HABERDASHERS
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JAN-MAY 2020
UI/AUDIO PRODUCER
57 PERSON TEAM
16 WEEKS
Roles and Responsibilities
Lead UI/Audio team in daily scrum meetings to track daily tasks and monitor progress.
Communicated team objectives and blockers with leads, producers, and stakeholders.
Delegated team members according to how best to utilize their skills at any given point in the project.
Hosted milestone retrospective meetings to review what went well and what we could improve on.
Talked with individual teammates about the problems they encountered and what we could do to fix them.
Experience Earned
HaberDashers presented a unique leadership challenge for me, as I led a subdivision of a much larger team focused on a wide variety of tasks including UI and Audio​. Because of the unique composition of my team, it was necessary for me to adapt myself and the team to best address the needs of each individual team member.
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One major takeaway from my experience is the paramount importance of communication. While crucial even on small teams, it is essential on larger teams to make sure that information is being conveyed clearly and efficiently to everyone that needs it. We used kanban planning throughout the development process to guide our tasks, and while we had our share of growing pains as we adapted it into our work, adhering to it helped ensure that all team members were able to quickly ascertain what needed to be done and who was working on what.
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With so many hands on the project at once, we ran into several instances where team members ended up touching components or features that had unforeseen impacts on other people's work. We quickly realized the importance of using our role as producers to manage cross-team communication to develop a stronger understanding of what individuals intend to work on and what impact that will have over others' progress.
CRYSTAL CALL / CURSE THAT MAGIC CAT! / PUZZLE BOX PALACE / SPACE SMACK! / TRIKAYA
USER RESEARCH PRODUCER
JULY-DEC 2020
5 TEAMS OF 12
19 WEEKS
Roles and Responsibilities
Organized and hosted playtesting sessions for each of the dev teams for each milestone of development.
Discussed milestone goals and testing priorities with teams.
Created playtesting surveys using Qualtrics to gather quantitative and qualitative player data.
Disseminated playtesting feedback and suggestions to leads via one-on-one meetings and visual representations of data.
Recruited remote playtesters and organized remote playtests to accommodate for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Experience Earned
In the second half of 2020, I served as User Research Producer for five games being developed simultaneously by five unique teams. This provided me with a unique set of responsibilities and challenges as I worked to gather user data for all five teams in the midst of a global pandemic.
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To oversimplify a bit, my work was twofold: I needed to acquire information about how players interpreted the games we were developing, and then communicate that information back to the teams in a productive way.
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Gathering user data was a process of constant refinement as we reviewed our surveys to pinpoint exactly what we wanted to get out of our playtests. Over the course of multiple milestones, we were able to develop surveys that both answered the immediately pressing questions we had while also providing contextual information to guide our interpretations and our planned responses.
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The process of delivering feedback is a delicate social balance to strike. For my part, I always strived to deliver the feedback honestly but productively. It frequently happens that user feedback is negative or even harsh, which can be discouraging to team morale. Perspective is key here: the value of user research is to find room for improvement and test the effectiveness of ideas while we still have the time to iterate and make adjustments. As a Producer, I do my best to ensure that my teammates understand the feedback I offer them both intellectually and emotionally so that they may act on it to the best of their ability.