The moment you are in a leadership position, even if you don’t have any explicit authority, you are responsible for setting performance goals and standards for your group, be that a team of 3 or a department of 100. Even without explicit authority, a power dynamic is established that affects how you will interact with your team and how your team will interact with you.
Leadership
Approaches to Feature Prioritization
One of the most important production tasks is that of prioritizing work. Prioritization takes place throughout a project’s life cycle, from determining the importance of items in the ever-growing backlog to determining which elements of a given sprint should take precedence, all things being equal. Making these choices can have a profound effect on the success of a project.
You, as a producer, can certainly prioritize a set of features on your own. Your leads should be able to do the same. Yet, how do you approach and justify your prioritization when an external actor applies pressure to your project?
Some Thoughts on Trust
When you have a blog, it’s easy to talk from a position of assumed authority. After all, writing something down makes it seem like the author must know something. If that author has a pedigree of any sort — say, a career of any significant length or certain accolades and honors — then we give their words even more weight.
It’s easier to trust someone we consider to be an expert, after all.
On Production – A Preface
What in the heck is this all about?
I’m going to start a series of production articles, centered on detailing what I’ve learned during my time as a producer in the game industry. For those who may be confused by the term, a producer is akin to a software project manager. The terms may be slightly different, but the management techniques and approaches are very similar.
Duncan Makes Games 