Super Producers: Build Your Leadership and Make Great Games

welcome welcome on I'm Erin Tebow if you're in the if you're in the right place I want to make sure I'm VP of product development and an executive producer at gearbox software I oversee the Borland's franchise I also oversee all development basic essentially GM at the studio everyone and that's making games reports up to me my boss is Randy Pitchford CEO of the studio and founder my second boss is Steven ball CFO another founder there the the two owners of the studio who are still in and making games at gearbox and and my my third boss is the studio I make sure that I fill whatever they need first and foremost I also teach them professor at Baylor University where I teach capstone and engineering I like working with kind of in that context really small teams of students have

seven this semester which is different from the close to 300 I have internally a gearbox plus you know all the external people that we have close relationships with it your box so it's kind of refreshing to do that and today I'm doing a little bit different format from what I've done in past years if you've ever heard me talk before usually I rely heavily on memes and pictures and go more for entertainment value and giving you food data and ask for this year what I want to do more is actually cut through the a bit and get more into what we're looking for anyway and what people I'd talk to you in in production around the industry are looking for in their producers and how to move kind of crawl walk run style from getting your foot in which many of you probably already have a quick survey who in here already is a previous or in some kind of production capacity of studio awesome and who here is kind of looking to go that route or

you know making a lateral move or something like that cool students students a few Wow I'm first of all I'm flattered that so many of you who are already pretty in the industry decided to come to this talk when there's so many other cool sounding talks out there and congrats to those of you who are students are looking to get into the industry seeking out you know opportunities like this to hear a little bit from people have been doing it a while I've been in games now going on 20 years I was in music before that I was in rap promotions and production I may give a couple stories there and I started at origin systems when we were coming out of the beta on Ultima Online 97 when I started day one out of out of music was as a audio intern and about three weeks later I started helping that direct cinematics was there a question was there and I

heard something corner my or a corner might hear and we moved from from there into doing some some help third party style with other studios around the EA system got to do things like go up to Dallas and work with the American McGee's Alice team and work with James combat simulations where Andy Hollis had his group at origin we've got actually a couple of old other old school lords and people in the in the audience right now that I can see so thanks for being here so really for me what it boils down to is as a producer what I'm trying to do all the time is to imagine the very very best possible outcome that I can and do everything in my power to go after it and I don't you know it doesn't matter where you are in the organization if you are just getting your foot in the door if you're the EP on a project if you're a dev director it really doesn't matter

this I hope is your goal all the time you want to help your team achieve the best possible success you're not just trying to kind of cover your ass or do the one thing that you got hired to do or you know make sure that your next performance review whatever your KPIs or metrics are for the you know the thing that you're going to be evaluated on that you're just focused on that really the bigger goal is entertaining our customers and finding ways to manifest the best possible things that's what makes this really uh not just a tolerable thing to do for me but but something that I'm passionate about and I know that there are many others who are passionate about production as well however we don't really have this kind of discipline of production there aren't that many schools outside of management that really discuss what you do as a producer or a dev director it's something that most of us have just gained experience from being on the ground doing it and many of us came from other disciplines as well so these are

just my opinions right these are just things that I've seen in my experience and anecdotes from friends of mine who are who are in the industry but what I want is to give you work to do okay so hopefully you brought pen and paper or will get access to this later because actually what I want is for all of you to as we're going through this presentation think of what examples you would use to describe the things that we're going to talk about what pictures that you would use to quickly send the message about those things and how you would do this presentation yourself I'd love all of you when you get home to create this presentation for yourselves and do it so steal it and do something cool with it we're going to start out before we get into like how do you do the the best

possible most awesome job as as a producer EP in the industry and really we're gonna we're gonna stop a little short of the EP side we're not gonna go deep into business I know some of that was already talked about this morning about the economics of the industry I think we in an hour we don't really have time to go fully into the really the executive producer side of things but I'll give it probably a few examples and and if you have any questions when we have time please ask him so coaching opportunities for improvement what I've done is I've pulled some actual coaching statements from performance reviews that I've given over the last eight nine years at gearbox and thinking about some of the coaching moments that I've had before gearbox to start with some mistakes that we see with junior producers and with all producers so the first one is and I I Drive this one home all the time please don't be afraid to say that you don't know something because it's the when you never say you

don't know if you are working with a team and you find yourself constantly feeling the need to answer questions as though you really know the answer and you don't you erode trust with the team and when what you should be doing is everything you can to build trust because you need to use that credibility you might have to cash it in later and so the the economics of credibility and Trust are way more important than being a person who always has the answer it's cool if you have the answer but it's better if you like everyone else are showing that you're just a human in the team some mistakes junior producers may have to do with opinions the first one is which may be a surprise to some of you I feel a lot of a lot of people in production roles in the industry feel they shouldn't give their opinion even if they feel they have a valid backing basis for their opinion they don't speak

up about it and I think the stems from from those I've talked to when I've coached them it stems from feeling not empowered so if you are in a role where you don't feel empowered to speak up about things that maybe you don't think are just in your purview I think that you should address that with your lead or maybe just by revisiting who you are and what you're doing in your role and in in the industry I remember a time actually when I was at origin and we were working on Ultima Online 2 and I felt like messaging there wasn't enough information going around the studio about what was happening with the title and I felt like there wasn't enough leadership on that project amongst all the leads there are some people who are awesome they were you know especially the sort of the vision of what the project was going to be but when the rubber really hit the road from my perspective anyway I wasn't getting enough information and I wished in retrospect after that project was shut down that I had gone to that senior

producer and had to talk with him he he quickly left to go run another studio but I realized later why my boss he was the head of the we were in this team called the rave group stood for radical audio-visual experience we were responsible for cinematics and storytelling and technically animation and art and all the audio for our games why he stuck a potato and that person's monitor and left it there for four months not realizing that guy was on the way out the door it was kind of his passive aggressive stance to speaking up when he didn't feel empowered I understood what that was later was funny at the time that there was a potato in the guy's monitor though so don't be the person who put some potato in the monitors is my point this one is the more common one that you hear offering an opinion when unqualified like here's the thing if you're in a if you're in a team if you're in a bigger team especially and that team has hired

designers to come into design roles on your team please don't usurp the authority and responsibility of those designers on your teams by constantly offering design opinions I love that you have design opinions if you have them and you're offering them just make sure that you're helping the team use their time most wisely and boosting the cred of the people around you by giving them the responsibility of having and pushing forward those opinions I actually every year every year I have at least one moment where I have to coach a new producer on this one and then not asking other so this is goes hand in hand obviously with not you know kind of not speaking up or not feeling empowered but not not asking others for their opinion not asking enough questions not being curious enough what I'm looking for really especially with newer producers or people who are really curious it becomes very helpful when you are

uncovering the unknowns in your design to have curious people around you especially producers who are responsible for understanding the scope of work that is being proposed and so when you don't ask a lot of questions and people for their opinions about the validity of things the goodness of things how deep problems are gonna be in things then you're not helping your team as much as you could self-control once in a while and this goes for all team members but it really hurts me when I see it from someone who's in production your team's looking to you to be a leader to be someone who sets the tone for adult behavior and professionalism in the team usually you know it we want that of all members of our teams but you know my discipline now

is in production so I can't control per se or give that same message to all other disciplines I'll say if you're in production I'm hoping that you are consciously practicing self-control there's a lot of ways to do that I'm not going to go into kind of all methods for all things here I will ask you that you practice this there's an obvious one however a lot of times we see informations being disseminated through electronic means that needs to be given face-to-face anytime you coach somebody I hope that is face to face never coach anybody over email or on a phone call it can it can wait unless it's disastrous it can wait until you're face to face also great news is best delivered face to face it's way more impactful and you can also use it as a moment to coach in a positive direction not just away from a negative direction there's kind of damned if you do damned if you don't

things there's a lot of there are a lot of these gotchas so rather than say it's a failure to make a decision before you have all the information I could have said that but instead what I'll say is that the failure is not recognizing what the best alternative is you have to make decisions with incomplete information it's part of your job you're gonna try to uncover all the information you can but really you're going to have to make a lot of decisions with incomplete information so you might favor making a decision toward something that you can easily recover from that's that's always a good direction to go if you have the time to recover taking too long to make a decision well there are some that can stand to wait right there are some things that are painful to make bad decisions with whether it's hiring the wrong person or making some feature decision to do a back of the box check you know for your product as opposed to ensuring that your team can really deliver on that thing that you're

discussing so make sure that you're weighing the pros and cons across across competitive decisions so along the same lines of professionalism that we were talking about before the baseline that you set is really important and you have to be intentional about it you can't just be hey it's just me and I'm on the team and people have to accept me for who I am that as a producer okay I want you to be who you are and I want you to be comfortable in your own skin but you are establishing a baseline and everything that you do that deviates away from that baseline is going to be hugely impactful especially as your team's grow so you have to be intentional about what that baseline is okay if you come in and you're kind of have this getso behavior because you're passionate about a lot of things and you're all over the mat okay you might be passionate and you'll be around isn't say assistant or associate producer for a while but you're not going to be in a leadership capacity

with that sort of behavior and I don't see anybody in here who strikes me that way but I've seen it and had to coach people out of companies I've been at as a result of it where their baseline in is really important and you have to be reliable in that way now here's the thing though because you've established this baseline then you can be intentional about when you use emotion there are times when I want to see you use maybe a lot of emotion in order to be super impactful and the things that really matter for your teams you guys know about Matt Maslow's hierarchy of needs yeah you've heard about this a lot of times you've probably heard other talks about it studied it in school whatever it's funny how often this really truly comes up in a studio environment whether it's something as simple as food or the AC isn't working the heaters not working whatever it is you have to decide how you're going to escalate your response to things

actually directly impact that foundation of what people need and once you've established a calm baseline when you see things that might impact your team's physiologically psychologically things that impact their safety you know if you hear about hey cars are getting broken into in the parking lot and you know you you're in an environment where you might have street lamps that are going out whatever you have to be the one to care about the team enough to escalate in a way that others understand how much of a problem those things are and as a producer this is really squarely in line with things you have to care about so professionalism you know we're in games I understand we're not in a corporate environment yes it's cool but I'll say I'll give another origin example we had this stupid terrible thing we used to do

which was a mandatory happy hour and it started when the company was small and it continued when the company got big and I saw two different marriages get wrecked over the fact that we had this forced socialized thing happening you know you have to be really really mindful of how long do you want to be in the industry and what kind of reputation do you want to have and leave behind so things like dating coworkers but again whatever whatever your company policy is that's cool keep in mind though once you start having those relationships grow in the office environment through the stress you're probably going to experience on the kind of projects that we see all across the industry these days you know that can really impact things in the game and in your life and I don't want you to go through the kind of things that I saw in those days that we had 20 years ago it's not okay to say offensive

things like it's not okay to like I don't want us to have to be too PC in the industry I curse a lot I use a lot of references that people would you know that I what I wouldn't use maybe at home with my mom or you know or with my family at home it at the same time though you have to be really aware of who your coworkers are and and you want to boost them up and make them feel great likewise I also want you to keep in mind and I'll only stay on this one for a second that when you're this is especially for junior really new producers because you'll wash yourself of this if you're gonna stay in the industry at all is that anything that you bring into the office environment first of all you want to you want to keep any stress and negativity are having from things happening your

personal life leave that outside the doors before you get into the interior studio or with your team beyond that most of the people on your team don't really want to hear about whatever's going on in your personal life whatever your drama is but you should use whatever strength you can draw from your personal life whatever experiences you've had there talk about those talk about the positive things that might be good examples for the team to know why they should believe in you and why why you have strengths and what you bring to them this is one that I'm in probably two or three times a year I have to coach somebody in this one too much importance put on titles on using somebody's new title or role or promotion as a way to get what they want and for something or feel like now they have they're supposed to enforce more of what they want on to the team maybe you move into you know a role like producer a TA right some of you might might be here in that

particular role where you do have some you know design or quality responsibilities for the title and so cool that's your job but I see whether whether it's a gearbox or with teams that were working with in other Studios this happened wha so we try to have a more flat meritocracy style culture in our studio where titles don't mean as much and I have one guy who decided that he wanted his title to be Minister of art that's what the Flex is and Minister of art is that all I really wanted to do is help us hire the best people and I think that having that title makes me feel good about doing it all right cool I'm gonna call you an HR advisor and you can tell other people you are whatever you want but you know this can get in the way of good feelings between team members when titles start to matter too much you guys know that something that I mentioned earlier is this sort of currency and economics of credibility right once you

start spending your credibility it's you have to build it up again before you can start spending it again and these tend to be on decisions where there's no clear answer but you have an agenda behind the thing that you want and so you're willing to spend that credibility that you have and you have to be very careful about how and when you spend it especially if it's something where others are pulling you to spend on their behalf you can get yourself in a situation very quickly where you've spent it all it's like you know like you're spending it on a credit card make so the way to combat that is make sure that your decisions are yours that you really really truly believe in the things that you want and that you're willing to go to bat willing to go to bat for this is really common and this is something that as you grow as leaders I want you to think about a lot you have to see yourself as a leader it can be very difficult for us to see ourselves in that way a lot of us in in the

industry stay in the industry or got into it because we didn't want to be executive manager at a company go down some other path that felt maybe more corporate or whatever to us right so I want you to see yourself as a leader that is part of your discipline in production and then practice things towards that we'll get to that in a second I only be on this one for a second about two months ago I had this is actually trying to be too cool was a line and in somebody's review I wasn't a review that I gave was a review somebody else gave I won't tell you which of these three things was the issue but it was a new person who won't just really wanted to fit in and I hope you don't find yourself in any of these situations don't don't be that person though you won't last long so this isn't this is a big problem that I'm I'm frustrated that I have coached someone for a couple of years now who and every other aspect of what they do

is great but this is one that keeps coming up kind of time and again which is you might be someone who's terrific at get a get only getting along with the team you know working through tasks and JIRA whatever task management system used like you're really competent and capable in a lot of areas but the little things keep falling through the cracks and this is the one that will absolutely prevent you well at least if you're working with me but this is one that will absolutely prevent you from being promoted like you can go from foot-in-the-door you know assistant associate producer but to move from associate producer to a full project producer this won't fly and once you've shown that you have a penchant for letting things fall through the crack through the cracks it's going to take a couple of shipping cycles or if you're in a live environment you know whatever your your your life cycles are it's going to take

a few of those to gain back the credibility that you need to be able to get yourself in a position I have that promotion again or you know for others to see you as someone who you can be in a kind of role of responsibility so make sure especially if you're told at some point that something got by you that that you don't let any of those details get by all of these are very important kinds of things that have actually happened recently with me how many of us get frustrated about being in meetings where people just always seem to take notes and nothing happens with those notes am I the only one yeah it's so to move this from a kind of a negative thought into more positive thoughts I hope everybody is turning everything that's happening in meetings

into actionable items you have to measure those right because people only do the things that they're measured in overtime if we feel like the thing we're doing is of no use because it's not being measured nobody remembers that I actually turned that stuff in that meeting into action items then I can easily fall back into the trap of just sitting there scrolling crap on a piece of paper so if you have people working for you who are note takers and meetings or if you're the note-taker designated note taker or whatever make sure that others know you're constantly following up this one kills me meetings with topics but no agendas it goes hand-in-hand with not having action items and follow-up just fix your meetings there's a lot of thinking out there about how meetings should be held but just fix your meetings if you're having these kind of issues dear God please in fact I'll give a quick note about that last one I wanted to train my production staff at the studio I now have I probably have 25 25 or so

producers at my round table maybe 30 I wanted to train them that my expectation of producers a gearbox is for them to be responsible as a peer group to solve their problems before they ever get to me or anybody else who is going to have to then sort out noise from the signal and to train them in that when I began assembling this new group of producers I told them first because I like to use dramatic language to to convey simple points I hate meetings so never call me to a meeting unless there's a great expected value to come out of it and and only if it's almost a last resort because something couldn't get worked out between yourselves first and that the outcome of that approach of course you know III also gave examples of how I wanted these meetings to be conducted to get those results was the most junior

producer one of one of the more junior producers in our studio now runs these producer roundtable meetings where all the important stuff that has to get sorted out between producers happens at these roundtables no executive managers no executive producers go to these meetings that's body design and I've had requests from from other executives hey can I go to these meetings hear more about this happening well no because if you do that they're not going to have the discussion they need between them so what I want is I want that healthy peer community to be established in a studio especially at our size and bigger I mean we're small compared to maybe what if any of your fluency would be soft Montreal or any larger studios but even so there has to be a healthy community of practice amongst producers you can't do that when everybody's just working in their silo

I'm Borderlands 2 Sean Riordan who's the senior producer on the project and I sat down and we were trying to figure out because there was it there was there was some things happening around the schedule as always happens on any project kind of what's the formula actually we started this discussion way back early in beurling's one even kind of what's the formula for quality enough what we care about is quality and we're meritocracy and we need to create a compelling argument about why we need to get more time for something you know how do we do that well you know quality results from focus and time so we need to use these words and then turn them into something acts as a studio for how we organize ourselves quick thing I'll say there is anything that distracts from focus is negative so if you have people who are spending a lot of time streaming if you're dealing that if you know taking a lot of smoke breaks whatever while that might not feel like a big deal you know on a day to day basis you're creating a

lot of debt over time that has to be paid and that's something that you have to reinforce with a message with your team all the time you can only do that first of all if you are setting a good example giving a heads up so the military has this term where no weren't a warning order that's hey I'm about to tell you something's going to happen here's the thing I'm going to tell you and then the actual order comes later and you have to remind people all the time that there was a discussion about something that might require them to do work they have to be prepared to do that work because if you don't do that you have situations where especially with leads who are really busy they I don't remember that ever being discussed or I don't remember that being a thing I had to prepare work for and I didn't create that job posting and I didn't do the spec for that thing that had to happen so you have to keep this cadence of information so that people remember there's a thing that they're going to have to do by the way I want to remind you I want you to give this talk or a

version of it for yourselves when you get home and so think about what examples you can use for these it's it's strange but I think this happens in a culture where performance reviews don't happen regularly that we forget part of our job is to supervise what's happening we're not just information handlers we actually are responsible for the quality and result of the product that we're working on and so supervision you know for a junior and that remember this is more geared towards junior producers while I don't want you to act like you're the boss I do want you to remember that you have a responsibility here so it's an easy one just don't be negligent well what happens next when we start to abdicate our authority in the role that we do have is we might do things like a very bad job at expectation management now this ranges across all kinds of

things and unfortunately it can become part of our culture if we're not careful just the topic of poor expectation management we see it in things like press stores where we might say things about products that were correct at one time and then later didn't we're not so correct or it might become something about what a role is what we expect of people in their roles it can be something about what the focus of our project is at the time whether it's time or quality you have to manage your triangle right and the triangle of time quality and money as something that you're responsible for managing you have to know which of those is there's always something that's a priority okay you can't have everything be the highest priority an expectation management is knowing what the priorities are in clearly communicating those and that can be caused one of the things is having unchecked assumptions and I had to counsel somebody it's about six months ago kind of hand in hand with things

getting through the cracks not doing a very good job of actually checking information so we know that in a communication model there's the signal that's transmitted well if you want to know communication communications really happen I did talk on this last year so only touch on me here you want to make sure that communication was actually received in a way that you intended it and that is your responsibility and it's funny to me how often were it's easy for us to transmit communications we're so willing to transmit communication but we do a terrible job at making sure that that communication actually happened and that the sig that the signal went through and that the the message was heard and is being acted on and in a way that we intended so I'm saying it's hard it's not easy don't distribute your attention too much it's easy for us to make too many commitments once you can go too far right you can say I'm going

to enable the team to do everything and then it's very very quickly easily something we can fall into as a trap we're getting close to wrapping up kind of the failure part of this so failure to deal with the producers dilemma this happens all the time when you have somebody in a CE and you're you think man if I coach that person I only have that one person you can do that thing whatever it is this might be my sort of platform specialist or could he'll it could be the lead designer the project could be anybody when we fall into the trap of having to keep that one person it could be that one bad seed that spoils the water that poisons it for everybody poisoning the well I see a less of it these days in the industry but it sure as hell still happens I see a lot more qualified people and we have grown a lot which is good but we still fall into this dilemma and as a producer you have to be kind of at the front lines of dealing with it candor and conflict in

the industry you're not everybody's buddy right you're not here to make friends with everyone and your team needs to know that you're gonna be straightforward with them because the second that they start feeling that you're full of you've lost your credibility and your trust and it's your you they know you're no longer able to be candid with them they'll feel that you're trying to politic with them when you move from candor to politics of you law you've lost the team and you need to know where the when that might happen and avoid that danger I've worked in environments where there's a lot a lot of politics happening especially when I was working with the military or back when I was working in music there's a lot of politics happening all the time because there are scarcity and jobs or scarcity in in attention and once you get

yourself into a role where you can make sure there's a lot of attention you can give to members of your team or a lot of jobs that you can provide or coaching moments that you can have with them you know you can do away with some of the politics but you have to be direct with people or else they'll fill that you're full of and they can't trust and then it's much harder for you to do your job and you probably won't be in your job very long so this is kind of the complement to that that will happen it can happen if you're not comfortable with being direct with people if you have fear it's okay to be afraid but you have to practice being candid a lot of people have to practice that it's not something that's natural to everyone so hopefully you're in an environment where you can practice that but you have to find opportunities to practice don't ever lie so moving from there that's sort of a crawl walk phase I'm gonna talk about the things that I I

think make for super producers again not quite at the business epp level okay there's a little bit of that but between myself and the senior producers I work with a gear box and in some at the publishers we work with here's a few qualities that I'd like to see you all practice and think about intentionally okay so here's the first one you have to be the person now say you're moving from junior producer mid-level producer into senior producer you're the person responsible for the project for the team or your enabled by your lead to be one of those people bad things have to stop and you have to go through a practice you should go through a process on a milestone basis some regular basis where you are evaluating you might do this as a mid mode more than a post-mortem simply something that you do as an activity with your team members your leads you have to be constantly identifying things those that need to

continue those that need to stop new things that you should start doing things that need to be discussed okay you are going to come across things that have to stop and the only way to break a cycle in a bad culture or to avoid some pitfalls for quality of project you know things that make studios go out of business is to make bad stuff stop as quickly as possible and it is it is your responsibility to do that the best producers walk around I talked about not sending them at all your messages through electronic means if you have a team right if it's not just a fully distributed team I'm saying in the in the realm of the feasible you should be walking around at your face should be everywhere people should know who you are you should know who your dev team members are you should know as much as you possibly can about them and and there are some really tangible reasons for that and some popular thinking about the you know the walking manager one of

those is the ability to send that message and rally people around your causes you have to be able to use words and convey your your words in a way about what your goals are that gets your team members excited and impelled to do what's needed for your project so you have to be the person you might think it's it's corny or you didn't come from a background where this is the thing that you did or you're introverted or whatever you have to practice helping rally people you maybe you're not the right one to actually be the rally point and do the hooah moment that's fine that's fine but you need to be part of the solution to get people excited in using their passions okay the best producers show and practice the things they want in the macro they do it in the micro all the time everyday in the smallest ways because it it sends a vibe across your

entire team in your studio about what your expectations are from the smallest to the largest it's common themes right so here are some in that basically in that you know according to that triangle the team's food again details clearly communicating every time you branch or have a build don't let those get by you people need to be aware of the state of the product that looped from intent to QA depending on how you manage QA and quality in your studio this could be a huge thing not just because you want to reduce bugs and defects but because the your QA team quickly is your frontline of getting a broad view of the quality of the state of the next piece of software that you're releasing so this cadence of useful communication the best producers maintain that cadence and are

intentional about it you don't just when you have information send it you think about regularly what is the kind of digest what is the what are the kinds of information that you can provide on a regular basis so that you set an expectation with your team that you are going to provide them information even if you don't have a lot to say provide a little bit on a regular basis so they know that information is happening and they'll feel a lot more secure about decisions being made that they're not aware of the best producers have a strong moral compass I don't think I need to say a lot about that but maybe it's not maybe it's not obvious to people coming in the industry it was interesting to me this came up a lot when I was talking with my production friends about what makes for great producers is that your team can rely on you to make decisions for the right reasons and that your team can recover even if

consequences of decisions are negative you have to practice what you want you have to have a shipping mentality all the time at least in and now again the industry is really big now right so we have people in in many areas of development where maybe you don't ship things in the same way that I do cross-platform and PC maybe your hell maybe you're shipping every day if you're in Mobile so there you definitely have to keep that shipping mentality but you also might be doing things where efficacy is much higher than or you might think efficacy for say if you're doing an educational game or something is higher than pure entertainment value and so your mentality is more around efficacy that's fine but we're making game still right so we want to make fun things that are going to get out there when you don't include the team in decisions about the thing they're making then they're not bought in and

then they're out right a lot a lot of people see it as binary a lot of developers they're passionate and they're gonna see it as a binary decision they're either in or they're out you got to keep it min and the way you keep it man is by keeping them engaged best producers are playing games hopefully you're playing games with your teams it's a great team-building exercise if you're playing cooperative games competitive's cool too but if you're playing co-op games with hard missions then those are great team-building moments also shows you're a gamer you're buying those cred points so producer a lot of people who are not in production and a lot of us who are in production think of the producer as a scheduler I think of the scheduler as the project manager I think of project management as part of what producers do we've created titles for people who spend more time and scheduling than in other areas of production but if you want to be a great producer you better be awesome as scheduling you

can go other directions in production that aren't as scheduling focused but when somebody in finance say asks you are you gonna hit this milestone and you I wouldn't say a lie but you make a reach statement and say yes without actually knowing what the state of the project I was compared to your schedule is then you're putting yourself in a in a dangerous situation so if you what I prefer is people to come from a background of having to work with creative departments in building lists going very deep into those lists maintaining data at a dude trend analysis with those what what the outcome of the work from those lists was over time so that you really quickly build your wall quickly so you build your filter and have the you know encompassing view of how quickly people can get things done on your team

what the kinds of appropriate work is for your team to commit to etc the hard thing there I think because I still don't see it often enough with even just people who are only focused on scheduling and project management is in bracketing if you are if you have any responsibility for scheduling at all and and even if you don't and you just want to make sure you know what the hell's going on in your project I hope that you can regularly have conversations about and build your own backwards plans and forwards plans compare the two and then bracket the window when you think when you think things are going to land use that as part of doing your backlog building if you're doing agile use that as part of your milestone commitments or even your initial full project schedules the more you do that over the time the better you're actually going to get at knowing

how much scope you should be committing to with the kinds of people you have as opposed to guessing or just guessing and ask a lot of questions for those things so going back to say music that's definitely talent management a in our artists and repertoire kind of like building your building bands or groups or working with them to make sure that they're being promoted or doing the best kind of work they can it's the same thing in games it is a talent management business and hopefully you know that it's not just getting random people in and you know building a schedule around them but rather over time especially in a studio environment really crafting what the team is like and who's responsible for what things that your composition is is good senior people tend to want to mentor others or at least you know rely on the experience they have and know that it's being listened to so you want to have the

right mix of senior and junior people [Music] you only go to war with the army that you have right so make sure on behalf of your team that you're committing to things that they can do you need to know what their growth plans are also so you know what kinds of challenges they want to accomplish next and you have to constantly be talking about what the goals were and whether or not you hit them and celebrating those successes when they happen but always providing kind of bread crumbing the goals for your teams if you don't know what the growth plans are for your team members please go find out or build them if you haven't already you have to get inside the heads of your team members so that you know what's possible not just what you've already committed to but what's possible with the team that you have and where your gaps might be for what's next so I think all of us are only going to stay in this industry if we're able to innovate if

we're able to capitalize on the teams that that we've built or going to build in the future we can't do that if we don't go deeper into knowing the motivations of our people your decision-making frameworks really important it's also very important that you be able to communicate it and that's really hard for many producers to communicate that they even have a decision-making framework it's easy to say you're making decisions based on common sense it's really hard to say you're making decisions based on any particular framework or approach okay I mentioned a few things here and I'm gonna ask if you're not familiar with these that you follow up and discover more about them so one I didn't write in here which has to do with P&L impact is the idea of earned value management in in earned value management you're comparing the product that you built to the money that you spent and two people

in finance the ones who tend to control necessary just completely sell finance in which case congratulations to you but you know for those of us who are still working with other people's money the more clearly that you can communicate the value of the thing that was built to the money that was spent the less question other questions you're going to need to answer and the more leverage you'll have to get new things that you need for your team can Evan framework this relates directly to agile and this is around understanding the situation that you're in situational awareness and having a measured response to the situation that you're in to go from being a good producer to a great producer this is something that you have to master is modifying your approach to the situation that you're in with your project and your team and hand in hand with that practiced agility so you know how many of you now are kind of in full or very heavily adopted agile production

frameworks in your studio okay not everyone but many most of you I'd say I found and you probably know there's no I haven't found a common implementation of agile or scrum or Kanban in any in any set of studio environments everybody's doing something a little different which i think is cool and good because it should be something that matches with your culture but because it's different in many different studio environments we need to practice before we implement full scale and practicing can be very hard because you have to find the right situations to do it in and sometimes things don't work and we have to break them and do something different and that can be hard when you've fully committed to some production methodology and you may not feel empowered now or it might feel like Momentum's working against you to change what you've done so one of the ways to do that is to have some kind of

incubation little you know project where you can practice something different and use that as a comparison point we actually do that fairly often in gearbox SWOT analysis you probably know a SWOT analysis is but you know being able to identify your strengths strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats but being able to then use that as a way to explain to other say executive stakeholders or even people on the team what kinds of things you should pursue in your projects or people you should hire especially doing gap analysis for your teams to be able to use that as a way to describe how you came to those answers can be very helpful so innovation I'm going to talk a little bit again about as a senior producer or to be a super producer in the industry you need to be able to lead people into innovation you can't just be standing behind waiting for others as they're making decisions to try to pick up the pieces

from them to see how you can support the efforts that they want whether that's in you know some new network infrastructure that the team wants to build going more data-driven in your design whatever it is you need to be at this point to be at this level of production part of that decision-making process and funneling it funneling that's by asking questions about feasibility and being part of that process that's how you move from from chaos to to structure this is what that framework by the way high-level looks like go out and read more about it and when you give your presentation you'll know plenty there and what I like to on a you know on occasion when I'm talking about production philosophy explain that a lot of the decisions I make come from things that I've studied in the past having to do with strategy and battle strategy and this is one of my favorites

miyamoto musashi did any of you know who Emotiv Musashi was quite a few cool wrote the book of five rings this first point here from well from the quo anyway from the earth but don't engage in useless activity so it's basically don't do anything that's of no use and when your team sees that you're not engaging in useless activities and when you're focusing your effort in those things that are always pushing your team forward and while I'm pulling your team forward again you're gaining a lot of credibility points but also you're being efficient in saving money and helping to create a culture of self-reliance amongst your team members I recommend that you read the book as a leader as a as a super producer in the industry you have to quickly be able to explain to others what your definition

of leadership is this is something that a colleague of mine Zhan antal the colonel at our studio he's a he's a great leader and he's a great teacher of leadership and he makes sure that people always can define what leadership means to them quickly you have to have kind of your elevator pitch of it and if you want to be great you have to know what it is for you not just that there's some notion of leadership out there but what it really means for me it really just comes down to the ability to impel versus compel and how that translates into what I do with with my teams so first for leadership mastery you have to be a great representative of your team in your organization to be a to be a truly excellent producer everyone you work with has to know that when you are

talking with them that you are really truly representing that organization what it means well and that you you are a key person in that organization so don't do the things that would hurt that and better yet do the things that others would kind of seek to be you do that yourself second you you can't lead from the back I mean there are theories of management some of which I think are basically just passive aggressive theories around covering your ass which is which would be leading from the back but if you really want to be a great producer and be able to build awesome teams that do amazing things you have to be with them they're at the front you have to be identify as somebody who's leading from the front with those teams you have to be a driver with them succession planning you know this is a really hard one for companies

not just as a producer and a team this is a really hard one for companies to think about you know a lot of studios have been built as lifestyle businesses right they haven't been built as some other kind of company that's going to scale and grow and transform the other things we have a lot of studios that have people who are making him because they wanted to make games and they're in that company to make games and they're not gonna do something else so that studio and and rep is represented now on the team that you work with are there just to be there to make games and that's awesome I want to make great games I hope you all want to make great games but people are not gonna just be in one role forever and even if you can't get buy-in from the people you work for you yourself to be great need to be actively engaged in succession planning all the time you need to do it imagine you know what if you're hit by the bus what if your team members are hit by the bus what if

you need to move people into new roles of leadership what do you do with the vacuum behind them how do you get them to do that as well you want to be awesome you better be able to speak truth to power and that is can be very scary if you're afraid for your job you may not be able to do this maybe you'll be brave enough to do it maybe you won't I hope you will be I personally am NOT interested in having producers who work at gearbox under me who I'm not interested in having them be there if they are afraid to speak their mind to me so I tried to create I believe I create safe environments for anyone to voice any concern that they have and I hope that you are doing that also and not penalizing people for having opinions remember you have to have that baseline of being calm and once you've done that then you have the credibility to coach them in some direction

remember I want you all to go home and teach what we're talking about here today but do it in your own words with your own examples and your own pictures and whatever you want to use but if you want to become great and you want to be seen as someone who has a credibility to to be overseeing a lot of projects and people you also have to see yourself as a teacher not just somebody who's you know a satellite pulling and conveying information these last couple are where I think you really transform once you've done all those other things once you've stopped doing the bad things and you've turned those into ways to be very positive and to do great things the way that you conduct yourself and the way that you work with your teams when you think about the sphere of influence that

you have and how you can expand that for the benefit of your team and the quality of the projects that you work on that gets you to start and thinking about things on kind of a new plane because right now maybe you're just focused and when I say just I'd really don't mean this disparagingly okay you might be focused on the project that you're working on and the team members that you have and just how to do the best you can you know going to war with the army half right how to do the best you can in that scenario but what when you can expand your reach in your influence way beyond the boundaries of that team and the company and the project that you're in you're gonna find all kinds of new opportunities for whatever recruiting for the where your project can go from there new opportunities for building that in the IP with you know ancillary opportunities licensing opportunities meeting people you know that the

effective networking and how that can benefit you and your team so when you think about the sphere of influence you have and what it would mean to grow that in a way that benefits the team not just you yourself you're gonna move into you like this whole other level of super producer and then to go even a step beyond that to me this is kind of the ultimate when you can get to that point and then be able to expand your teammates spheres of influence now you're scaling your organization and your entire organizations capability and being the connector for your teammates to others out there in the world to be on technical steering committees or to give talks at you know GDC here or at the other GD other regional GD C's or dice to be able to expand your reach out

and to learn new things people will come to you at that point or or through your team members who you are asking to expand their own spheres of influence you're going to learn a lot about what's happening in the world for your organization so in kind of a corporate world right there's this idea of business intelligence and competitive intelligence and analysis really I think for us in the games industry as we do need to keep innovating and learning about what all the opportunities are for us to innovate and where we can make money now and in the future one of the best things that you can leverage to accomplish that to have that learning to be able to actually execute on it is to work through your team members to do it at origin back in those days EA didn't really want people to come to GDC and I don't know if that's still true I think he has a very different company now and

I think they're great in whatever yeah but I it's it's a different world now and I hope that attitude isn't prevalent anymore I hope there is no fear of our team members coming to something like a GDC or a dice or any other conference where they can have great takeaways and bring them back to the team because it's the only way that I think we're gonna stay competitive all of us with what we're doing and this is kind of the key I think to being able to keep making games so that's it [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you