What I’ve Actually Learned as a Video Game Producer

* removes the dust from her website * lol. hello again. welcome back to my blog!

Where have you been?

Howdy y’all. Yes I am alive and well, for the most part. Did I give up on writing blogs? Kinda. You know how that goes, you find success with one piece and then get really scared to deliver more content so you just…hide. But, here’s my lame attempt to get back on track.

A TL;DR on what’s gone on since *checks the date on last blog* October 2024. Almost two years on the dot!

• I got engaged and have taken wedding planning extremely seriously. Are you surprised to hear that almost everything is booked, and everything is tracked in a super nice colorful Excel spreadsheet with formulas and data validation? It rules. My fiancé says it’s cool.

• I got a promotion last year! I’m now a mid-level Producer.

• My last project got announced at Summer Game Fest! Check out Crossfire from That’s No Moon.

• I got a new job back in March 2026! I now work at Gravity Well as a Producer.

Anyways, that’s my lame attempt at saying I’ve been putting in WORK the last few years, which is why I’ve been AFK from my blog, but I felt compelled to write about my experiences as a follow-up to my first blog: Becoming a Game Producer. Now that I have some street cred (not really), I think it would be nice to talk about what I’ve gone through and how I’ve learned from it.

Also, I’m writing this as I watch the Eagles get shamed by the Chicago Bears so bear with me (hahaha) as my tone may progressively get angrier. Can’t help it. Go birds.

What Have I Learned?

Now this is where I struggle to put words on a page but I will try my best. In the last four (4) years working in games with varied experience in AAA game development, indie publishing, start-up teams, these are the things I’ve valued the most and would want anyone considering a career in Production to know. But take everything with a nice grain of flaky salt (my favorite is this one from Nordur Salt lol). This is all from my own personal experience, others may differ or disagree which is totally ok! Would love to hear from others what they value the most, and what advice you might want to give someone looking into Production.

Find Your People

I don’t know that I would’ve been able to succeed to where I am today had it not been for my support systems at each studio, and outside of it. I’m putting this at the top of the list for a reason, in that I think this is what has kept me going in this (imploding) industry. You will have good days working as a Producer and should celebrate those, but god damn do you have bad days too, and if you don’t have people you can lean on, those days can be really tough. These could be anyone, maybe it’s someone directly on your production team, your manager, the team you produce, or someone that you don’t work with at all but you get along with. They recognize your best self, uplift your talents, and are the people you can turn to when you need someone.

And these relationships should come naturally to you. A mutual respect and understanding of each other, knowing the right kind of support you need from one another. Whether it’s to run ideas by them, have work-free conversations with, vent a little bit (safely), anything you might need each other for, they’re your person.

I had a particularly bad day at work. A meeting I was managing did not go well, some unkind words were thrown my way that completely threw me off guard. After everyone hung up, I was immediately met with messages from my team offering their support, validating my feelings, and discussing next steps to get this addressed with the right people. I didn’t have to ask or reach out to anyone, these people knew me well enough to know how I felt after the call and offered to help. I would do the same in a heartbeat.

What’s even better is if these relationships stand the test of time and moving onto other studios. Always stay in touch, the industry is so small that you can always find your way back to working with each other again.

Shoutout to my Ferret Nation (IYKYK).

Ask All the Questions

Not only is it my main job function as a Producer to provide clarity and communication, but it doesn’t hurt to stay curious. Learning new things is great for your brain and makes you a more well-rounded producer. Even if the questions seem obvious to the person, it’s still good to ask because someone in the room may have been thinking the same thing but was too afraid to ask. I always try to learn one new thing a day because you never know what tomorrow may bring, and the more knowledge I can empower myself with, the better.

It’s especially fruitful for design thinking. Getting people to think outside of their dev brains and more about the player experience will get you better features for your shipping game. It’s also helpful when you go to plan and prioritize things for milestones or sprints. Why does this feature work this way? How does it fit within the game? What happens if this feature isn’t in the game, how does that affect the experience, and what risks might it bring?

When I set up meetings, I make it a point to have my agendas question-based. What are we trying to solve or answer here? What should we take away from this time spent together? And if we get into the meeting and find we have different questions to answer first, great! Pivot the call to focus on that, as it’ll still be a good use of time and will lead to better outcomes later on. It’s a great forcing function for meeting culture, as any producer can attest, the question you might get most often is “why are we in this meeting? what is this about?” It always stings a bit, especially when you prepare ahead of time, but once you tell them what you’re trying to solve/answer by the end of the call, heads will nod and the conversation starts.

An example question I have in my head right now: “Why am I an Eagles fan?” It’s fine. We will persevere.

Play the Game, and Play Often

I’m not talking about just participating in a playtest, I’m saying load up PIE or whatever branch is stable enough and play the game. I try my best to play every morning, if not at least three times a week. Keeping my finger on the trigger (literally) helps me understand how to best support my team and the game. Jira is super powerful when you set it up and use it well, but it can only tell you so much about how your game is doing. It’s not going to tell you how the game feels and where the friction points are. Getting to experience the game for yourself and talking through your feedback with the team will empower you to make more meaningful decisions in your sprint planning, roadmapping, and resource planning. Plus, being able to articulate what you’re working on by your own experience only helps you.

I take it a step further, and you don’t have to, but I learn the workflows of the teams I support. I sync to P4 every morning and see how long it takes. I monitor build times to see if there’s spikes or slowdowns. I read changelists like it’s the newspaper to know when something changes so I can sync to latest and play it myself. I want to know what my team deals with in their workflows so I can not only budget time into this for planning, but find any possible improvements, tools, optimization, etc. to make things better. This piece of learning might not make sense for every producer or team, but I’ve mainly been focused on gameplay and combat the last two and a half years, so knowing my features inside and out is crucial.

Prioritize Your People

The game can’t get done without people. And the people can’t get work done if they don’t have the support and safe environment they need to thrive. You can only do so much as a Producer - you can plan for all different kinds of scenarios, run the data with different formulas, create as many dashboards as you can, but there is nothing more important than your team. Even if it means doing a little extra work on your side to set them up for success, do it.

Put faith and trust in your team, and they’ll do the same with you. I’ve worked at four different studios in the last four years (contracts ending, got laid off), and I’ve switched up my onboarding approach each time. At Maxis, I went head first into learning the ropes and tools, but didn’t take the time to get to know people on a personal level. At Gravity Well, I took my time learning the processes and instead made it a point to understand how people work, and what they look for in a producer and molded my approach based on that. If someone needs a producer that’s more analytical and in the weeds of Jira and data, I can do that. If someone needs a producer that’s in the weeds of feature development and playtesting, I can do that. It’s important to be flexible, and to respond based on what your team needs at any given time.

Now more than ever, it’s so important to prioritize your team. You never know what the future holds with this industry, so approaching each day with empathy and compassion goes a long way.

Keep a Paper Trail

Like I mentioned above, communication is a key part of my job. Decisions can get made quickly, and not everyone will be in the room to hear them. As a Producer, it’s so important to clearly articulate information so people who only check Slack 3 times a day can still read your message and get the main takeaways. My meeting notes will typically have: meeting topic, date, recording (if applicable), 3-5 bullet points of the highlights, whether that’s a decision, action items, next steps, anything important, and a link to Confluence with all the notes in case people want to read them. And then tagging the relevant people. It’s possible your studio’s communication tool has too many channels, so I’ll cross-post my notes so it can be seen by virtually anyone. Or email them! Although the last few studios I’ve worked at, I rarely touched my inbox.

It’s especially important as you move into Production (the development stage, not the job function) where you are hopefully focusing on implementation and not ideating on things. People might forget what was agreed upon last, or maybe they weren’t there, but they need a refresher on a feature they haven’t touched before, having a reliable place people can go back to is so crucial. Especially in a remote start-up studio where you might still be figuring out process or how to work together. You can’t expect everyone to know or remember everything, but you should be able to anticipate them needing the information later.

And, sadly, it could come in handy when it comes to accountability. I’ve been in unfortunate situations where people have tried to gaslight others into false information, or have said that I didn’t complete a specific task. Having a paper trail protects not only information and progress, but you and your team, too. Hopefully it doesn’t come to this but, just calling it out.

Producers are Important

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. They are wrong and I will fight them. (the Eagles just got intercepted again. sorry. I said I might get angry right?)

But seriously. I’ve been fortunate enough where the teams I work with value my contributions to the game and the studio, but there will always be someone hiding behind a keyboard saying that producers aren’t real game developers. I might not actually be in the weeds of the engine writing code or making content, but I am helping those that are developing things understand the problem space and what the goals are. A good producer will be the difference in your game seeing the light of day.

Luckily this is becoming an outdated take, but you still hear it every now and then. And that person will still be wrong every time.

What Have You Learned?

Hopefully you got something out of this wall of text. I’ve really valued my time as a Producer in the games industry and truly hope that I get to do this for the rest of my life. Sadly, the industry is so unstable that I’ve considered temporarily pivoting to another role and find my way back once things are better. It would be sad, considering how much I fought to get here, but ya girl’s got a wedding to pay for!

Production is a great role that I think anyone can learn valuable skills from, even if they don’t want to be a producer. It’ll make you a stronger developer. I think all my advice can apply to any role, so if you’re reading this as either a person that wants to be a producer, thinking about switching to production, or was just curious about what a producer does, hopefully you’ve learned that:

• having a strong support system keeps your well-being healthy

• it’s ok to ask questions, as it can only yield to better outcomes

• playing the game often is your source of truth into what really matters for the game

• equally as important, build relationships with the people you’re producing, and be flexible based on their needs

• documenting and sharing notes in a digestible format protects you, your team, and your game

• producers are game developers, and are there to help the team achieve their goals. help them help you!

I hope I don’t forget about this blog and write something else soon. I gotta keep myself distracted somehow, since the Eagles are about to lose by a big margin. If this is how the season continues, I might write a blog every week until January lol.

OK BYE!!