Looking for a Product Management Crash Course? Grab Your Controllers!
When starting as a Product Manager at Intelligent Machines, I was nervous because of how little I knew about the nature of the job and about the AI/Advanced analytics industry of Bangladesh. Hundreds of Google searches, and asking my peers in the industry couldn’t give me a conclusive answer to what product management really is (because of how the role differs so widely from organization to organization now that I think of it). However, I realized upon a year of being in IM, and by learning first hand from some of the very best in the industry, that I had been preparing for this exact job my whole life. Product Management is less about hard skills and certification than it is about discipline, a love for getting problems solved, and agency.
That is where video games come into play (pun intended).
I played my first video game long before I finished reading my first book. For me video games are a different artistic platform for telling meticulously crafted interactive stories that have not only brought me joy in dire times but helped me grow as a person in more ways than I expected. What sets video games apart for me is how it provides the audience with the agency to craft the story rather than to just witness it happen. However, games while being immersive can also be powerful educational and even skill-building tools.
Here are some ways a lifetime of playing video games low key prepared me for my job.
I. ) Your Life becomes an RTS game.
Let’s get the most obvious thing out of the way. A big part of Product Management is Making Plans. Product Managers have to develop strategies for their products, vision, and a way forward in form of Product Roadmaps, which are made with the environment of the product in mind (e.g, the political, cultural climate that the product will be launched in). Product Managers have to have a 360-degree view of their surroundings when making critical decisions. Anyone who spent countless hours Real-Time Strategy games such as Command and Conquer or Age of Empires would know about this very well. The RTS genre is vast, with simpler games like Startup Company and Video Game tycoon that allows you to build a business, to massive games like Civilization where you not only build an empire, but also run economies.
In Real-Time strategy games, or Simulator have you be constantly on your toes, paying attention to environmental factors in the game. For example, when building your settlement in any level, you are expected to develop your strategies by sending out scouts to observe the terrain (PESTEL analysis), take peeks at the enemy activity (Competition analysis), acquire and optimize resources to either attack or defend based on your environment. You are actively checking your available resources (gold, wood, or food) to raise an army, or to build structures that can keep invading armies at bay. Whenever possible, you can even tactically invest in certain perks. For example, spending your gold in research in Age of Empires games gives you the reduced cost in building structures, or weapons saving you costs in the long run, just like at Intelligent Machines, we have a considerable budget that goes into training and gathering knowledge-based resources for our team member’s professional development.
II). Developing customer empathy and attention to User Experience on all Platforms
Video games are a great place for anyone to develop empathy as Users, and a sense of User Experience. Be it a casual game, or a very complex simulator, the need for effective and User-friendly system Interface is universal. Not all video games get it right, and poor and clunky UI can often make or break the experience for gamers. Design choice can strengthen or break immersion. There is a reason why casual games have a very simplistic design, and games designed for hardcore gamers can be a nightmare to look at. Developers have to strike a balance and commit significant time and resources to accessibility.
An essential function of the Product Manager is working with customers (or clients), and designers who design the Interface of the product. The PM’s job is to ensure that the design is as simple and user friendly as possible, and at the same time robust enough with functions a customer can carry out.
Product Managers or those looking to be in the line can learn a lot of principles guiding effective User Journey and UX design in video games by paying attention to certain design choices. For example, the screenshot below is from a seminal horror classic Dead Space. The inventory management of the game is a semi-transparent one, you cannot pause the game when you access it (the way you can in other games). It leaves you vulnerable to attack and builds tension when playing the game, hence forces you to only heal/change armor in safe spaces. It is the product manager’s responsibility to ensure that every little design choice serves a purpose in making the experience better.
III). Games are data-driven, just like your job!
Video games are all about numbers. The games are built on numbers: your scores, your levels, your reward, difficulty levels, hit points, and progress are all output of a very complex ecosystem of numbers working together. In most games, you won’t even notice. But in certain kinds of games, having a basic sense of the numbers take you a long way. As it does for Fans of Role Playing Games (RPG). One of my favorite games of all time is the brutal combat based horror RPG Bloodborne. It’s an infamously difficult game where you have to constantly pay attention to stats, as you nurture a very underpowered character to take on enemies that range from mutated beasts to otherworldly god-like entities. You are constantly eyeing your attack or defense-related character attributes when leveling up your character, or getting new weapons and armor. More often than not, to wield or use a weapon, your strength or dexterity has to be at a certain level. In games with so many many inter-related variables at play, you learn to constantly calculate, and tweak your strategy when playing.
Product Management is like playing a numbers game in real life. Being able to pay close attention to numbers gives you a significant advantage. At Intelligent Machines, working with numbers is what we take pride upon. Our operations are very carefully planned and optimized based on mathematical simulations. Product Managers are expected to make very quick and timely decisions and sometimes that means crunching numbers real quick. In real life, this means going the extra mile to track daily operations with meaningful metrics, and constantly staying on top of things, always on toes and ready to report or course correct.
IV) One Size Never Fits All, in Games and In building Tech products
As the technology for video games is getting better, games are becoming increasingly adept at letting players customize how they play. In some action games, you can go all guns blazing, or choose to be stealthy and swift, or wear the heaviest armor to survive a deluge of enemy AI. A franchise that gives you such freedom is the immersive simulator game Deus Ex. Your protagonist is a cyborg spy in a dystopian cyberpunk future, who can infiltrate fortresses through hacking, or through manipulation by speech, though stealth, and if all else fails through sheer brute force. The Immersive simulator is a very challenging form of the game to design and build for this exact reason, to create a self-regulating environment which operates in a lifelike a manner, and mechanics that allows users to play however they often want. Such a robust system can very easily create inconsistencies in game design. For example, one style of playing the game may feel rewarding than others, or more fun than others. In Deus Ex, you get different endings for the style of your playthrough. You get a darker ending for killing your enemies, and a happier one for choosing peaceful means to solve your conflict (i.e, opting to sneak past enemies).
However, like all products, video games are built upon finite resources. Developers have to very carefully prioritize what to put in a video game for it to sell enough copies for a return on the investment.
Prominent video game developers conduct very thorough requirement analysis, research on what their target gamers want in a video game, conducting focused group discussions, online surveys, even beta tests of games to collect feedback. Their requirements are recorded, tallied, and analyzed. Any tech product manager has to understand the market segment of his or her product’s users very well, their lifestyle, attitudes, preferences, habits and where the product fits into their lives and has to have a process of collecting that information, to analyze and correctly prioritize the right mix of features for a product. A lot of video games (just like tech products) fail to capture the market simply because they don’t understand their target users very well. However, sometimes the gamers themselves don’t know if they want something until they experience it.
V). A-B-M, Always be Multitasking
People tend to argue how a tendency to multitask has left us with a low attention span, from juggling so many tasks at a time. While linear games tend to have you focus on one mission at a time, the more open-world games such as The Witcher series or Assassin’s creed have you have multiple objectives, missions, and side missions. If you are a completionist (with very little time to play video games) like me, you like to tick off all boxes. You will pick an optimum path through your journeys to get them all done as quickly and efficiently as possible. For example, in Death Stranding, all you do is carry goods from one end of the map to another.
Product Managers have to multi-task immensely. Most product managers work on more than one product. That means keeping track of objectives and deliverables for multiple stakeholders. The product managers have to constantly plan ahead, and optimize their own resources to meet deadlines. We live in a society where all the tools are at our fingertips, to always be productive and make the most of our time, no matter where we are.
All of this however comes with a caveat. The most important aspect of Product Management is Interpersonal and communication skills. It is important for Product Managers to be great team players, and networkers, to help bring people from different disciplines and skillsets to come together and build things. This is something that most video games don’t teach you very well, hence the universal stigma of us gamers being an awkward bunch! However, considering how fast the video game industry is expanding in terms of content richness, one day maybe there will be a simulator/role-playing game where you get to play yourself and develop that exact skill.
