Philosophy #7: PM Planning & Prioritization in Game Development

How product managers plan game dev from concept to production to live-ops!

To PMs, publishing teams, and executives:

The approach and philosophy towards analysis, forecasting, and planning for game development vary wildly amongst game studios.

To get a sense of the ways in which different studios operate, the Philosophy brothers aka Brett Nowak and I asked industry smartypants, Adam Telfer, to join us in a wide-ranging discussion about planning approaches for game development.

Speakers:

Key Take-aways:

  • Adam believes PM planning for the concept phase of game dev is the most interesting stage and where most PMs have problems.

  • Adam’s perspective: PM should be the owner of the product strategy ensuring what a game is aiming at is viable. Whereas producers should focus on executing product strategy. The key focus in this stage should be on validating a game’s core thesis.

  • JK differentiates planning for games more oriented around F2P systems-oriented games and fast follows vs. new, innovative games that are more gameplay-oriented. One is easier to plan for and the latter much more difficult.

  • In many new game development projects, the notion of a Peter Thiel “secret” would suggest that the biggest opportunities are non-intuitive and by strict analytical approaches suggest these ideas don’t make sense.

  • Brett suggests looking at the CIA approach of “Analysis of competing hypotheses” as a tool to help prove/disprove different product concepts. JK suggests using logic trees.

  • Brett recommends being more explicit on focusing innovation against a game’s design objectives. Further, it’s important to understand whether the product features being worked on aligns with game objectives.

  • JK likes to do very simple analysis in the concept phase: for example, a sensitivity analysis around a revenue model by installs vs. LTV and a monetization table. The objective is not to be accurate but to harden thinking around what are the things that need to be true to achieve various levels of scale?

  • JK describes two different approaches to production planning. For more F2P, more systems-oriented game teams, and generally for most game teams, they are usually required to have full production plans. If you’re a credentialed dev team from Blizzard or Riot against a new game, you may only need planning for pre-production to vertical slice.

  • For live-ops, Brett stresses the importance of operational efficiency. However, he also cautions to be careful to continue to incorporate innovation even in live. Don’t just rely on incremental improvements.

  • Adam suggests keeping bold beats (for example a single yearly bold beat vs. a regular beat of say every month) as a separate track and treating it like new game dev.

  • Brett highlights the importance that leadership should not believe in certain bold beats because the ones you would normally believe in are likely more incremental in value.

Key Point of Debate: Deadlines

One of the more interesting points of debate came up around deadlines. I personally believe in setting deadlines even for some types of work that are difficult to forecast.

I believe companies like Activision Blizzard and Riot likely don’t set aggressive deadlines. From my understanding, they take more of a marathon-based approach and take the time they need to “find the fun.” Some great products have emerged from this model like Hearthstone and Valorant (I’m guessing this was their process).

Even further, one of the best arguments I have come across regarding not setting aggressive deadlines for innovative work comes from the famous 1962 study by Sam Glucksberg that seemed to indicate that setting aggressive deadlines for creative products can be counter-productive.

For more on this research you should read this article:

In that post the authors suggest:

If your goal is a creative product, then the threat of being late will make it that much harder for you to innovate.

You can also watch the TED talk Dan Pink gave covering this research on “The puzzle of motivation.”

On the other side of this argument, we have my own personal experience working with creatives. And, also Will Smith the famous actor/singer/writer/overall badass who recently stated in his new YouTube series The Best Shape of My Life:

There’s a funny thing with deadlines right?

So, artists need deadlines, and need budgetary confines to get jammed into the work.

Like… I needed the deadline to be looming in order to force me dive into those areas of myself that I’ve been avoiding.

The other advantage of setting deadlines is the ability to do a retrospective against the deadline. Even if you miss, then having the team reflect on what were the assumptions going into the deadline, what were mistakes made, and how the team can improve IMHO is an incredibly valuable exercise.

In general, I personally believe both of these approaches have value and advantages/disadvantages but do represent different schools of thought. This is vanilla ice cream vs. chocolate ice cream. The better flavor depends on who you are.

And maybe the answer lies in deeper nuance. Another additional concept to consider I quote from one of my all-time favorite thinkers of all time, Bill Walsh.

Aggressive leaders—effective ones—push individuals hard, and then we push harder, knowing that one of our responsibilities is to get that extra effort necessary for an organization to achieve top results. A good leader believes that he or she knows the secret (or secrets) for bringing a group up to maximum productivity, and in fact, if you don’t know how to do it you’ll soon be gone.

However, it’s just as important to understand that “extra effort,” in whatever form it takes (mental, physical, emotional), cannot be sustained without eventual damage and diminishing returns. There has to be a very acute awareness on your part as to the level of exertion and the toll it’s taking on those you lead.

One of your great challenges is finding the middle ground between the well-being of the people who work with you and the achievement of your goals.

Maybe setting aggressive deadlines is good if the consequences can be effectively managed to not be too punishing and in which rewards for hitting those deadlines are more carrot-based than stick-based.

What Do You Think?

Please do watch our discussion for full context and then take our survey here!

The Poll

Should production planning for new game development include aggressive deadlines?

1. Yes. Aggressive Deadlines is Better! | vote

2. No. Don't Set Aggressove Deadlines Keep Planning Iterative! | vote

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