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by Gareth Miller
Operations Director
Old School vs Modern
The Producer role is largely dissected into the ‘old school’ Producer and the modern, defined Producer.
Both the old and the new rely on the principle of efficiency and effectiveness. The Producer is to add security and stability to all departments and ensure the steady delivery of the agreed workload, with an expectation that tends to lean towards faster delivery.
However, the application of this principle varies quite differently between the two schools.
The Old School Producer
In ye olde days of game development - the halcyon days of freedom and good money - the Producer role was the jack-of-all-trades role. The Producer within a studio would often step into gaps, blocks, slowdowns, missing skills, and ‘chip in’. The Producer would often find themselves negotiating vendor offers for localisation and vocals and physical marketing assets for events and they could be called upon to attend business-to-business meetings with partners, publishers, and platform holders. They would help QA and would be active community managers. They would plan milestones and delivery pipelines. It could be common for a Producer label to be interchangeable with ‘Designer’. It was not that Producers were Designers but they were expected to be the decision-makers for overall project aims. Should we add this feature? Ask the Producer! Is this new iteration good? The Producer will know! Which team's idea should win? The Producer will know best!
The Producer could be thrown at many different problems and would be expected to unblock them, speed up solution finding, or just plain old get the work done because the problem was a lack of resources.
The Modern Producer
All hail Agile! As the industry, which was born in roughly 1983 (don’t fact check that), matured with each new company, year, and game, the Producer role began to homogenise into a specific, defined role.
Although the Old School Producer can still be a requirement (often of smaller companies run by veterans), most studios have a standardised expectation of what the Producer role means to the hierarchy.
The Producer of the modern era is the grease in the wheels. They keep things turning not through filling in but through facilitation. The role is often built on academic production philosophies with the winning formula being some practice of Agile - Scrum or Kanban.
Modern Producers are expected to be the conduit for plans, information, and decisions. They can whip up a good spreadsheet, have a passion for Gantt charts, and chase you about your Jira cards. The hierarchy should have ownership and accountability for all areas baked into it and spread throughout so the Producer shouldn’t be making decisions for a team or getting stuck in with the team, they should be a voice guiding the decision makers and their teams into making the healthiest decisions. They should be a voice that maximises accountability and transparency. They should get information to where it needs to go, make sure knowledge of decisions propagates, and then ensure feedback and disagreement are communicated back to the decision-makers.
Ultimately, Producers are expected to hold decision-makers and the team carrying out the work accountable. Where blocks, gaps, and hurdles appear, the Producer endeavours to find the most appropriate person to tackle the problem.
The Modern Producer is a generalised Lead that helps everyone on their team be productive through coaching, mentoring, and assisting. They advocate for process, workflow, and productivity across their team.
A Producer within the Hierarchy
In this section, I will set out key philosophical approaches that are expected to be seen within the different seniorities of the Producer role. It’s not exhaustive or extensive but it will address the core foundation of Junior (associate), Mid (intermediate), and Senior.
Junior
A Junior Producer prioritises facilitating the needs of the product.
If told the game needs something, a Junior producer will spring into action to ensure that need is met. They typically do not validate the need and show trust that the person or team with the request or demand are asking in earnest and from a place of expertise.
A Junior Producer is a skilled facilitator.
Mid
A Producer prioritises facilitating the needs of the product and the team.
If told the game needs something, a Producer will begin to investigate the value and consequence of that need. They’ll seek evidence and explanation so they can understand the request and relay the request with accuracy to other teams.
They will be looking for friction and/or conflict that the request may create for other members of their team or maybe even for other teams that they believe may be impacted by the request.
Ultimately, they will look to balance the books by ensuring a rogue feature or change doesn’t enter the product without first being approved by those who may have to generate their own work to maximise the feature. They will also keep an eye on what the request means to deadlines and report that to the Lead or Head of Production.
A Producer is a skilled critical thinker.
Senior
A Senior Producer prioritises facilitating the needs of the product, the team, and the stakeholders.
If told the game needs something, a Senior Producer will go through all the steps described above under Mid, however, they will also account for the needs of stakeholders.
Stakeholder is a broad term that is relative to whatever is the subject of a request, feature, object, process, etc. Stakeholders can be Creative Leads, Directors, Heads of, Leads but they can also be nominated people from other departments or feature teams.
A game studio is not just a development team. People and Culture managers develop and enrich working environments, IT gets the dev team tools and licenses and put out their tech fires, Marketing and Product are educated about audiences and how to reach them, Finance officers ensure that wages and taxes are paid, Recruiters attract talent that enriches the skills of the team, Business managers keep healthy relationships with external parties to maximise opportunities.
A game studio is a team of teams. This is true with the dev team - Code, Design, Art, and Audio are all working towards a singular goal (a great and successful game). It is also true at the organisation level - HR, Business, Marketing, Product, IT, and Finance have a singular goal (a great and successful studio).
I have seen it said that a Producer is loyal to their team first and foremost. I believe this to be fundamentally false. To treat stakeholders as outsiders who don’t get us, man - as if they don’t understand what it means to be here in the trenches with us, the real devs - is to misunderstand the reality of business and organisation. Keeping the lights on, keeping the wages paid, keeping the audience engaged, and keeping the publishers and platform holders favourable are all critical and vital functions of a healthy studio.
To fight and go to war and battle Directors and Heads and Leads is to contribute to a toxic culture of combat.
All teams have their own priorities, aims, and objectives. This includes stakeholders. We’re all just trying to maximise the quality of our product and maximise our chance of making enough money to eat food and sleep under a warm roof.
Senior Producers notice requests that would impact the views and plans of stakeholders or potentially should require the expert input of stakeholders. This includes when the request is made from stakeholders - a Senior Producer will seek to understand the purpose, value, and validity of the request and take it to the relevant teams or individuals to understand the validity and achievability.
A Senior Producer is a skilled negotiator.
The Key Producer Skill
Ask 10 different Producers what the key trait you have to have and I’m sure you’ll get 10 different answers, however, I’m the author so here’s my answer. I’m about to use the word English a lot, so feel free to substitute it for the primary language of your studio.
The key trait of a Producer is the ability to translate English to English.
Different roles and departments attract certain kinds of humans. It’s not exclusively true but, in my experience, there is a bell curve that most devs fall under. Coders tend to be very coder-like. Artists tend to be artist-like. Designers are very design-y. Audio engineers are very audio-like. QA are super QA-ish as well. Producers do not escape the bell curve either.
Producers tend to be puzzle lovers and problem solvers. They thrive in the deep end. They find great satisfaction in resolving issues. They care about the welfare of people and the success and enjoyment others find in their work. Producers are naturally people pleasers. The old adage goes ‘If you ask a Producer how they’re doing they’ll tell you they’ll have to ask how their team is doing’. Producers hunt for failure and mistakes and feel at their most satisfied when the times are calm and the dev team is content. Producers love everything running smoothly.
With the nature of humans being very human-like, the natural parlance that each department talks in can use all of the same words but have very different intents. Miscommunication is often the biggest slowdown, hurdle, or problem to solve. It is common for teams to find that negotiation has grown stagnant despite agreeing. It is even more dangerous when teams are energised and in good spirits because they’ve come to a conclusion that inherently doesn’t align and no one has caught it. A feature takes 6 months to complete and it is presented to a stakeholder who, with panic and frustration, says, “We didn’t agree to this!”.
The most critical skill of a Producer is to learn the language of Code English, Art English, Audio English, QA English, and Design English. As a Producer progresses and enters Senior then they unlock the next linguistic challenge - learning Marketing English, Finance English, HR English, and Business English. Stakeholder English!
A studio is a team of teams that are all using English in slightly different ways but these differences can create vast variances. A Producer is instrumental in noticing these differences and nuances. A Producer is at their peak when they can make a single sentence make sense in all of these different Englishes.
Producer Archetypes
I believe that there are two fundamental types of producers: the people producer and the product producer. Producers can be a balance of two but their natural skills and traits will lean them in one direction or the other. The best Producers in the industry are the Producers who learn the methods of the other side. It is almost a requirement of seniority that the Producer has picked up some fluency on the side of Production that isn’t their natural strength.
The People Producer
The motivation of a People Producer is to improve efficiency and effectiveness through enabling, championing, and supporting people directly. They rely on emotional intelligence, social skills, and coaching to make a team productive.
They spend time getting to know their team personally and learning what kind of work motivates and demotivates them. They often understand the wider consequences of requests and decisions on a team’s morale. They know how to minimise the negative perceptions among the team and maximise the excitement and satisfaction of the team.
A People Producer is often a fantastic representative for their team and can understand how to put forward feedback and complaints that truly reflect the team’s point of view. Vice versa too, a People Producer can field incoming requests and feedback in a way that would resonate with the way the team processes information.
The Product Producer
The motivation of a Product Producer is to improve efficiency and effectiveness through improving the tools, pipelines, and processes that developers interact with. They rely on puzzle-solving, attention to detail, and a keen perception of how others engage with the world.
They spend their time getting to know the intimate details and functionality of the project management tools the team interfaces with. They understand that sluggish tools, confusing workflows, and redundant or repetitive processes are tantamount to death by a thousand cuts. People don’t notice when things work correctly but they know when things aren’t working. Product Producers get things working.
A Product Producer is often an unsung hero on the team whether they’re structuring documentation in hierarchies that immediately make sense to everyone or automating processes in project management tools or having storage solutions both online and offline available for staff before it’s needed. Product Producers have an intuitive sense of what makes game dev life frustrating and they are excellent at removing those frustrations.
The Archetype Reality
Ultimately, to be an effective producer, you must have both sides of the coin. No producer can make it in game development by just being product or person. To care about improving tools for the team’s benefit, you must care about their welfare and working lives. To care about making your team happy, you must care about the frustrations devs face with tools and processes.
Most people will find that one side comes easier than the other. This will help them nurture and develop with ease in the direction of product or people. They will often find that learning skills from the other side takes more effort, requires more sessions of exposure, needs more practice, and that it is infinitely more boring to learn about the other side of the Producer skillset. It still needs doing. The team needs you to be good at both sides.
The Value of Producers
If a dev team of 10 people is equally earning $30,000 a year, then that’s $300,000 a year and brings us to a monthly team cost of $25,000.
These are incredibly conservative numbers that represent next to no studios around. Game dev is super expensive.
If a producer prevents a deadline from slipping by just over a month, avoiding the additional month of development will pay for the producer. In reality, it is common for games to miss internal and external deadlines by multiple months—even years in some cases. If a producer prevents a six-month delay for the imaginary team above, that producer saves the studio $150,000.
The average salary for a game dev in the US is $100,000 (rounded). This means interns and juniors on shockingly low wages and execs on luxury wages.
In a team of 50 with the wages averaged to the above, the annual cost for that studio to run is $5,000,000. The monthly wage bill is $416,667. There are overheads, there are tax rebates, etc - costs are not as easily calculated as this - but the point is still correct:
Producers guiding projects to either be on time or minimise delays is a huge deal.