My journey as a producer started rather recently as I switched from programming. I had a single semester to become acquainted with how to run scrum, manage a team, the intricacies of agile development, and how to be a good leader. Also the hard skills of financing, resource management, time management, among many more. After that short semester I was thrown into Production II as a producer managing my first game development team. Throughout the year I have learned a lot about the profession, but never enough. There are so many different facets to being a producer that once you think you're getting a handle on things, they change, and you must change as well.
Up until midmortem I was managing a small group of four; two programmers, a designer, and artist. After a bit of a rough start things ran rather smoothly. The group got along, everyone communicated regularly, and work was getting done on time. Then the team expanded to ten members, and everything became much more difficult. We switched from our small messenger board to a server on Discord to make communication between ten team members more manageable. Communication between and within divisions remains excellent but it is much more difficult to keep track of. Different disciplines will have their own meetings outside of large group meetings and the takeaways from those meetings must be recorded and made available to the team. It is much more difficult to tell if everyone is on the same page and if all the information is correct. This is why revisions and reviews are extremely important.
Another challenge is that the team has acquired another producer. That's another person whose job is the same as mine! We sat down and talked about what each of us are going to be responsible for and where our responsibilities overlap. His method of management is very different than mine. His style is much more structured while mine is more relaxed. For example in my smaller group I would have them do a scrum update in the text chat telling the group what they did, what they are going to do, and if there are any impediments. They would do this whenever they finished their work for the day. I did this because not everyone will work on the project at the same time due to personal work preferences and their schedule. The other producer set up a system where the scrum meeting would happen at a specific time throughout the week whenever the team's schedules would align.
I find that level of control and specificity to be a little unnecessary but it seems to work just as well as my method so I won't fix what isn't broken. This reflects a lot of what I have been learning in production; to stick with what works. Every group is different and has different needs and conflicts. A strategy that worked in one group might not in another and everything is person to person. This applies not just to production but interactions in general. I've learned it slowly and consistently through my time at Champlain. Programming wasn't working for me so I tried something else, one communication method wasn't working so we tried a different method. To put it pretentiously, life is about finding what works and adapting when it doesn't. I strive to be better at finding what works, and to be faster at adapting when it doesn't.
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