Esteban Mercado

Game Producer working with remote teams on major releases for Art, UI/UX, VR, Localization, etc.

Esteban's Production Playbook

Welcome to my quick production tips, strategies and learnings! This is a collection of best practices I’ve used throughout my career that may help make your (and your teams') life easier.

⚠️ Every team is different and each has their own goals and set of dos and don’ts. My goal with this playbook is to offer just a few tips that may help teams of all types and sizes avoid common problems and find the right workflow that works for them.

※ For a list of credits, see the "Who am I" section


VersionDateChange
1.02024.02.18First version
1.12024.02.28Added navigation and templates
1.22024.05.18Polished writing and migrated to Carrd
1.32024.05.25Added corkboard and glossary tips under Process and Organization
1.42024.06.15Added horizontal planning under Process and project templates under Resources

Who am I

Hi! I'm Esteban ✌️ I’m a Game Producer working on really cool projects with creative teams distributed remotely across the globe. Previously I grew multiple outsourcing teams for Fortune 500 clients before switching to the gaming industry where I’m now producing major releases for Art, UI/UX, VR, Localization, etc.

During my free time I enjoy making music for games and animations, attend conventions with friends, find new cool indie artists, play as many games as I can and watch anime with my wife and cats.

Released projects

Producer @ VRChat

Experience

  • Project management

  • Capacity & roadmap planning

  • Prioritization & task management

  • Process design, documentation and training

  • Team leadership and mentoring

  • QA planning

  • Budget & expense management

  • Recruitment/growth coordination

  • Status communication & reporting


🗺️
English fluent / Spanish native / Japanese intermediate

Tooling

Simply put the task management tool you decide for your company will be your main facilitator of work. From my own personal experience I always recommend Linear, but even if that’s not your style I recommend looking for a similar tool that has the following features built in:

  • SOC 2 Type II certification: make sure your work won’t be leaked by poor software security!

  • Automation & integrations: minimize repetitive manual effort and make communication across work apps easy

  • Simple vocabulary: Teams don’t need a scrum certification to do awesome work. The simpler it is the more they understand the goals we try to achieve. Something like Project > Milestone> Task is easy enough for most people.

  • Auto-backlog sorting: Helps you keep your backlog prioritized with no manual effort! Simply define what’s most important to you (high impact tasks first, easier tasks first, etc.) and let your team work directly with filtered views. They now have a simple pool of tasks always organized by priority.

Process

I like simplifying production into 3 stages: Planning→Projects→Maintenance. These can of course overlap, work in parallel and take different lengths and complexity levels based on what we’re trying to achieve. Teams working on a single player game might take longer on each stage but run through them a couple of times for patches or DLCs. Live games, on the other hand, could probably take less time on each stage but repeat this flow much more frequently.Here are some best practices I’ve found useful when thinking about process improvements:

  • Use project briefs: Simple document that transform ideas into a view (one-pager if possible) of what the project is, how we plan to achieve it and any flags we need to be aware of, etc. Check the Resources section for some templates!

  • Plan for discovery and support: Its very common to jump into implementation without a clear direction, or doing a launch and then jumping into the next project without supporting post-launch quality. Always budget time for these at the beginning and ending of a project plan respectively.

  • Setup feedback pipelines: During discovery, share your plans with the team for internal feedback before implementation to reduce the amount of rework change suggestions could imply. Similarly, during the support period automate how user feedback is organized and prioritized to make solving critical user pain points easier.

  • “Easy wins” day: Even during projects, schedule or embed some small time every week for low effort/high value tasks. A good task management tool would make identifying these a breeze. 1 hour or so per week has very low impact to project deliverables but makes the users’ life better, one small fix at a time. Balancing a small amount of maintenance with project work when possible also helps the team not feeling limited to a single area.

  • Do retrospectives: After a project or important cycle ask yourself and your team, what should we “keep”, “stop” & “start” doing?

  • Define QA stages that make sense for your team: What represents quality for your project? Does it solve the real goal initially planned? Does it look nice without breaking performance? Are we proud and users happy after launch? Work with your QA team to setup the checkpoints you need to be confident of the quality of your releases.

  • Use an ideas corkboard: Use collaborative whiteboard tools like Miro to organize and prioritize ideas before they grow into projects in your roadmap. For those ideas that don't immediately align with the current goals, pin them in a dedicated "corkboard" space for future review! This way those ideas are not discarded (people don't feel ignored) while also keeping focus on the current objectives.

  • Plan roadmaps, not backlogs: Planning work vertically (as a vertical backlog of wishlist items or "pet projects") tend to be difficult to manage as it places favorites alongside prioritization, divides team focus and creates a lot of bottlenecks as progress is not aligned. On the other hand, planning horizontally (roadmap across time) helps you see how projects serve a long-term purpose of feeding future dependencies and which areas (workstreams) are worth focusing on. I like to see it as: Goals help define Workstreams. The sum of all Workstream Roadmaps represents the Company Roadmap.

Organization

While every company/studio/team will be different I believe there are still some key practices that a Producer can facilitate to achieve better work environments:

  • Have a clear organization map: If people are confused about who does what or who to reach out for something, how can we expect them to do their best? We can help by breaking down and communicating team roles & responsibilities in a clear way. This can also help prevent those “loudest voice wins the argument“ toxic situations in your work environment.

  • Hire facilitators: How good is to a team a top expert that doesn’t work well with others? Not much. Always consider work handoff, communication and feedback management valuable skills of any potential member of your team. The easier they’re to work with the better time everyone (including you) will have working together :)

  • Grow sustainably: Every company wants to grow but take it slow. Throwing more people at a problem can make things worse, so plan your hiring and growth carefully only to what you need. If you try to grow too fast you may end up shrinking instead.

  • Centralize a glossary: What you understand as “roadmap”, “project”, etc. is usually slightly different from what others might understand as we build our understanding of abstract concepts from our own experiences, be them good or bad. Keep a tidy and simple glossary at hand for everyone to reference to make communication easier! It should be easy to find, easy to read and will make aligning on processes much easier (specially for new hires).