is the mediator between those two things and that's the production role you you you fill there and you facilitate some sort of an understanding between those two groups so that um that you get the best thing that you can for your customers. That's a really customer-focused role. I think that's what I liked about it. Um again sort of staying in that UI and and customer appreciation area, I like to

put localization producers here, too. That's another very specific, specialized production role. Um it's really good if you already know multiple languages. Um it's definitely a role where there's a lot of opportunities. Like I haven't met the game company yet that said, "If I could find a good localization person, I just wouldn't hire him." Like everybody wants them. They're not um easy to come by. Um your focus is really going to be working on getting the translations uh created for the games, probably working with an outsourced house to get that done. Um and localization integration testing, which is everything from uh is the translator giving me stuff that is uh appropriate for the language of the country. So, if it's translated, does it still make sense? And is it if it's a funny game, does it still funny? If it's a serious game, is the translation still serious? And does it get the same point across? Um, having a background in QA uh or doing working for one of these translation companies that's out there, both good good areas um for you to have if you want to go down this road.

Although, you know, if you can get a job as an associate producer and tell someone, you know, I also speak Spanish and I'm really interested in localization, you're going to be fine. Like, people are always looking for localization folks. Um, again, it's another one of those where attention to detail is probably the most important thing uh that you can bring to the table because you're typically going to be managing anywhere from if you're just doing EFIGS, you'll have like three or four different languages. Um, and you know, I think Spore shipped in like 21 languages. So, you know, it's a wide variety of things. And you get some kind of interesting problems like in Spore, uh which is the game I worked on for EA, uh we did it in Thai. And Thai is not a character high, it's a character and a half high. Uh and that really wreaked havoc with the UI of the game cuz everything nothing fit. Like, when the translations went in, we're like, "Well, that's terrible." And so then you end up working with both the translation team, but you also end up working with the UI team to make the UI dynamic. So, you get to, you know, work with a bunch of different people. And it can actually be

a really interesting really interesting job. Um, uh so, you know, one of the things that I I think is an awesome piece about doing localization brackets and is it also makes games more accessible for more people, which I think is just cool. Like, I just think that's a really good thing in our industry for anybody to be able to play any game uh is just a worthy goal. Um, but I also feel like there's and this I only have anecdotal information about this um from a couple of the different games I worked on that were highly pirated is that localizing actually decreases piracy cuz a lot of times people in countries that don't get games in their native language will buy a pirated version that's been done in their language. Whereas if you offer it in that language, they will give you money for it. Which is so crazy. Um so I think that there's a you know a big case to be made for localization and there's a big case to be made for having a dedicated localization producer managing that. Again, this can be a fairly isolating role though cuz you're not typically working on the game features. Um you might be coming in towards the end of

the project. So you might even not even see the game while it's in development. And uh to me that's also a really fun part of being in game development is seeing it be super crappy and then get super awesome. Um so you know, it can be a it can be a hard role if if you feel like the need to be uh you know, in on the ground floor of a game development project. So let's shift gears a little bit and start talking about um the engineering specialized producers. Um and we're going to start with director. Oh. Sorry. We're going to start with development director. Um So development director is a good production specialization path that you can go down if you're a producer. And typically you're going to do this if you're really interesting in scheduling and project management. Excuse me. Um typically you're going to be doing things like putting together schedules for projects. You're doing a lot of you know, it's you're the traffic cop. You're doing a lot of like you over here get this done. You over there get that

done. And you're doing a lot of facilitation of of mostly engineers um trying to get their jobs done. And uh it can be a really satisfying role and I'm going to tell you why in 1 second. I have a friend uh very good friend I've worked with for a long time who's development director. And I asked her for a reason. I haven't been a development director so I didn't have like a why would I love this job because I don't actually think I would love the job. So, I couldn't make up something there. So, I asked her and I'm going to read you a quote that she gave me. She wrote, "I love working with engineers. One of the great fallacies of engineering is that it's not a creative discipline, and that could not be less true. One of the hallmarks of a great engineer is their ability to function as an elegant thinker who is able to cut to the heart of a problem with efficiency and grace. That takes incredible focus and creativity, and the ability to harass a bunch of brilliant creative minds to do great work is what gets me out of bed in the morning." And I actually love that quote cuz it makes me actually think, "Oh, maybe it would be cool to be a be a development director." And I think if you can look at engineers and it's a

Grace Hopper, Alan Turing, and Ada Lovelace who are the three engineers that my engineers I work with were like, "Those are my three favorite engineers that I think are just brilliant." Um if you can work with those types of minds and get good work out of them, I can imagine that being a fairly satisfying career path. Um and you're doing a lot of scheduling and you're keeping things a lot on track. Um in fact, if things go off track, it's probably going to be seen as your fault. Uh and that's definitely one of the minus of this whole this whole situation. When things go well, no one really considers why that is, uh but when things go bad, they're typically holding the bag as the development director. So, there's a really high level of responsibility. So, this is good good role for you if you, you know, are interested in scheduling, you're interested in management, you like working with um technical brilliant minds, and you like having a high level of responsibility for the success of your project. Like there's a big big risk-reward payoff in the development director world. Okay.

So, this is what I do now. I'm a technical program manager for Amazon. I work on the Lumberyard game engine. And I put this in not because I work at a game development company per more, I work for a game engine company of which there are, you know, quite a few now. Like a Lumberyard's only And of them. There's Unity and there's Crytek, and there's uh Unreal. So, there's a lot of different jobs, and within a lot of large technical technical companies there are also a lot of different more technical roles. When I came to Amazon, they were like, "What do you do?" And I was like, "I'm an executive producer." And they said, "Yeah, we don't have that job family here." And I had to sit down with the management and say like, "Okay, if you don't have that job family here, let's figure out what my skills are and where they're going to be most applicable." And what we came up with was a technical program manager. And it's a fairly fairly high-level job at Amazon. It's like a career path job. It's not like an entry-level job. And basically, my job means that I manage multiple ongoing interdependent projects across different functional groups.

I coordinate road maps. I plan releases. I run sprints. I run triages, and I assign bugs to engineers. And I needed to have a basic understanding. This is kind of what got me in got the technical in front of my name, is I needed to have an understanding of how engineers do their jobs. Which I have from just years of working with engineers. So again, this is another role where if you like working with engineers, and you like seeing everything kind of come together and be wonderful, this is a good good one for you. So, before I did computer stuff, I was a cook. I was a line cook. I used to take orders and put them up, and and I ran the kitchen. So, I was the grill cook, and I I had the guy on my left who was making salads, and I had the guy on my right who was doing sauté pans, and I did all the grilling. And it was my job that everybody's food came out at exactly the same time and was beautiful. And I kind of think that's what I do in my job now. Basically, I'm coordinating all of the different projects to come together at the same time and get out and be exactly

what we want so that our customers will want to keep coming back for more. The other part of my job that I really like that's that's really the interesting creative piece of my job is that I ensure that like technical design and implementation meet the product requirements. So, I work pretty closely with product managers who are coming up with the ideas of things that can be in the product and and help make sure that everybody on the product knows the right thing to do to kind of get that outcome. So, that's the more satisfying parts of my job. And has some ups and downs. I'll say that about it. You know, I definitely feel like it's not as creative as as some of the roles I've held in the past. I'm not doing the product management side, so I'm not creating as much as I as I have with regards to technical project specs. And that's fine with me cuz there's other parts of my job that are very challenging and I love the engineers I work with. Not working with artists anymore and I kind of miss seeing art and it makes me go out and play more

indie games cuz I just crave sort of seeing wacky crazy art in my world that I don't see at my job. So, you know, I think when you're being a development director or technical program manager, you have to kind of commit and say, I what I want to do is I want to manage projects and be successful at that and I need to like let go of maybe some of the creative aspects or maybe I'm not that interested in that. Satisfying for me about game development is getting the job done. So, talking a little bit like switching gears again and and talking a little bit about online. So, mobile product manager is a new sort of avenue for producers to go down and this is one that's a little more appropriate for most mobile games. Like most mobile companies have one or more mobile product managers. And then they tend to be a little bit more focused on things like customer retention, player behavior analysis, things like revenue generation are really big big areas of study for mobile product managers. They usually collaborate with designers,

so there's a lot of opportunity for them to give some creative input in their job. And they usually have monthly, quarterly, and annual revenue targets. So, if you're somebody who thinks, you know, one of the things I really enjoy is being having a way to quantify whether my job is going to think I'm successful in my job, there is no better way to do that than to make money for your company. Um cuz people will notice it and you will get credit for it. So, if if if that gives you a lot of satisfaction at work, um this is definitely an area for area for you to consider. Um if you're you have a a business background, if you're into data analysis, if you like statistical analysis, um this is another really good area for you to be in. It's a really good training ground um for sort of executive management, not necessarily project management, but executive management, um you know, within a within a small to medium-size company. Um one of the ups that I found from working with product managers is that they really enjoyed is they spent almost their whole job worrying about

customers. So, I worry about am I going to get to the finish line in time? They worry about is the customer going to get to the finish line in time? And I think that that's a a pretty satisfying way to think about your job. Um another really important piece of it is, you know, if you're at a small company and you're a good product manager, you're helping pay the bills for the company. So, your co-workers um can pay their rent and and you guys can have pizza and things are good because your product manager's thinking about how to generate revenue all along the way. And that's a really nice feeling to pay rent. Um I enjoy it. It's a good thing to do. It's also um a pretty new area. Like mobile hasn't been around that long and uh and that means that there's a lot of room for innovation and experimentation. So, if you're a person who says like, I think this might work, um and you can make a a data anal an analysis that it will work, you can almost always find a manager who's going to say, "Yeah, let's give it a go. Let's like see if your idea works." And they won't all work, but most of the companies that have

people like mobile product managers are okay having some um measured amount of risk in the types of things that they do cuz some stuff works and some stuff doesn't. And if it does work, you have Clash of Clans, you know, so not too bad. Um the downsides were uh you really don't necessarily play the game itself on a daily basis. A lot of these are going to be live games that have uh upcoming ongoing new content coming into them. Uh and that might be something that's really important to you. You really want to be able to play the game and and have that experience. You might not have time to do that. So, you have to put your trust in the other people that are working on the game. Um and one of the other people that'll be working on the game is the live producer. Um so, this is another online role. Uh I actually did this role for a few years for a company called ngmoco. Um and your primary job in this role is to make sure that the online game is uh being updated on a regular basis. So, in this world, your game doesn't you're not finished when you

launch. You're just getting started. You uh you have so much more work to do once customers actually come in. Um and you're typically worried also about generating online revenue. So, you're going to have a product manager that you work with on this. But you're also going to be doing things like So, you're going to be worrying about money. You're going to be worrying about when is my game going to get approved from the App Store. You're going to be worrying about whether my servers are up, which is that red and yellow. You don't want that much red. Trust me, it's not good. Uh and you want to like look and see if you know how popular the servers how are things going. That's just the wild server list cuz that's a great long-term online game. They are experts in live operations. They have lots of live producers at Blizzard. Um you will need to know some about server management and data operations. So, you'll need to understand like how are my servers doing? Am I getting enough data back to be able to make decisions about my product? And you're going to be a conduit. You're going to be doing a lot of mediation between the designer and the product manager. Because product managers going to say, "I think this product is this feature is going to make so much money." And the

designer is going to say, "That is terrible. We would never want to do that to our customers." And you as the live producer are going to have the opportunity to mediate between those two people. And if you like your team and you have fun working with people, this is a great job for you cuz you're going to be able to use those people skills to help solve problems and help people get their jobs done, which is really what producers do to me. Um so, you know, me this this is server chart um from New Relic and this is just the app response time. This is the kind of stuff I used to look at uh pretty much all day on one of my monitors. Um and I feel like uh my job was intrinsically tied to the servers. Um if the servers were down, two things happened. One is my customers couldn't play my game, which is terrible and you never want your customers to not be able to play your game. But the other piece was we weren't generating any revenue. If there was no servers capacity, then nobody could get into play and nobody was going to give us any money. And those were not great moments. But what those did give me was an opportunity to work with um some really dedicated DevOps professionals. So, I

worked with some engineers who made it their life's work to A try and keep the servers up the best that they could. And when they went down, they did heroic efforts to get them back up. Um and that was a really That's That's like being in the trenches. Like I've never been to war. I've never been in the military and it is I'm sure not as bad as that. Um but it is definitely quite an experience to like have your servers all go down. I think there was an AWS outage this morning that probably freaked a lot of my coworkers out quite a bit, but I wasn't there, so I have to worry about it. Unless you're at GDC. Um So, uh the other thing that I found really fun about doing online um online production is that you really are things all the time for your customers. And you get to see I love working with communities and I love people and seeing what they're doing and getting to see like how they're playing your game. And then going onto the forums or or on Twitter or anywhere and sort of seeing like, "What are they saying? What would they like to see next?" And having the opportunity to build those features into a game, uh and have the people go, "Oh my gosh,

they actually like heard me and like listened to me." That was extremely satisfying for me. And in packaged games, you you don't get that. Um in packaged games, you you ship and and either if you're digitally distributed or your box product, it's out and uh and there's no changing it. So, that was a super fun thing for me, and I feel like being in live production is great for you if you like change, if you're adaptable, if you like working with people, if you get excited when uh things happen that are beyond your your scope of ability to uh to prevent, but that you really are excited about resolving. Um so, I think it's a really fun and exciting area of production uh that's very different from like if you were a producer 10 years ago on a box game, they just had nothing like that. Um next one I want to talk about is uh publishing producers. So, at the end of the, you know, here's a game and all the way up to the publisher. Um publishing producers are relatively new kind of producer that's uh been around for a few

years. It tends to be a little bit more senior. So, this could be interesting to you uh somewhere down the line in a career if you decide, "I like things like traveling and meeting new people and seeing new kinds of games and making money and and I'm really a few different things." And I feel like um publishers uh tend to uh work as a publishing arm of a of a company. So, it'll be either a developer who makes their own games, but also as a publishing arm, or a dedicated game publishing company. And they typically um handle things like marketing, uh distribution, but the publishing producer's going to be able to, you know, keep their eye on production all the way through the development of the game to ensure that there's a financial and critical success cuz the publisher's only going to make money if the game makes money. Um you need exceptional people skills for this. So, if you decide you want to go become a localization producer cuz you kind of like swimming in your own lane and working on your own stuff and not talking to a lot of people except on email, uh then that might this might not be the job for you. Like this is a job where

you are going to be schmoozing people and and going to out to do stuff. If you don't like going to parties, please don't become a publishing producer. Like it will not be a good job for you. You also need a broad game development. That's why I say it's maybe a job that's for later on in a career cuz you'll need to have some sort of knowledge of everything from uh initial pitch uh through and and including shipping the game and and doing uh after after marketing. So, you're going to spend a lot of your time doing communication. So, you're going to need to, you know, be on email a lot. You're probably going to have a couple of different Slack channels for different teams you're working with. And you're going to be a Skype expert. Um, you also need to be super organized. Um, if you aren't organized, you're going to lose track of of stuff cuz you're not necessarily living it day-to-day. You might work on a project uh for with an external developer only have every 2 weeks you have things with them and you need to remember to ask them about it when you talk to them. And lastly, you need to be sort of the paragon of enthusiasm and positivity.

So, you know, for a publishing producer, they're out talking to the people that are making these games who are in the trenches. And this is the role where you really want to be the guy who brings along the guy or woman who brings along, you know, that like sense of excitement and positivity and that everything's going to be okay cuz you're helping them make everything okay. Um, you know, I talked to a couple people. I've never been a publishing producer. I talked to a few that I actually had a whole bunch of people who when I like asked some friends they were like, "Oh, yeah, I was publishing producer for a while." So, I got a lot of feedback on this one from people and and they had a lot of different reasons for wanting to do it. Um, I think it's another one of those jobs that you take on when you want to be uh thinking about moving it to upper management. So, they wanted more insight in how decisions were made from above. Um and then a great quote from one friend was I've always been a games as a new and relatively unexplored art form. And I want to help those trying to push the medium in new and interesting directions find an audience. And I was like, that is the most lovely altruistic reason I can possibly imagine for being a publishing producer. Good job. Like

that was awesome. Um but you know, he also said he gets lonely and he misses the creative dynamism of he he was a producer before he became a publishing producer and just worked on a game and and he misses it. He misses that dynamism of working with a group cuz now he mostly works with a bunch of publishing bunch of developed students studios that are publishing. Another friend of mine said his worst his you know, he loves his job and there's a lot of great stuff he gets to do and he loves delivering good news, but he also has to be the bearer of bad news. Um and you know, you can really destroy people's dreams if you're a publishing producer, if you pull the plug on their project. And you become the person that has to um actually communicate that to somebody. And that's a really terrible place to be and you have to be able to be okay with that some of the time too cuz that's going to be part of the job. Sometimes things are going to go great. Sometimes they're not going to go great. As a publishing producer, you have to be prepared for both sides. All right. So, I said I talk a little

about design producer and here's that moment. Um I think of design producers as feature producers and that's pretty much the most traditional type of production that there really is. Um and I don't want to spend a bunch of time talking about it today cuz I think you probably got a lot of information if you were here for Aaron and Ruth's sessions earlier today and they probably covered most of the ups and downs here and I don't want to cover stuff that other people already talked about. If you want to talk about this more, I'm happy to. I've done this job. I know lots of people who have done this job and and I can give you some feedback on it. But if you decided to go into production, which I assume most of you in this room did decide that, or you wouldn't be here at the production boot camp. Um then you probably have a pretty good idea what a a feature or a design design producer does. There are some new types of roles. Um I worked at Telltale for a while and they have a design associate. It's kind of like a design producer, except it's more to go in the design track, um which I think is a different other interesting specialization, but I

think of that as a design specialization. That's talk for another day. Okay. So those are the types of specializations that I'm going to cover um today. And now I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about um how some of these different specializations vary when you're working on a small team versus a large team. So when you're working on a small team, you're pretty much going to wear a lot of different hats. Um you're going to have the opportunity to try maybe two or three of these types of specializations. So you might be the art outsourcing, UI, and localization producer on a small team. Um and that's an interesting way for you to sort of start experiencing um the different types of specializations and sort of see what might be appropriate for you. Um one of the things I like that um this is is this is what represents dive deep, which is an Amazon leadership value. And basically what it means is you will dig in and do whatever needs to be done uh to get the job done. And I think that's like a hallmark of any producer, but I think that um when

you're on a small team, it becomes even more valuable uh as a skill. That you're able to say, I am not super excited or I am super excited, but I'm going to jump into this task and even though it's kind of, you know, not quite in my bailiwick, I'm going to go for it and I'm going to try and get something done. One of the downsides to small teams is uh there's limited growth opportunities. So, you know, pretty much if you have like an EP and a senior producer and a couple of producers, there's not a lot of growth opportunity and there's not a lot of opportunities for, you know, really getting in and really becoming a specialized producer. And I feel like um you know, that can be okay for a while, but if you do say like I really want to be a DD, you're probably going to need to move on and end up in a larger team because when you get to a larger team, that's when you start seeing these different types of producers break out and spend all of their time focusing on one specialization, and that's when you can get the best experience out of it and understand what's going to be right for you. There's also, you know, room for growth. Uh you know, you don't feel like oh, I

hope the senior producer wins the lottery cuz then maybe he won't come to work again and I can have his job. Um but, you know, in in a large team, you have a lot more opportunity for um movement around. And then if you stretch that out and you become on a large team but within like a studio that has multiple projects, you can say oh, I can also move over to that project. Or if you're in a corporate environment, you could actually move over to a completely different studio. I really like, you know, BioWare's games and I've been working on Dead Space, but man, I'd love to work on Mass Effect. Like that kind of opportunity is there for you as well, especially if you have a specialization and you know they need it. Um that's why localization's an awesome one cuz there's always always room for localization. I'll stop talking about that now. All right. Uh within that though, there's a series of hard skills that I think all producers need to bring to the table. And again, different specializations are going to have different hard skills that they focus on. Uh on the left is uh all the project management stuff that I've had

to use in the last couple of years. Um project management and communication. This didn't include email. Email producers live and die by email a lot. Although I like that Slack is actually starting to take the burden of email off a little bit. It's nice and it's a little more more fun and manageable, but mostly fun. I actually think Slack is pretty fun. Um but I would become an expert in some of these things. Like one of the things I learned on one of my first projects that I was working with Jira. It was years ago when Jira was still pretty early. Was uh somebody made me an admin cuz I was a producer. That made sense at the time. And uh I learned how to create workflows in in Jira. And it's something that I use to this day. Like somebody knows they can make me an admin in Jira and I can probably set up a workflow for them in, you know, 15 or 20 minutes and get a project kicked off. Um and that's just a great skill to have even though, you know, it didn't take me very long to learn, but hardly anyone learns it. So, you can go sign up for a free Jira account and you can learn how to do this on your own. Uh and then you start developing those

skills that become part of different specializations. Like it is a really good skill for a development director to have. It is a really good skill for a TPM to have. Um not necessarily a skill your producer needs. Um in the middle are two of the producers' best friends, um Excel and uh and Google Sheets. I love Google Sheets. I wish I could use it for everything. We don't really use it much at Amazon, um just cuz well, it's Google. And uh Uh so, I use Excel a lot, but I love Google Sheets for being able to see uh projects getting updated. So, I worked with an external development shop for a while, and we could have meetings where all of us sat in Google Sheets and we updated it on the fly together live. Um that was That's incredibly valuable as a production tool when you're working with distributed teams, which almost all of these productions production specialists could um eventually do. Um and then over on the far right, those are all of the um the first-party uh development platform. So, that like if

you have to submit to Steam or you have to submit to iOS or Sony or or Microsoft. Different specializations have different parts in that in that role. Um so, you know, it might be that you're the producer who goes and reads how iOS requires you to do your user experience design. Well, that's on the the iOS portal. Or you're the producer who at the end has to actually submit the app for distribution. That's a completely different other part of the portal and it's a completely different specialization. But these are all really good things for you to understand what are the requirements of the first platform holders and how can I make sure that my my area my area of specialization is doing the right thing so that we don't fail submission because of my stuff. Um so those are some of the hard skills. There's a lot of different hard skills. I think that uh we're going to talk a little about development methodologies and that kind of leans a little bit into the hard skills as well. But I want to talk for just a second about soft skills. Um empathy is at its simplest

awareness of the feelings and emotions of other people. It is the link between self and others because it's how we as individuals understand what others are experiencing as if we are feeling it ourselves. This is probably the best soft skill that I can tell any producer to bring to any specialization. Particularly if you are managing people and particularly if you are one of the specific producers that is mediating between two different groups. Um this is an area where you can bring like I have I was I have in my past been terrible at empathy. Like super terrible and it's been a a skill that I've been working on over time because I think it's a really important production skill for me to be able to say if that person can't get that done, why is that? Like what are they what are they feeling and how are they going through their their job that is is not able enabling them to do their job. So I feel like that's probably one of the biggest soft skills that you can bring to the table in any of the specializations, but particularly the ones where you're mediating between a designer and an engineer or an executive and

you know an artist. Um this is a book. You I think you'll be able to see my slides online. This is a really good book about difficult conversations. This is another really good one if you're if you're mediating or managing uh between different groups uh because I feel like this is uh what producers do a lot if they are the type of producer who's working uh with groups, not necessarily the ones that are swimming in their own lane as much. Uh one of the other things I think is a really important soft skill for for um production is uh team health. I think that no matter who you're working with and which which part of the organization that you're you're working at within your specialization, team health is really important cuz if you and your team aren't happy and aren't feeling good about their work and don't have a good work-life balance, um that is partly your responsibility because your job is to get the project out the door and uh and team health is a huge part of that and that's become more uh important as time has gone by and specialists

within specialist producers have a really big role to play there. Um and it's a super fun thing to do. Like worrying about team health means that you get to plan cool things for people to go do. Um and I think that that can be a really positive um experience as a producer. Um one of the things I use at my current job um that's less about ordering pizza the ordering pizza side of team health and a little bit more about making sure we're getting the job done team health cuz that also is a very positive uh positive impact on your team. Uh we use some parts of Agile and we use some waterfall. So, I'm going to talk a little about the parts of Agile that we use. Um have you guys anybody used Agile? Everybody, sweet. Um has anybody used strict crazy strict Agile for game development? Wow. Yeah, that's one. So, you know, for me when I think of how we've used Agile uh on the projects that I've worked on, these are really the four um areas that I tend to use the most. So, I like to

use user stories for game development because it makes sure the engineering team is actually thinking about what's right for the user experience and not relying on built as designed, which is um my favorite answer as a producer to get from an engineer when I say, "Yeah, but it doesn't work." Hey, it's built as designed. Um so, you know, user stories are a great way around that cuz you can say like um the user needs to be able to create an avatar, right? That's a great user story, and then you can flow out everything from that to actually get that work done. Um I love daily stand-ups, not necessarily because I use them in the strict Agile way, but because I get updates from my team, and it helps me sleep at night. Um on days when I don't go to my stand-ups are like my worst days for wondering like, Is Is the train rolling? Are we getting everything done that we need to get done? I like to use incremental development, and I think that's a really good one for specialized producers in particular cuz it helps you figure out, When am I going to be able to give a report about my

part of the project to another part of the project? Um and what's going to What's going to be in that? So, if you say like, I know in this sprint, we're going to get this amount of work done. I know from previous sprints that we actually get 3/4 of that work done, then I can go out and say, "Hey, executives or other teammates. Um here's what I think we'll have done in 2 weeks." And if a combination of the stand-ups and knowing that that incremental development and sprints is happening, I as a producer are going to be able to work with other producers and be able to report to my management what's getting done in the project. Um and personas I really like and I use them both uh I used them a ton when I was doing mobile development. Um but I use them now even though I don't share what I do with them to as many people. In mobile development, you use them cuz you're trying to figure out like, What are the product features that we need to prioritize based on who's using the product? And you have all the data telling you who's using the product. Uh in my current job, I don't really have that, but I do have the idea of like, Who's using our engine to do what right now? And thinking about those personas and figuring out how to do feature development even though it's not

necessarily tied to revenue, I still find very valuable. Um waterfall, you know, I I This is not the fanciest waterfall slide in the world. Um, but waterfall's pretty basic. It's been around a long time. Um, you know, it's sequential. It's non-iterative. If one thing slips, it causes lots of other things to slip. Um, I tend to uh rely on it to do upfront schedules cuz I just want to like like when I'm trying to schedule something out just to get sort of a vague idea, a straw man of when something might be done. Um, but they tend to you know, I I say your mileage may vary when you use waterfall. They're easy to create, but unless somebody's actually really actively updating it, um, it becomes out of sync pretty quickly. Um, so I tend to you know, look at that and I say, you know, what I end up doing is I say, I use a combination of these things. Um, and uh you know, it sometimes leads to mayhem and chaos. But what I usually get from it is I take the pieces of Agile that work, I take the pieces of waterfall that work, I try and combine

them, and figure out which works best for which specialization I'm doing at that moment. So, for live production, my scheduling is completely different than what I do as a TPM at Amazon. So, you you you know, again, your mileage may vary. This is something that you'll adapt for your particular specialization, and you'll have to work with other people on it. Like you have to get your engineers to buy in with whatever production methodology you use, or you will get nowhere really really fast. Um, so you want to be having those kinds of discussions at the beginning of a product and try and you know, move things along in a way that makes sense for your particular product. All right, last slide. Pusheen, cuz there should be a cat in every presentation. All right, what should you major in? So, if you're in college right now and you're hoping to become a producer someday, you should major in whatever the [ __ ] you want. Um, basically, uh I sort of feel like you should also take some engineering classes. Um, but you should major in something that's going to give you a broad

knowledge of humans and what we've done with the society that we've had for millions of years. Um and for production in general, you're going to work with so many different kinds of people doing so many different kinds of things. Having a broad base of knowledge is the best win. Um I am a terrible artist, which is why I drew not one of my slides. Um I'm really literally a terrible artist, but I took art history classes cuz I love art, and that gave me enough information for me to sit down with a game artist and be able to have like a conversation don't sound like a complete idiot. Um and and it also makes me enjoy it. Like I actually have an appreciation for the art that gets that happens in games, even though I can't do it myself. And that's kind of why I think, you know, what you should you major in? Really anything. It's a it's what you learn along the way and and what you want to bring to the table for the job that you want to have down the line. All right, should you take classes in Agile? Should you take classes in anything? If you want, you should. Um I don't know that I would take an Agile class. I think there's information

online, um and it seems like all of those Agile classes are like, "Come to San Francisco for an all-day Agile class." I can't think of anything that I would find more boring. Sorry if you teach Agile classes. Um but uh you know, I think if you're super interested in it and you want to become, you know, a super technical project manager, maybe it it would be a good thing for you. I still think there's plenty of stuff online. I think there's other classes you can take. Like I took a Java class a few years ago just cuz I wanted to learn about object-oriented programming. I'm not going to become a programmer. I have no desire to do that at all, although I have tons of respect for programmers. Um but it just helped me be able to have more intelligent conversations because I had taken a little bit of time and learned a little bit more about something I didn't know about. So I'd say yes, if you want. Um how do you get into production? So if you're somebody who's not in production now, but you want to be in production and you don't have any experience and

you don't know anybody in the industry, um look for an entry-level job and you might find an entry-level assistant producer job, but it's more likely you'll find something like excuse me, a QA job. Um there's still a few of those that are feeders into a production group. Like I worked at Telltale, they feed people from QA into production all the time there. Um or look for like a community manager job cuz like most people know how to use social media. Learning how to use social media is again something you don't need a class in, you can kind of learn that online and that leads you down the path of getting a foot in the door, understanding community, and understanding who's playing the game is actually a super valuable producer skill for almost any of the um production specialization. So, that's a good foot in the door. When you're a producer and you've joined the company, find a mentor. Find somebody in the company that is doing one of these specializations that you're interested in that's more senior than you and ask them to go to lunch. Uh take them out to lunch, it'll be worth it. Uh you don't need to have a formal mentor relationship with them, but if you have a relationship where you can ask them a question here or there, they know who you are, they start seeing you around

the company, um that's a really good thing to foster and it gives you somebody to talk to about something you're interested in, which is super fun and why we are human beings. Another thing to do when you join a company is finding a champion. And a champion is a little bit different from a mentor cuz a champion's going to say, "I uh think you're valuable and I want to help you get ahead personally." Like I want uh and there those do exist particularly at some of the larger companies. Um and what they'll do is they'll, you know, work with you, they'll see what you're good at, they'll understand your value, and hopefully they'll help you get ahead within the company. Uh they're definitely harder to find than mentors, but if you find one, uh you know, take advantage of that relationship and and and work with them cuz it's a great way to um learn about a company and learn about how to uh improve yourself within the company. And that's it. I have some time for questions. If you

ask a question, please do it at the mic cuz I'm going to lose my voice in about 10 minutes and uh I don't want to have to repeat everybody's questions. Hi. Hi. Um so first uh very helpful, so thank you. Um so one of the things I've noticed um actually was at Amazon, so I was a TPM at Amazon and then it's a PM at Microsoft, technical producer of uh some place else. So how do you kind of like bridge the just the different titles in different places? Like how do you kind of like describe your role in a resume when you look for things, kind of like keywords to bridge the things? And then as an addition for that, what do you do if you find yourself at a production role that is very, very specific to the place you're at and how do you can then advertise yourself to other things or grow into other things? Yeah, so I think for the first part of that um you know, what I tend to do it's really easy to write too many things about a job and I try and look at like the three things I do most. So what are the you know, in a within a week, what are the three things I do most? For me right now, the three things I do most are

uh road map planning, sprints, and bug triages. So those would be the three I'd pick even though I do a like a bunch of like I do contract management, I do all this other stuff that I just don't think is as relevant for whatever the next job I want. So what are those three things that I do that are going to resonate in whatever I want to do next? If you're doing something the sec Is that your first question? Is that it? Yep. Yep. Okay, so the second question um with regards to if I'm I'm doing something and I kind of want to go in a different direction for a job that I see that doesn't have it doesn't usually need the skills that I'm I'm working with now and and aren't part of my resume. Um I'd probably try and figure out another way to get some of those skills and that might be participating in a hackathon or game jam and say, you know, like go to a game jam and say, you know, I really want to be the person who helps pull together all the art cuz I've never done art, but I think art would be more interesting than, you know, localization. So, try and find the experience somewhere else if you can't find it within your own company. Thank you. On your last slide, you had uh bullet

points about um finding someone to mentor or champion you as a young producer. Do you have any advice for people who want to get into mentoring or champion people less experienced than them? Yeah, I mean, I think that if you're at a company that's big enough, like go talk to HR and say you want to spearhead that. It can be as easy as like if you have like an internal spam list that's like I'm selling my cat carrier. Uh it could be just as easy to say like I'm looking to mentor. Here's the three things that I do most with my job. Um but HR typically also has people who might be interested and and might have be able to help you do that if your company is has an HR person. What if you don't have an HR person? You don't have an HR person? Well, do you have a company spam list? Yeah. Ah, there you go. Mhm. Yeah. Or ask managers. Ask other managers, too. Hi. Hi. Um my question was about uh mentors and finding a champion. Do you think it's appropriate if that ends up being

the same person or would it be better to have it be two separate people? Um I I kind of would end up thinking it's two separate people cuz I think it you know, the champion you want to be the highest person in the company that you can get. Um and the the mentor you really want to be somebody that's in a discipline area you want. And it's not necessarily that that's I mean, if it's the same person, that's fine. But I I I would I I don't know how that would work. Like I don't know that many company where uh the same person is like a senior like unless it's like you want to go into marketing and you want the CMO and they also are like, yeah, I think you'd be great in marketing or whatever. So, I I don't think it would work out that it would happen very often, but I don't think that there's a problem with it if it did work out that way. Thank you. Mhm. Hi. Hello. First of all, thank you for my young producer. Um and um my question is you touched a little bit about uh Agile classes, but what are your feelings and thoughts about like Agile Scrum project

management certifications? Are they worth it? You know, I think in tech companies they might be a little bit more worth it. I'm not sure they are in game companies just cuz I just don't know that many game companies that use strict Agile Scrum techniques. Like they just they're just they need just to be modified. And I think that's cuz games unlike software, games actually need to be fun. And I actually don't know Agile I don't think Agile Scrum actually addresses like the fun factor of games very well. So, I think that a lot of companies try and use it to the best extent they can, but then have to veer off at the point when they're like once you get all those independent independent pieces together at the end of Scrum in technical software, that's fine. Like your accounting software, it's great. Two and two does equal four. I'm done. You know, but you know, in a game that rarely happens. Like when you get to beta in a game, you're like, oh, I actually not so fun. You know, that's bad. So, I don't know if the certification matters so much in games as it does as it might in other

areas. That said, I know people who have gotten it and uh you know, I guess it sort of depends on who who who's hiring you. And uh and what you bring to the table from that training. I think you'd probably want to be able to articulate what you got out of it pretty pretty thoroughly. Thank you. Mhm. Hi. Hi. Uh on one slide you had a bullet point about personas. Can you just uh touch on that real fast and what is that? Oh, personas Oh, sorry. Um it's basically um a fictional biography of a typical user. So, a persona might be um like in the case like a whale in a mobile game is a persona. You'd be like, oh, it's somebody who plays the game x amount of time, spends x amount of money over x amount of time, and sort of fits that. Or some other persona from a mobile game might be somebody who plays the game x amount of hours but never spends money, but I serve them this many ads, so there's another way to look at them. some kind of user profile. Yeah.

Okay. But it's usually fictional. Like you usually sort of create them and then train. and all that kind of stuff. Okay. Hi. Hi. Um very interesting talk. I run a small studio down in Costa Rica, and the problem that I have is that I I'm not a producer and my background is computer science, and since we're small team, I got pulled into the production area of the company. So the image of a game producer it's on a non-existent in the Latin American area. So what would be your advice to me in order to try to increase because we tried working with a remote producer, but it's it's it's not working. So what would be an advice just to to improve the process that that we're having right now. who call themselves project managers? No, we're seven people. Oh, seven people. So it's just me and then art and then programming and that's it. Yeah, I mean I think in that case you might want to think about a ways to get

your group to be self-producing so that you know, I mean somebody whoever's the lead of the project. So thinking of another friend small company and basically if they they all are individual contributors, but the person who owns the creative vision of the company needs to have that ownership of this piece needs to fit with this piece needs to fit with this piece. There has to be somebody who says I'm going to own that even if each person is responsible for putting all their own tasks in Jira and making sure their sprints that you know, they put this stuff in the sprint. There still need to be somebody who like sets the sprint up to be populated with tasks. And that probably ends up being the project lead or the the founder. Sorry. Thank you. Hi. Um what would be your advice for someone who wants to laterally become a producer in um a company that doesn't have a lot of producers? Um is there an acknowledgement that there's

a need for producers? Um it's kind of like a lot of people act like producers because there's a lot of leadership that, you know, people take initiative and everyone's kind of got their own area they're in control of. But, you know, with somebody who wants to kind of be a producer, um How much overtime do you want to work? I actually work pretty long hours already. Okay. I mean, that's really the at the end of the day, uh and this goes for most jobs, the job that you want needs to become the job that you do. Um and if you need to do your own job, if you're artist and you need to still produce all your art, then on top of that you also need to like provide the value that you'd provide as a producer for somebody to see the worth. Um so, it's not it's it's really hard to convince somebody with words that they need something. You really have to do it with actions. And that's really not a great answer for somebody who's already like, uh I'm already working like a gazillion hours. So, yeah, but it's really like doing the job you want before you have it.

It's how to get promotions, too. Yeah. Um on a following note, you know, I work in a mobile gaming company and I want to eventually work for like, you know, triple A console company in a production role. Um you know, what's some advice you might have? Uh kind of transition or marketing myself. Yeah, that's a hard one if you I mean, I was in triple A and then went to mobile and then came back to triple A. So, um it's a I think it's a a tough jump from mobile to to AAA, and I think you probably need to figure out a way I And really one of the biggest differences is a uh you know, the quality of the art and the environments. It typically is you know, the the biggest chasm I've found. Um and and the technology as well. Um just behind uh game engines, but um you need to figure out a way to get yourself some of that experience. You need to find like a project to work on again in your copious amounts of spare time. Thank you very much. Yeah. Good luck.

All right. Well, thanks very much today.