What shipping products did to me
I was in games for a while, working as a game producer, before I moved into this current product manager role.
In that amount of time, we got to ship quite a few games — and I still remember each time we were up for submission.
I used to think it sucked to be a producer who was involved in multiple games — when these deadlines came, I had to be up late often. Our setup was unique, we were a virtual game studio mostly from South East Asia but our publishers were from the US. (Looking back, it was probably a good tradeoff, I didn’t need to be up late on weekends trying to get the code and design right)
Here are some things shipping products did to me:
1. It made me scared. I always had a lot of thoughts coming to gold date (ship date). Did I play the game enough? Test it enough? Did I miss out on any known bug we found? Did I make sure our testers knew what to look for and how to break it? Did I prepare all necessary marketing materials for FB, Twitter? Have I prepared the blog post on our site? Did I schedule the post to come out at the right time? I’ve worked on and shipped more than 10 games but I’m still very scared when gold date hits. (I think it would have been much easier now with tools like Zapier to automate steps between tools)
2. It made me firm about our priorities. We always shipped games with tons of known little bugs. But would they impact the users much, would they find the bugs all of the time? No. We made sure we dealt with the issues that had the most severe result and massive impact. Other things just had to be marked as known and won’t fix. I hated this but shipped is better than perfect.
3. It made me aware of everything to prepare for. I ended up making all sorts of checklists for teams to follow, such that towards the end of my producer career, each team i worked with filled them out on their own without me needing to manually follow up (I love you guys — you know who you are). The presence of the list not only helped me by freeing me up, it helped the teams by making sure they could schedule this work into their work weeks.
4. It made me realise how important a good team is. One time, we stayed up for 26 hours because gold date was there but there was a major bug, our coder’s internet was flaky, he couldn’t upload the final game for testing and he wasn’t communicating well with us at all. We ended up submitting the game later than our date, and missed our launch schedule and marketing.
5. It made me self-reliant and taught me that sometimes you have to break protocol just to ship. We had to do what we had to do. Would we wait for the proper process? Why don’t we just upload this on our own without the coder? I can compile the file and upload it to the FTP server myself.
6. It made me realise there can be so many difficult calls to make right at the finish line. Do I call up our publisher and ask for more time? Do I push for this fix now, knowing if we had more time, we can push for the better fix? These were story based games we were making, and iteration was not an option.
7. It made me realise how iteration can make things slightly easier. If not now, then later! The only difference is, you now have to track all the tradeoffs you made to ship, so you can go back to them later.
I’m learning that it’s not a silver bullet to forcing things to be great before you ship; now there’s a lot more we have to pay for, each time we push back something in the spirit of simplicity.
In my current role, I setup a sheet that contains all our product debt — things we chose now and what tradeoff we sacrificed. Usually, speed of implementing over efficient code or basic design over more complicated design.
Conclusion
Are all these things good for me? I don’t think so. I’d rather not break protocol again, just to ship; the self-reliance might have made me less of a good teammate. Now, I’m having to re-learn to work well in a team.
Ultimately, it’s given me more confidence and chill whenever we have to launch something, which helps me be more level-headed. This should help, even if I’m in a totally different world now — the B2B SaaS world.
