One of the make-or-break moments (terrifyingly so) for Product Managers, and Producers, in almost any industry or genre is when chaos descends on your product. It's almost never a question of "if", it's usually "when" chaos appears. No matter how well laid out your development plans, your roadmap, how well-oiled your teams are, how well aligned leadership is with the project - it will happen.

Let's talk about how you can mitigate some of the impacts of "chaos". Some of these are going to sound (really) familiar. Some of you might roll your eyes saying "but, Rodolfo, that's obvious!". And, yeah, I would agree with you - but if you've been in the trenches, you already know how easy it is to de-emphasize (or worse yet, deprioritize) these things because there's always something more pressing.

Proactively Keep Leadership Aligned

I'll admit, this is obvious. You'd be surprised how much drift happens when you don't maintain and nurture alignment of the product vision. If you've been in Product Management or Production for any length of time, you're run into the drift issue. Think about either of these two scenarios:

Scenario 1

You've worked with the leadership team to land on a product vision, who the audience is, and what the roadmap looks like to land that experience. You get right to work with the development team to build towards a prototype, an MVP, or an MLP/MMP (whichever your milestone is). Leadership trusts you. They're working to keep the board or investors hyped, but that message drifts from what you are building as you continue to run user / player interviews, market research, etc. On a long enough timeline, what you're building and what the investors hear kind of look the same, if you squint at it.

Scenario 2

You've worked with the leadership team to land on a product vision, who the audience is, and what the roadmap looks like to land that experience. You get right to work with the development team to build towards a prototype, and MVP, or an MLP/MMP (whichever your milestone is). A couple of weeks go by and one morning, one of the leadership team members comes in and says: "We have to do Y! Company Z, who is very successful, does Y and so should we!"

(I'll give you a few minutes to recover from any accidental PTSD triggered by either scenario).

Both of these introduce "chaos" and we've probably seen flavors of either (we can argue which one is more chaotic or a more normalized flavor of chaos). They're not necessarily unhealthy, in and of themselves, but if we don't proactively address the underlying issue, things can spin quickly out of control.

(I'm sure you already know what I am about to say...) We need to make sure we keep leadership aligned. This might take the form of a stakeholder meeting, it might take the form of a weekly report with advances and insights, or it might take the form of informal conversations. The organizational culture and norms will inform how these take shape, but if you were to take anything away from this, the message is: involve your stakeholders.

There shouldn't be a taboo about bring up new ideas. You can always evaluate them against the vision, the audience, the experience, and the priorities of what has been decided. Even if it's discarded or deprioritized, it can help a lot just to be heard. Understand the stakeholder's weight in this process and how that impacts your approach.

In the same vein, if you start noticing that the market is shifting, player or user preferences change, and that's misaligning what you are doing, bring up those issues and how the team can address them or what changes might be needed to keep the product aligned with the market's desires.

Keeping the Product and Market Aligned

We sometimes don't want to show off our product before it's ready. I get it. Inside most of us, there's an internal battle between wanting feedback as soon as possible and wanting to make a good first impression. When in doubt, pick the former (and that is sometimes easier said than done).

If are agile inclined (little "a" agile), then you're going to try to get player and user feedback as soon as possible. That feedback will influence the roadmap and the development plan, but wouldn't you prefer to know that some core aspect the game isn't fun or that the product solves the user's direct problem but introduces others that were outside of your original view?

What we're striving for here is validation that we're (at least) on the right track. I wouldn't expect anyone to hit out of the park in a single swing. As professionals, as a team, as an organization, we get better with more reps. And the cycle of user testing <> feedback does at the core. How? You learn more about the audience and their preferences, circumstances, and wants. The team gets to understand more about the audience and how their work can impact the audience's perception. The organization gets to validate the vision against who they are building it for.

Which brings us to where (I believe strongly) the value of this cycle really lies for organizations: it helps to keep leadership aligned. Each one of those testing cycles should have a hypothesis attached to the effort and the answers and insights gathered from that feedback cycle should flow throughout the organization. If players or users find your product fantastic (gratz!), then you're also giving ammunition for leadership to keep the lights on. If you're starting to see cracks in the vision from the data gathered, it'll give you time to raise a flag to have a deeper conversation and pivot before the runway runs out.

Dealing With Chaos

Even the most involved Product Manager isn't going to be able to predict rapid, tectonic shifts in the market. External circumstances or situations may completely shift the ground that the vision is staked on or changes the market conditions to where the plan is untenable. Depending on where you are in the game or product's development cycle will influence what maneuverability you have.

Not going to rehash that you need to keep leadership aligned, but... you need to keep leadership aligned. If a tectonic shift happens, regardless of its origins, you'll need to re-evaluate the vision, the audience's needs and wants (is it even the same audience anymore?), and what would be the most important thing(s) the team can be working on to deliver the vision under the new circumstances.

You'll have to read the room (your stakeholders and the business conditions). You'll have to dive deep into the data (from those testing <> feedback cycles that you were doing, right?). You might have to negotiate between the creative vision and the business reality to redefine even how that experience is going to be delivered to potential players or users.

The goal here is to be able to garner support for the direction that will address the situation. That means understanding how to deliver the news to the different stakeholders, how to get their buy-in (a bit more of this ahead), how to maintain the teams aligned on why we're focusing on what we're focusing on, and help create some sense of out the chaos. The goal is to keep the wheels on, going in a single direction, and keeping leadership and the teams in lockstep.

Keeping all of these moving parts in the organization might mean that certain ways of working will need to change. This might be fundamental operational aspects of meeting frequency, agendas, or work systems. It might mean a re-evaluation of cultural norms and practices that add value to the organizational culture. It will probably mean a lot of self-reflection and adjustment on your part to navigate through the uncertainty and forge a path for the rest of the organization. (No pressure, right?)

Ultimately, it may come down to cutting scope and deprioritizing work that was once deemed important. No one likes to cut scope, especially when it comes to items that were thought to be important for the experience (it can be a dangerous exercise if done indiscriminately, not only for the product, but the team that is building it). But if you're in a sink or swim moment, as a team, backed with what data you have at that moment, ask:

  • Does X solve our problem?
  • Does X contribute to our goal(s)?
  • Does X move us forward in a meaningful way?
  • How does cutting / leaving in X affect the player or user's experience? (Maybe even ask if it's something that can be delivered separately once the crisis has passed)

It's not fun to do this but leave the things that you've answered "yes" and can defend it, through feedback data, market data, revenue, etc. The items that didn't make the cut, use the MoSCoW method and leave those items in the "Won't Do / Wish to Do" category for now. Hopefully, they can always be reprioritized later (if the evolution of the game or product still needs it when it hits player's hands - once there, it takes on a life of its own).

We've all dealt with chaos, pivots, changing priorities on a dime in our professional (and personal) lives. We always want to provide the best experience or the best solution for our users but, sometimes, the market will throw in a monkey wrench, and you'll have to be flexible about those plans. Preparing yourself to deal with the chaos, having an idea of how you will forge a path forward well rooted in the vision, will pay dividends if you ever have to weather that storm.

/r