What’s the Difference Between a Product Manager and a Game Producer?.

The typical tech company has project manager, product owners and product mangers but no producers. The video games, music and film industry have the role producer, which is responsible for the project, the product and the production.

But, what is the difference between a product manager and a game producer? I often see job positions for game producer and product managers in the gaming industry and wonder, what’s the real differences between these roles in terms of responsibility, task and execution.

In general, I think those two roles could be interchangeable or entirely different depending on the company.

I haven’t worked in the role of a game producer yet, but was leading game productions as product manager. Also I learned how game producer work in my time in other game studios.

Variance from different game studios

In a mobile game studio I know, a producer is more of the project manager, and the product manager is the business manager. The product manager is responsible for identifying the features and updates with the biggest business impact.

In another studio, the product manager is responsible for the product: The “WHAT”, and the producer about the process: The “HOW”.

There are other companies, where the producer is more a project manager and the executive producer is acting as the product manager. Or the producer is responsible for the product, and the project manager(s) are called associate producers.

There are a lot of variance in responsibility, role and title between different companies.

Similarities between the job roles

Both roles have some similarities and common expected requirements. Project management skills is definitely the first one - how to organise tasks, people, resources and budgets.

Today, most probably all software-driven companies use some form of agile project management. There are still good use cases for more traditional methods like waterfall, but the practices and process vary, on how the team works best.

Secondly the team communication, the game producer and the product manager are both responsible to communicate with the team effectively so that they have all the required information at any given time.

They are also both responsible to identify and remove blockers for the team members. Normally, they lead and participate in daily standup, if they don’t have a dedicated scrum master or product owner.

Since both roles require project management skills, they also do some sort of roadmap planning. Game producer typically focus in roadmaps more on milestones and deliverables - product manager lean more towards features with the highest value for users and business.

Roadmap creation is a collaborative process within the entire team, so the priorities and values vary from team to team.

Thinking like a game producer

As mentioned earlier, the game producer creates the project roadmap with certain milestones in mind, since these are typically fixed delivery dates to publishers or investors. Depending on the project funding or the company setup, this can also be different.

One aspect, which product managers rarely work on is the risk assessment and management. Producers are responsible in game companies to analyse and priorities the risk before and during a project.

Especially during the main production, a producer has to manage the technical requirements' checklist TRC/TCR from platform vendors. These complex technical requirement need to be implemented before a game can launch on a gaming console. When the release candidate are submitted to the platform holder, most games need to be submitted multiples times to pass all requirements.

For the game producer role it is expected that you are passionate about game. This is not usually the case for product managers.

Thinking like a product manager

Product managers often have good math/stats skill and some knowledge of SQL. Product decisions will be based on data and rely on good datapoints. But the data analytics tracking only starts earliest with the first playable version or alpha version, to get insights into the real user behaviour.

The company and product vision are also important pillars for the PM to consider in his decisions. Occasionally, the product manager defines the product vision himself, but in larger teams this strategical decision will be done by the Head of Product (or Head of Production).

With the vision in mind, the next stage is the establishment of mid- and long-term goals. These can be for smaller groups, teams or the entire company. Goal setting with trackable metrics is a critical task of a product responsible person.

Conclusion

After exploring the nuances between the different role definitions I beg the question, if there is a clear way to separate them from each other? I would say: NO

Every company creates its own policies for these roles and the responsibilities and activities they have to provide to their team.

As recommendation for anyone seeking employment in a gaming studio and want to work in game production:

• Carefully study the expected requirements and skills
• Having a passion for video games help
• Develop your soft skill and craft your communication skills
• Show your strengths in the interview and ask about the relationship between the two roles in their team