💻 Project Management vs Game Producer
Which One's Better?
Niki: Hi all,
Today we have a very special guest,
from . He writes about news and rumors about game development, as well as his experience on Software Testing, Project Management, and being a Game Producer.He was kind enough to collaborate with me and share some of his experience here in GDJ. In this issue, he will compare project manager and game producer. Let’s go!
Hello friends,
Let’s talk about roles that are most associated with software production or management. Project Management and Game Production (Producing?) are two very similar, but quite different areas.
Today we are going to discuss similarities, differences, the potential of jumping between them and what is waiting ahead if you choose either one of these.
Disclaimer
Before we go any further, I want to warn you that everything that follows is representation of my personal experience and not the state of the industry as a whole. Every company is different. Everybody has their own definition of both of these roles, sometime you could even see them present at the same time on the same project.
And of course, both software and game development industries are always changing and evolving. So, please, consider this article a guideline and an overview in big broad strokes.
So, who’s a PM and a Producer
Project Management Institute (PMI) defines PMs as people who lead projects to success with their tools, knowledge and expertise. There are too many definitions, but they all say essentially the same thing. PM is the person responsible for the project's success and who manages the project’s scope, schedule and budget.
Unfortunately, I don’t know any official definition for a Producer and in general Game Production doesn’t have a lot of theoretical base. The best definition I can come up with is that a Producer is a person in charge of developing a certain game. They are also responsible for scope, scheduling and budget, but also for the overall vision of the game, making sure that the game reaches its targeted KPIs on the market, team spirit, player satisfaction and many more things.
Quite similar, right?
They definitely are. When I first started as a Producer, my responsibilities didn’t drastically change. As a game is essentially just another software, right?
You still need to make sure that the team follows the project plan, adjusts it as necessary, communicates with stakeholders, balances the budget, aligns people and processes, removes roadblocks and yada yada yada.
But here’s the thing.
Game development is not quite any other software, at least not in my experience. More often than not, games don’t have the same… Swing? Scale?
For example, when I was a Project Manager, I didn’t need to think about whether the project is going to be a success or not. I had Product Managers for that. I didn’t need to think about pleasing the end users. I had Customer Support. I didn’t need to try to keep the team motivated and inspired. I had HRs. I still did all those things, but that wasn’t expected of me (even getting me in trouble a couple of times).
Game development is usually drastically smaller than that. Most of the time you need to know how to do all those things for your project to succeed. And it’s often a job of Game Producer to make sure that all those things are accounted for and moving in the right direction. You don’t need to be an expert in all the disciplines, but you need to have at least some level of understanding of the majority of them.
Of course, if you’re working in the top 10 biggest game dev companies, your experience will be somewhat similar to typical project management. But in my experience, it’s quite rare.
But surprisingly, it pays smaller
If you are in it for the money, then I’d suggest sticking to the traditional Project Management. I honestly haven’t met a single person who worked in a game development company for a long time and was there for the higher number on the paycheck.
I try to look at it like this. No amount of money is going to replace the sheer enjoyment of working on something that you love. In my case, I’ve been playing games for most of my life. Whenever somebody asked me who I wanted to be when I grew up, the only answer that I had was: “I want to play video games and for everybody to leave me alone”.
The last one is quite impossible in any Software Development area, but as a Producer, you definitely get need to play a lot of games. So, I kind of got my wish, right?
“What if I want to make Games?”
Then you are in luck because a lot of skills from traditional Project Management are transferable to Game Production.
You still have your Project Management Software, like Jira or Confluence. You still have your meetings and stand-ups and you definitely have a lot of teams and people to talk to. The Game Development process is quite similar to Software.
But you’ll need to learn more about games and you need to understand why do people play the games they play. This means that you need to understand what’s fun and what’s not, how to pitch a game to your stakeholders, how to organize and do marketing stuff, how to do Live Ops and what KPIs are going to tell you whether the game is successful or not, how to improve those KPIs, how to do a proper competitor analysis and learn from others. But most importantly, how to maintain the vision for the game and make sure that the players get the best version of the game possible.
“What if I want to make Software?”
Quite understandable and again, fully doable. With the Game Development being what it is, it’s not surprising.
The good news is that after being a Game Producer, you probably has a lot of cross-discipline experience and can bring a lot of value to Software Development. The main skills will stay the same, but for me, it was more about a mindset shift than learning some new skills.
You’ll need to clearly understand your boundaries and responsibilities. Chances are that even in small to mid-size companies you’ll have a lot of people in your team as well as much more stakeholders. So make sure that you know everything that you need to do before actually jumping into it. Who do you need to inform, who do you report to, who do you need to ask for approval and how to keep everybody happy.
Also, if you want to learn more about traditional Project Management tools and techniques, there are a lot of books out there. The best one is probably the latest edition of PMBOK, but it may be a little bit hard to swallow at first.
So what’s better?
Every job has its pros and cons. I’ve had some experience with both of these things and I can say for sure that there is no right answer in terms of which one is better.
I can say though that it all depends on what you are looking for. Both are amazing fields to get into and in my humble opinion, the world could always use more great PMs and Producers.
And it’s never too late to change fields, you just have to make the first step in the direction that excites you the most!
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