Am I a Good Games Producer?

Am I a good games producer?! I like to think I am, but how can I tell? How do I know when I should learn and improve more vs stop punishing myself.

Today’s question doesn’t come from a follower, but from me. I stress about this more than I should. So I set out to think about how to look at the question more objectively.

Hi I’m Jenn Sandercock and this is Jenn’s Generally Good Game Production Advice. I’m a games producer who loves helping teams ship their games on time, on budget, and with a happy team. But am I any good at all this?! Should you even be listening to me?

I might be about to shoot myself in the foot in terms of gaining an audience, but … I struggle with self-doubt and a lack of confidence at times. I believe to help myself and to help others, I should be open an honest. Perhaps you also struggle with self-doubt and hearing me talk helps you get through something. That would be awesome!

I personally don’t believe people who talk about one “right” way to do game production and act over confidently all the time. Game production is nuanced and you’re not going to get it right all the time. So being able to admit your mistakes and learn from them is essential. On the other hand you do need to have self confidence so you can get your thoughts across and help your team the most.

If you’re still with me… great! Let’s get into this.

What does a game producer even do?

Production is really broad and you can’t be good at all the bits. Once I went to a conference talk by another producer and almost quit the entire industry afterwards! That person had a very different production style and set of tools to me. Thankfully a friend reminded me of what I already knew deep down that there’s space for different producers in games. Indeed: different teams need types of producers.

At its heart, I believe production is a service role. Ultimately you’re serving the project. That is, you’re trying to get the game finished. To make that happen, you serve the team themselves. You’re supporting them so they can do their work and ship the game on time.

How can I tell if I’m good at it? Well, if I was an artist, I could create a piece of art and find out that it is good enough to put in our game. As a producer, if the game ships on time, on budget, and the team is happy… well sure then I know I’m a good producer! But what about in the day-to-day? How do I define a happy team and am I even going in the right direction right now?!

• When should I give myself a break and stop listening to the negative voices in my head.
• And when should I actually recognise that I’m wrong and need to improve and listen more to what people are saying between the lines or right to my face.

Let’s go deeper.

How to tell if you’re a good producer

I’ve come up with 3 types of tests you can do.

1. Objective measurements
2. Ask your team about
3. Ask other producers about

These measurements don’t necessarily mean that you are definitely a good or bad producer. Ultimately you’re a good producer if you’re meeting your team’s needs and the project’s needs. Which is almost always a subjective measurement.

The measurements I’ve chosen are indicators of techniques I think good producers do. So if you do great on all the points, then you’re probably not half bad as a games producer!

A caveat: Since this was a question from me, I haven’t tried out most of these techniques. I’ll be doing that this year. If you’ve tried some out or have other suggestions, let me know!

1. Things to test with (somewhat) objective measurements

I tried to focus on objective measurements since these are things that are easy to test without letting anyone else know that you’re doubting yourself.

You’re a good producer if you:

1. Accurately Predict Sprint completion rates
   • Guess what percentage of tasks will be done by end of a sprint. See how close you can get. As a next step: can you figure out which specific tasks will be unfinished?
   • Being able to predict sprint completion rates means you’ll be able to more accurately predict reaching big milestone due dates.
2. Minimal Unexpected Tasks in a sprint.
   • Measure how many new tasks are created every sprint after sprint planning. The less you have, the more it means your team is on top of predicting what’s in the sprint and the less chaos your team has
3. Roadmap is Accurate
   • Take snapshots of your roadmap every quarter and then check to see how much it has changed and whether you achieved the intended goals.
   • You’re doing an ridiculously awesome job if your roadmap doesn’t change much and that’s hard to achieve. You don’t need perfection here, but you can learn from what you get wrong.
4. Leave Space for Other Voices
   • You should spend less than 50% of meetings talking. That is, you give space to the rest of the team for their discussions and voices. If the team is speaking up, then they’re engaged in the meeting.
5. Followed up with team when you said you would
   • Check this by searching messages where you typed “I’ll follow up” or similar and then seeing if you did actually follow up.
   • If you’re saying you’ll follow up on calls, it can be harder to track. So ask your team individually: “Did I follow up with you on everything you asked about?”
6. Up to date documents
   • Look through all your key team documents (like game design overview, roadmap, pipeline description). Are they out of date? When was the last time they were updated?
7. Long time between issues.
   • Each time something comes up that you think is a decent sized issue, write it down and the date you noticed it.
   • Over time, look at how long there is between incidents. Is that time increasing?
   • Can you see a pattern to the types of issues that come up? Can you stop at least one type of issue from coming up?
8. No Time Taken Off After a Milestone.
   • Are the team so frazzled that they can’t come into work the day after a milestone? What about 2 days after the milestone?
   • Look ahead to the next milestone and figure out how to make it less panicked on the finish line.

2. Things to ask your team about

You can tell you’re a good producer if:

1. You’re on top of everything going on
   • Ask team members what is happening with them. See if you already know about it. Can they shock you?
   • As a bonus, see how much the rest of the team is on top of things. Tell them some of the big things you’re seeing and working on right now. Can you shock them?
2. Know What Priorities Are
   • What are the most important things the team is working on right now?
   • List them out yourself and check with the project lead to see if your order matches to what they think is most important.
   • Ask other team members to do the same and see what they list.
3. Everyone Knows Milestone Expectations
   • ask someone what they think is expected for the next milestone and see if they can match what you as the producer think it should be. How done should different aspects be? Which features and content need to be in?
   • If their expectations don’t match what you’re aiming for, then you know you haven’t communicated to them clearly.
4. Team is Empowered
   • How much do they feel they can speak up in meetings? If they don’t feel comfortable talking in a meeting, do they have an avenue where they can make their opinions known?
   • Do they feel like their opinions are listened to?
5. They have Minimal blockages & interruptions
   • How blocked is the team and how much focus time vs interruptions they have.
   • Ask them to measure how much time they felt they wasted on the last sprint.
6. You’re Not the decision maker
   • Producers should help support decision makers by providing them information they need to make choices. But producers are not generally decision makers at most game companies.
   • Ask team members who is the decision maker on the team? Do they defer to you? If not, do they all agree that it’s the same person on the team?
7. They Know Pipeline/Process Steps
   • Ask team members about a specific pipeline or process they use (e.g. creating environment art).
   • Do they know what happens after they’ve done their step? How about what happens before their step?
   • Understanding a pipeline means that the team are working like a well-oiled and efficient machine.

3. Things to ask other producers about

Sometimes it’s good to talk to other producers to check in and compare yourself. This could be a mentor outside your company or someone within the company.

Ask them if they think:

1. Your Solution is Good
   • Check your proposed solution to a problem. Go over the details with another producer, do they think it’s a good approach? Are you missing something obvious?
2. Your Task is Hard
   • Is what you’re doing actually hard task that everyone struggles with? Ask them what’s worked for them and go easy on yourself.

So am I a good producer?

Most of the time, I think so!

In fact: I made myself this little motivational embroidery to help me stay positive and to banish self-doubt when it’s not helping me out.

But I’m a human and I have bad moments too. And (to be honest) sometimes it’s not just about moments. And some tasks I just struggle with every single time.

What you can learn from when you’re not good, aka how to get better

Instead of just wallowing in how terrible you think are. Let’s try and figure out what’s going on.

• Ask: How frequent are these bad moments?
  • Once a day, a week, every 6 months? You can’t be perfect all the time. But if it’s happening on the regular, then something big is going wrong.
• Ask: what is causing your bad moments?
  • lack of training
    • Are you just not good at the specific task you’ve been assigned to? Ask for training and/or a mentor.
  • expecting hard tasks to be easy
    • Is the task just a hard task that no one in the world can do perfectly? Be kind to yourself and aim for good enough, not perfection.
  • dislike of the specific task
    • Do you dislike the work you’re doing right now? See if you can assign to someone else. Or try and get it done quickly so you can move onto something else. Figure out how to motivate yourself to get it done.
  • overwork or tiredness
    • Ask for support and/or check priorities on tasks. Maybe what you’re doing has very low priority right now or doesn’t ever need to be done. Maybe you can hire an assistant producer.
  • something outside work
    • is there something going on outside work that’s affecting your mental or physical wellbeing? Tell someone at work that something is happening (you don’t have to give details) and see if you can get additional support or reduced hours for some period of time.
  • a person or company culture
    • These are hard to fix, but not impossible. You’ll have to figure out if it is fixable with direct conversations, HR or management support, or something else.
    • If it isn’t fixable, can you avoid the person or people? Adapt yourself? Live with it?
• Whatever is going on, be kind to yourself.
  • Don’t tell yourself that you’re stupid or whatever else is going through your mind.
  • Produce yourself. That is, pretend that you are one of your team members who is struggling. Remember: you wouldn’t use the language you say to yourself with a team member.
  • See if you can find and fix the root cause rather than making yourself feel worse. Then you’ll be able to improve and become a better producer.
  • If you find yourself truly stuck, ask someone on the team to be your producer to help you figure out how to get through it.

Conclusions

That’s all the time we have for today. Thanks for joining me.

Instead of trying to be good or great ALL the time, perhaps I need to take my own advice and just try to be “generally good”.

If you think I’m not half bad as a producer (maybe even good?!) and want some advice about game development and production… ask me! If you want generally good advice, go to jennsand.com/askjenn. If you want to hire me, please do! Find out more at jennsand.com