 We're calling this welcome to the dark side because in a lot of times with gaming people are a little confused about what, you know, the gaming industry is like, you know, what do we, what do we really do in the in the game space and so just to give you a brief overview of who am I, my name is Tony Pollyaco, Pollyaco. There will be a quiz at the end of this presentation so but I'm born in Boston I went to Arizona State University got a degree in computer science. I worked there for about maybe 10 years in a women's web network called she knows.com. I went back to Boston because I thought it'd be great to get back to my roots. I took a director's position with a market research company discovered I hate snow. I hate black ice and I could have good pizza out in the West Coast. I went back and I came to Washington where I worked for the last six years for Wizards of the Coast where I was the senior product manager for Premiere Play and Esports. And then six months ago I changed positions. I'm now at Boeing where I head up a team of product managers in the data science and artificial intelligence space working with Boeing commercial air and Boeing defense and security. So I got about 18 years in the game. I've seen some good some bad some ugly but a lot of you know more good than bad. I spent you know a little chunk of my of my career you'll see that little you know blip in my resume that's where I was playing poker and magic professionally full time. So I was traveling the U.S. playing magic tournaments. I was going to Vegas for poker tournaments. The when people ask about playing professionally they say oh wow you must be great. If you look at like the NBA I wasn't a LeBron James I was more like a 10 day contract player. I was good enough to get on the stage but you know never the never bought on the trophy so. But you know working at Wizards was a great experience. It was good to see things from both sides of the coin because having been so involved with that game for so long. It was great to see how sort of like the how the sausage was made like you know behind the scenes. So for tonight's agenda we're going to just have a really quick to the point in terms of like you know welcome who am I. Here's our agenda blah blah blah the stuff that usually happens in these presentations. But then we're going to talk about online gaming. We're going to talk about our goals for tonight. We're going to talk about how does product management fit into the equation of gaming. Because gaming companies have a reputation for being the hoodies and the sweatpants. You know vodka and beer on your desk and things like that. So how do you effectively manage a product in that space. We're going to talk about getting your foot in the door if you've ever wanted to be in the gaming industry. How do you get your foot in the door. But then once the door is open you know what are you going to do how are you going to actually get in the door. And then once you're in the door now you're screwed what are you going to do. But we're going to tie up put a nice pretty bow at the end of it and talk about at the end of the day what your mission is as a product manager in the gaming space. And then we'll take questions if you want. So our goals for tonight we want to talk about three main points is one how do you get a job a product management job in the gaming industry. Because when you talk about gaming there is a wide space of games there is Xbox console games you've got web based games you've got desktop computer games off steam. You've got mobile games it goes on and on and on so how do you get your foot into that space. But because gaming is a different animal entirely what are going to be the unique challenges that you see in that space. Because I saw stuff at wizards that I never saw anywhere else and then when I tell people about it there's like huh really. I'm like yeah like these are some of the challenges we face on a daily basis trying to get games out to 30 million players. That's our player base just in magic is 30 million I'm not even counting Dungeons and Dragons. So every little tweak every little idea every little mistake you make 30 million eyes are on it and it's it's intense. But we're also going to talk about tips on how to effectively manage the balance between the business the people who want to make the money. And the developers and the engineering teams that want to make art that want to make quality doesn't mean the business doesn't want to make quality. But they're not going to be happy if they're making you know they're going to be happy making $15 million versus two. So let's talk about gaming first and who here consider themselves a gamer to that's enough. Who but who here's played Xbox. OK you're all gamers you all have inner gamers inside you it's OK. We've progressed as a society it's not it's not embarrassing to be a gamer anymore OK. My friend Ben was actually the executive producer for Farm Bill and yes it definitely counts. If you have clicked on an imaginary little figure created a little avatar you are a gamer OK. And the best part about it is that you know from my perspective with gaming. I got started way back in the day on the MMORPGs the multi the mass multiplayer games EverQuest World of Warcraft. I then moved into Counter Strike which is a sort of a first person shooter team based game. Got into magic and started playing magic the not the video version but the the paper version. And then of course there was poker too. These are all when boils down to it all these games are very analytical they're very analytical they're very logical. That is why when you have experience as a gamer and you want to go into product management. It's a great combo because I would say a heavy majority of the stuff that I did when I was a product manager. Is very succinct to OK well I need to get this feature built from this person I need to sign off. So if I do this they're going to do this or this OK cool. So if they do this then I'm going to do either this or this and I'll map this all out in my head like a chess game. Trying to see how do I get to where I want to be how do I get what I want. Because as product managers all we care about is the customer and the product. We will go through heaven and hell to make sure that we have the best quality to deliver the best experience to our customers. And part of that means sometimes we have to play games in looking at the evolution of gaming though. And I'm and I'll be upfront I'm forty two. Like I said I'm from Boston sometimes there's no filter between here and here OK. So I'm very blunt I'm very open about things but being older. I started off with the original Nintendo and I got hooked and ever since then it went right through through college. I don't even want to imagine the amount of either guest lecturers or famous people that I miss when I was in college because I was sitting at my dorm room click click click click click click click trying to kill that end boss for like the 12th time. But looking at where we've come from gaming from the Nintendo first to now Xbox whatever Steam mobile all the different platforms you can play on you can play anywhere now this is a game that you can be on a bus going to work you can be in your bedroom you can be at a hotel you can get online and play a game and interact with someone else and challenge yourself to compete. But what that means though is that the system is getting huge now OK. The gaming industry is getting huge 905 million revenue last year just on games. So all those times when you're growing up and your parents are like get off the get off the whatever you're never going to make money doing that. Bull crap OK because I got another number that's going to blow your mind in a minute and to make things even even funnier. This is up 38 percent from the year before. So you find me another growing industry that's growing close to 40 percent year over year monetarily. And that's an opportunity as an opportunity for everyone in here because Seattle is a hotbed for gaming. It's volatile. I mean it can it can flux but it's aggressive. And I mean this is the place that you want to be doing especially with that much money on the table. But when we look at the two sides of gaming you know we talk about the console side. We talk about the multiplayer games. We talk about MMORPGs and these sort of evolved. They started from like the desktop to the web to your phone and and that would be like the ever quest to Farmville. Ironic I put that in there and Clash Royale. You know type games. So there was this evolution of you're playing versus a computer versus you might play versus a computer or somebody else to now you're playing against 12 year olds and they're killing you. OK. Within a 10 year period though the gaming sector has gone from being to one of being one of the smallest to being the largest segment grower in that 10 year span. There's no other industry that has grown in volume revenue and in employment than the gaming industry over the last 10 years. Now on the flip side of the coin this is where we're talking about eSports now. Now I don't know about you but when I was younger and I used to play video games and actually you know what my girlfriend will tell you I still do this. I'll be playing a video game Madden or something watch this watch this you know I'm going to do this really good. And then she would say you know I don't care. That's why we have Twitch. That's why we have different avenues now mediums of communication to not only showcase what we're doing but to share that and monetize it as well. Those are great things because now when we move into eSports we're talking about taking the NFL mentality of a production of excitement of competitiveness and prize money to boot. And putting that in a medium where everyone can view it by tickets for it and treat it like a real sport. The funny part is though is that you would think that from an eSports perspective it would be eSports companies putting money into the game. You would think that it would be like like Riot League of Legends or Heartstone or things like that. No it's actually all third party money. My very last conversation I had at Wizards before I left was with a professional sports team that was wanting to talk to us about possibly partnering with us. Because they had already invested 35 million in their eSports, their own eSports League. And I was like man this is absolutely bonkers. This sport has nothing to do with the games they were offering. They were just sponsoring standard games like League and CS and Dota and all those things. They weren't even sponsoring like NBA K2 or any like sports games. That's what made it even crazier. But as these opportunities grew and advanced it was amazing just to see the growth in that eSports sector. $137 billion in 2018 was spent on digital, online and mobile games. Now I know for a fact I'm good for 10 bucks out of this $137 billion because I candy crushed a few times and bought extra lives. But this is talking about the console games. Every single type of game we talked about $137 billion. There is some companies that are just getting filthy rich right now and they're growing and they're hiring. And what they need is they need solid awesome product managers. Because without them there is no one minding the ship. You will have the incorrect people guiding the product and guiding the future of that product. And there's a very good reason why that is. When you look at product management and you look at how it fits into gaming. So I asked who was gamers earlier but who would be interested in looking at a product management gig in the gaming space? And that's fine. The reason why though is that because when you do you got to be very, very aware of what you're doing. This isn't Amazon where you could be working on like a Kindle one week and then something else another week. It's not Boeing where we're working on in the aerospace field. So you have to ask yourself why do you want to get into gaming? What is your goal? Are you hoping just to not have to get dressed for work anymore and just go in there and do all sort of cool stuff? That's fine but there's got to be a good reason for it. What are you hoping to do? Are you hoping just to be a fan? Are you going to work at this company because you've played their games forever and it's a great thing? What working in gaming is, what I mean by this bullet point here is what working in gaming is is it is a job. It is a real job with real business, real money, real people. It is not the stereotype that you might see online or in movies where people are just like, you know, this isn't Silicon Valley from HBO. We have no Guilfoy. But what working in the gaming is not. It's not a pass just to skimp on quality. It's not an opportunity for you to try and change things that you like about games just because you like them. I mean essentially, and this is going to sound brutal, I'm sorry, but when you go to work in the gaming industry, you don't matter anymore. The reason why is because you are not building for your experience. You are building for the customer's experience and you're no longer a customer. You are now steering that ship and making sure that the person who is taking that train from SeaTac into downtown Seattle is having the best possible morning because of the game that you're helping manage. So when we look at this and we say, how do you get your foot in the door? Because I know a lot of people who have tried to get into gaming and they always say the same thing. Who do you know? How do you get there? I applied and I never heard anything. Well, this isn't a mom and pop industry anymore. This isn't someone just getting emails and picking some to look at for resumes and some not. They have HR departments now. They have the same scanners that every other company does. You have to do the same thing that you would do for an Amazon, a Google, a Facebook. You have to trim the resume. You have to look at the job description. You have to curate it and make it special for that. But the same tips apply. LinkedIn. LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn. I can't stress it enough. The reason why is because you need to be able to form bonds with people. If you're trying to get an inside track on someone else, there's someone over there who is just filling out application after application and praying. Then there's someone else who's on LinkedIn and active and being a little sneaky. I'll show you what I do and what I've done before. I will find, I'll do a search in LinkedIn and look for the title. When I would type in for Wizards, for instance, Wizards of the Coast, and then I would put in something like Producer, Product Manager, Recruiter, HR, whatever. Some titles in there so I would find a list of people. Then I would see what groups they were in. Then I'd get involved in those groups. Then what I would do is I would start interacting with those people to be able to be like, oh, that's a great post. Yeah, that's a great post. I'm coming in on the side. I'm not like saying, that's a great post. By the way, are you hiring? No, I'm not doing it that way. I'm just forming a bond in conversation because now eventually I can LinkedIn connect with that person. They're going, oh, yes, that's the person who was being cool with me on that thing. Okay, now you're connected. Then a quick message, oh, hey, thanks for linking up. We'll get to know each other or whatever and just leave it at that. Because then they'll contact you back because now they think that you don't want something from them but you do. That's okay because you're being strategic. You're using your gaming instincts on how are you going to win the game. Don't stalk people. They're following them on Instagram and showing up where they are. Oh, hi, I happen to be. Don't do that. I'm just saying for LinkedIn, it's a great networking event. Gaming events, open houses. A lot of times Microsoft, Amazon, they'll throw these open expos where they'll show off their studios. They'll show off new games. LinkedIn's a good place to find out where those are. You have to hunt around for them a little bit. They're a great, great place to go. Anything just to meet people. When I went to Microsoft's for their Xbox team, I got an offer, not an offer, but an interview with the Azure team. My cloud skills were a little iffy. I was like, hello, but I kept in touch with the person who was there. Super cool person. Now we trade. I'm like, I need a product manager so bad. Oh, I have a couple of candidates I know that I can hook you up. We trade. We talk. We go back and forth. It's helping each other because we're all in the same community. We all want to do the best. We want this discipline to be one of the most respected ones out there. And so we do that. We have to work together. Career websites, duh. I mean, you're typical. A lot of these companies are going to post on there. A lot of these gaming companies will third party their job postings. So they'll have a company that's out there posting them on some of the bigger sites. I would definitely not just look at them and say, oh, that's not real. It's definitely real. Most of the times, the smaller studios that are growing that maybe 200 or 300 people in them, those are the ones that are going to probably use that sort of service. So definitely check the career websites. But the one thing to remember and get your foot in the door is that they want talent. They don't want fans. They have enough fans. These games have millions and millions of players. They don't need someone coming in and talking about their high score and how amazing it is. They need to go in there and talk about why they are the best person to deliver the products they need to do. So the door is open, but now the interview. Really, just treat it like any other interview. Don't do what I didn't get so jacked up that you're actually interviewing for a job in gaming. I mean, for me, working at Wizards and having played it for six years, I mean, played it professionally for 10 years, but working there for six years, I went into my interview more excited to show how much I knew about magic than actually talking about product management. And I could have messed myself up really bad that day. Remember the basics. When they're asking questions, state your problems, state the action that you took, state the results. Show the efficiency. Show the KPIs. Don't let your knowledge of the, let your domain knowledge of the game show or let your domain knowledge of gaming show, but don't let your passion show. And that's going to sound weird because passions are really important part of product management. So I'm going to explain what that means when I say don't show your passion. That's sort of what I was referring to about your high score. A lot of these people who work in some of these gaming companies, some of them don't even play games. You could be interviewing someone who just doesn't, who just loves Python and is like, yep, I'm just Mr. Python, but I'm not going to know anything about this game. And so you're talking about, oh, yeah, you know that level 42. I did this thing and what are you talking about? I don't know. I want to talk about product management. I want to talk about how you are going to take this idea and turn it into $50 million. Final thought before walking in that door and you're wondering why the heck is Ronald McDonald on this screen? And this is what I like to tell people about, remember McDonald's, okay? When I was in high school, I was a wrestler. I played football and I would routinely consume close to like two big Macs, 40 nuggets a day. And it was like, this is great. Going to school in the morning, I'll grab two, you know, egg McMuffins. It was great being young with a high metabolism. But when I was 16, I also got a job working at McDonald's. And if you go in there for after six months of coming home smelling like a French fry and an apple pie, you know, had a kid, that is, I never wanted to eat McDonald's again. Disgusted with it. So be really sure that before you get into gaming, you are ready to know that you might not like games afterwards. Or if you're going to work for a company with a game you like, you might not like that game afterwards. I will tell you myself, I do not play magic anymore. And it's not because, you know, it has nothing to do with the company. It has nothing to do with the game itself. It has to do that for six years. I went in and we made discussions about decisions on everything down to a font size, to a game feature, to an integration. And after that, I said, man, I just, I know I don't even want to go to the other side anymore. I'll just, I'll play, I'll play Farmville, I guess. I'll be frank and hook me up with the link. I'll play Farmville. So remember McDonald's. So you get your foot in the door. You find the interview and you actually get an offer. And this is great because the one thing I will give the gaming industry is that it is... So I'm going to, I'm going to phrase this a little differently because this could rub some people the wrong way. But I'll do that at least 10 times in this presentation. Don't worry about it. The gaming industry is a very accepting and very open industry. It's one of the most, speaking from wizards directly, one of the reasons why I played Magic for so many years was because Magic The Gathering was a game on a Friday night where you could see 50 people come together in a game store all from different clicks in a school. So you'd see like a couple of jocks. You'd see a couple of buh, a couple of B, a couple of C, whatever, you know. But they would all come together for these four hours. And for those four hours, we were all Magic players. And we all talked about the game and we talked about the new stuff that was coming. Now, yeah, granted, you know, go out the door at, you know, Friday night, everything goes back to the way it was. But it was a welcoming community. And the companies that work in that space are also very forward thinking, very welcoming because they understand who made those games popular. It was very tough for me when I was in high school to tell people that I played Magic because I used to get joked on. I used to get, you know, oh, you're going to play with your cards tonight? Yeah, so I was just checking, you know, and that's fine. It's okay. But the thing is now we've gone past that. And these companies are, they are, they want passion. They want talent and they also want to be successful. So if you have those three drives, those three values embodied and personified in your daily, you know, daily day to day stuff, you're going to do good with it. Now, once your foot is in the door, though, remember now you are on the dark side now. You are now part of the evil empire. You are making the game. You are no longer the consumer of the game. Yeah, you may still play it when you go home or whatever like that, but you need to look at this from a totally different lens now. And when you get into this new position, you've got a network right away. The gaming verticals are extremely competitive inside the companies. The reason why is because, and I'm going to, this is my opinion, camera, this is my opinion only, is that there is so much ego in the gaming industry from people who work in the gaming industry. I mean, you think that developers have big egos and they're prideful about what they do. Oh, you go to a gaming company and check it out from there. It's times 10 because everyone thinks they've got the answer to the next big thing. Their code is the best. Their, you know, their runtime is the absolute greatest. It's all competitiveness. But with these companies that are growing, people are thinking, okay, we're at 80 people in this company right now. We have a new game launching this year, one launching next year. We may see a round of Series C funding that's going to be about maybe $14 million based off like $100 million valuation. Okay, that means we're going to hire like 80 more people, which means there's going to be leadership positions opening up next year. I can see down the road on that. I want that position. So I'm going to make sure that my, you know, I almost said something really bad. I'm going to make sure my face is pretty. That's a good way to put it. I'm going to make sure my house is in order. I'm going to make sure they know who I am, that I'm doing the best stuff. And if that means maybe not helping another teammate so I can get ahead, that happens. Is it cool? Hell no. Is it unethical? Oh yes. But it's part of the game, how it's played and I've seen it. This last part, I talked about this in my last presentation when I was here. And so when you join a gaming company, you are now a level one noob. You are a level one newbie and you've got a ton of hit points. And what that means is for those of you that haven't played games with hit points, it's essentially you're a warrior. You got a lot of armor. You can take a lot of hits. The reason why I mentioned that is because one of my favorite things that I like to do with new companies is called newbie credits. And what newbie credits are is that you're a new company. You don't know everything yet. And you have a lot of credit to make mistakes. Which means that if you want to go forth and be like, oh well, I'll give you an example. One of my recent jobs, I was there maybe a week. And one of my teammates asked me, you know, hey, we want to do X, Y and Z. And so I said, okay, done. So I went and did it, made the right moves, moved people around. And then about like an hour later, I got an email that was like, you know, Tony, we're not supposed to do things like that. There's forms that we need to fill out and there's approvals that need to be signed off on for it. So of course I was like, oh, I didn't know I'm new. Oh, it's okay. You'll learn as you be here for a while. It's six months. I'm still occasionally sometimes I even still use the credits now. I'm like, you know, I've only been here six months. But I don't know what's going to happen after six years. That excuse is not going to fly anymore. I've only been here six years. I'm sorry. I can't. I did that again. But you do get these newbie credits when you work in a new product management position. So it gives you the opportunity to make some mistakes. It gives you the opportunity to be bold and then play the card to be like, oh, sorry, I didn't know. But it also will help you just establish your presence, which is actually the most important part. That leads into the networking. Quick wins. Quick wins early in this gaming space. There's it's intense. There's pressure from both sides from development and the business. And you need to be aware of where your quick wins are going to be. Is it volunteering to help someone else with something so you can, you know, get attached to it? Is it trying to, you know, suggest a different way of doing things that doesn't impact the delivery, but in fact makes it better. You have to look for those low hanging fruit quick wins because as soon as you establish that you deliver, that you're a closer, that you're a winner like that, you're going to get more credit down the road. And I would never tell a new person at a company to burn through all your newbie credit because I've done that and it's horrible because then you've got to get more credit. By getting these quick wins, you start building a portfolio of good reputation. And your words and your decisions as a product manager are only going to be as good as your reputation. If you're known as a blow hard that just always talks and never delivers, it doesn't matter if you get up there and speak like you've done it for a million years, no one's going to believe you. But if you're the person who gets it done no matter what breaks through the walls and makes it happen, it doesn't matter what you say, your actions are going to speak far louder and that's what's going to actually deliver the best product possible. So unique challenges in gaming. This is interesting because I was going to use some examples from Wizards but instead I was going to use some other examples from other friends in the gaming industry and the reason why is because there's similarities. A lot of times in the gaming industry you have two types of gaming companies. You have the ones that started off for gamers by gamers and what happens is usually that company will grow and at some point those VPs or the founders they end up taking different roles because they have to bring in people who actually have experience in global marketing or global distribution or package art or tax laws or all that sort of stuff. So when you get to a new company, your business partners, the people that you are asking you for what they want, they might not understand your world. The gaming world is very unique. The gaming world is one where we have our own language sometimes, it sounds like. In magic we had our own set of buzzwords that we just used with each other, not like we planned it, it was just like the vernacular of the gaming community. But if you were outside of our community and you listened to us, we sounded like idiots. It was hilarious and that's one of the things that in the same idea when you're working with the business with marketing and sales and all these other departments, they're not going to understand the funny little inside jokes about the games, they're not going to understand the buzzwords, they're not going to understand. What they want to understand is the data from the players that tells them what's the best direction to go. So if you're still ingrained in those communities, get that data, know where to find it, know who to talk to and be able to pull that in to be like, look, it's not just me who wants to be able to do XYZ, all these other people want to do it as well. We are your audience and that's the way you have to look at that. Your business partners aren't going to know everything. Same thing for the developers too. You can write the best code in the world and you may not even know how to play a game. And granted, it helps if you're in the gaming space and you're a coder because then you're able to use what you know about the games and be able to put that into code at some point or put that into UX or however you're doing it. But again, just remember, not everyone at a game company is a gamer. Some people is just a job. Not everyone's going to be a fan. So when I started off at Wizards, it was interesting because I was so stoked to be there. I mean, if I had, I would have shown up with my Wizards t-shirt, my Wizards sweatpants, my Wizards hat, backpack, little lunchbox. I would look at me and at Wizards everyone. I'd be posting on Instagram, Facebook. Oh, well, sorry I can't go. I have to go to Wizards for my job and just let everyone know. But other people would show up to work and just be like, you know, my kid's got a baseball game at the floor. Can I go home? You know, they're not like super stoked about the game. So, you know, you have to remember, there's people there who aren't there because of the gaming company. They're there because it's a company. You have a job. You have a mission. We've covered what that is. It's delivering the best for the customers, delighting their experience, which in turn makes money, more jobs and great things for you because you'll be up the ladder. But stay your lane. Remember, you're there to do a job first. You're not there to go swing by R&D and see what's going on. You're not there to go offer to help test new games, you know, every single day when you have like, you know, an hour break. You're not there to find out what the new secret stuff is so you can tell your friends. You have a product. Your job is to make that product amazing and to do it by any means necessary. Stay your lane. If you get offered, sure. When I was at Wizards, because I had played professionally before, they had asked me, hey, do you want to come down like, you know, and help us test new magic cards? And it was called the Future League. Now for anyone who doesn't know, I should have said this earlier. I apologize. Who doesn't know what magic is? Essentially, and since I don't work there anymore, I can say this because they hate it. They hate this reference. If you took poker and chess, made it into a card game, added a bunch of dragons and made it extremely skill based. That's magic. And so I would go down there and help test these new cards that would get released. But it was like, it was, you know, for an hour or two a month. And it was cool. But then there was like someone else who worked at Wizards who was just on the fan train. And every single thing that was there, person was going to be there. This person's goal was to work in research and development. Fantastic coder. Wanted to work, nothing but magic every day, all day. And eventually didn't work out because the passion wasn't there for being a product manager. The passion was there for being a fan of the game. And they don't mix. Also, look at the kind of company you're going to. Are you a technology company or a gaming company that's learning technology? And there's a difference and it matters. I'm sorry, I said that with so much passion, it matters. Reason why is because there's a company that was here in Seattle and they got bought out by King Games. The company did Candy Crush. And then Candy Crush got bought out by Activision Blizzard. They were a gaming company. Pretty good one too. They know gaming, they know the gaming mechanisms, programming, whole nine yards. Now take Wizards. Wizards was a tangible product game. It was a card game. Dungeons and Dragons, all books and manuals and things like that. Even until I would say maybe the 2000s, they started dipping their toes into the online video game space with Magic Online. And now the new version is Magic Arena. But there was a huge learning curve because Hasbro had just recently bought out Wizards of the Coast that time. They had gotten into video games now, but they had no experience in it. They were a physical company making digital games versus being a company that was founded to make games. You see the difference there? And it's important because you got to know before you go in what you're getting into. When I started at Wizards, I was flowing out for an interview and I met with the CTO, the VP and who would be my director. I said, are you guys using Agile? Are you using Scrum? What are you doing for your processes? Oh yeah, we're an Agile company. Just saying that you're having a stand-up does not make you an Agile company. I'm very pleased to say that since I started at Wizards to where they are now, they are now a pretty efficient Agile shop over there. They've made leaps and bounds in terms of some of the stuff that they're doing. But at many other companies, it's the same thing. Boeing evens the same thing. We're an aerospace company. We build the best planes in the world, but we're not known for our games. We're not known for like, we don't sell software, things like that. We don't sell Microsoft Word or anything like that. So keep that in mind. Being the peacekeeper, now in product management, one of the biggest things that we do on a daily basis is we deal with temperamental people. Whether it's business or engineers or whatever, someone is going to give you attitude at least once or twice a day. In my case, five or six. And so you've got to assume that you're going to be brokering a lot of peace meetings between the business that's going to say, we want everything and a cherry on top. And the developers are going to say, well, that's going to take about 76 years. One of the biggest conflicts I see in product management and gaming is that you have to be able to set one rule down right away. You either get to pick what you want or you get to pick when you get it. You don't get to pick both. It doesn't happen because the minute you give the power to the business to be able to make that decision and also when it's due, you are effectively telling your development team, I don't care about you. Now, that also means that as product managers, we have to have that extra chip on our shoulder that we can go in to any person's office and tell them no. I will do that every night of the week and I've told my team this at Boeing too. I said, if you can't go into our VP's office and tell him no to his face and stick to your guns and tell them why you were saying no, this might not be the right job for you. There might be better ones out there. There might be, you know, maybe some skill training that we can get to help with that. But you've got to have the ability to say no because otherwise the business will run you ragged. That was one of the biggest challenges that I faced at Wizards. We had a very, very smart, very aggressive business side of the office. My boss was a VP of marketing. His name was Jerome. I mean, he was probably one of my best bosses ever. Jerome would have your back. If you weren't his team, Jerome would have your back and that's where I think I learned a lot of mine over the years of how to get my teams back because Jerome always had my back even if I was wrong sometimes. But there was a lot of times where we had to push back some very eager expectations. And one rule that I had with my teams is that I never, ever commit for them. So when someone say to me, we want to get this release out here instead of here on the roadmap, that's great. So good, we're going to do it. Nope. Well, why not? Because I don't make that decision. My job is to explain to the team very clearly what we're doing and then I will accept their commitment. Oh, we don't have time for that. Well, I'm sorry, but you said that we're an agile shop. And if you're not embracing the agile values or respect, openness, commitment, then you're just talking. The business cares about the money. I hate to, I'm not trying to paint the business side of things as being cold and, you know, calculated and everything. But if you're in, like, say marketing, your job is to market a product. Your products are measured by how successful they do in those markets. If you're not making money off those products, then you're not doing a good job at marketing. So that's why the business cares about money. Now, development, I think, cares more about the experience and the quality. My son is a fantastic musician. I can say that because I'm his dad. And he, but music is another kind of art, an art, version of art that I cannot even comprehend or do. But from the coding side of things, that's another kind of art. And when I was a coder, I used to make beautiful, I used to love that experience of just seeing all these random things and all of a sudden run it and say, oh my God, this is great. I did this. I couldn't believe it. Like when I pushed my first app live, I saw it on the Apple store and I was like, I was 14 years old again. I was like, this is amazing. So you have to think about in terms of your balancing that measuring stick between the two worlds. Also get all the voices to the table before it becomes complicated. And I'll tell you what that means. A lot of the times in a lot of gaming companies, you're moving quick, you're thinking quick and a lot of hallway conversations go on. A lot of drive-bys go on where it's like, hey, are we going to be good for Friday? Yep, all right, cool. And then I'm off to something else. Now someone else is coming from that direction and saying, oh, you know, are we going to be good for this on Friday morning? The person's like, yeah, sure. Now this person's double booked. They don't even want to come to work on Friday now. We have no paper trail about who asked first. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. And so what I would always make sure to do is that when one of those things would happen, one of those drive-bys would occur. And I mean, drive-by could not drive-by. Drive-by is that I would be like, look, we need to get the sneeze at the table. We need to get the people doing the work at the table. Oh, but we don't want to have another meeting. I would rather spend 20 minutes with the people at the table and at least hearing the same things, hearing the same vernacular, being able to ask questions about specifics and making sure we're using common language so a proper commitment can be made. I would much rather do that than get halfway through a sprint, find out it's all crap, and then have to kill the sprint, start over, and go back to scratch. Now I broke one of my own rules there and I said, we'll have a meeting. Because me personally, I detest meetings. I think that most of the time it's people who just want to hear themselves talk. I've played games sometimes in previous jobs many, many years ago. Recording. Where I would just sometimes use big words and just see who bought into them. Because I wanted to see who was really paying attention, who cared about the product. I wasn't trying to clown on anyone and embarrass them. I was literally doing a litmus test to see how much attention they're paying to the product and where that passion lies. Because if I'm feeding them straight BS and they're saying great, that means that I wasn't doing my job making sure the business is well informed about what was going on. It meant that I was doing a poor job and I had to rectify that. So you're always going to keep that up and keep that in your mind. Get those voices to the table, make sure people are heard, make sure they're being respected. Because if you're going to drop the hammer on someone because something didn't get done off of a commitment, then you've got to make sure that respect was there in the first place. You can't just turn it on when you want to. You can't just be convenient with it. You've got to be steady with it. You've got to stick to it. And that's the last line here in terms of using a process. If your team is using scrum, agile, waterfall, I don't care. I'm not here advocating or evangelizing one process or another. No way. But what I'm saying is that if you're using a process, stick to it. Stick to the fundamentals. Stick to what the book says. Stick to what your team has done. The minute you let someone come in and put their hand in and start making it okay to skip stand up or to combine your retro with the next one or whatever it is, the minute you allow that to happen as a product manager, you have lost control of your team. You have lost control of your product. Because now you're justifying excuses to skimp on quality. And if you're not getting effective information out of your retrospectives, if you're not having a daily stand up and being able to communicate, if your whole team can't communicate about what's going on with your product at that very moment, then that's an issue. And that's not something that you're going to fix by just making it more blasé and more easy. You have to drop the hammer sometimes, but at the base of it, you've got to stick to it, and if they try and make you change it, push back. Otherwise, you are not a strong team. And that's the only way that you're going to be an effective product manager, and it's the only way that your team is going to deliver greatness. Reality is the gaming industry. I hate talking about this, but my mandate here tonight is to tell you the truth. You already know I'm blunt. Maybe I'm noxious. That's fine. That's fine. But in the gaming industry, sometimes you're only as good as your last game. A lot of these companies are fragile. And it's not because they're bad companies. It's because they have different models. If you're a company with, let's say we form a company right here, okay? We put out a game, get up to, you know, make a quick 80 mil. Sounds good. Let's make another game. So now we get another group of people that come in. We get salaries, and there's insurance, and then there's liability. Now we need more office space. Everyone wants new Macs. Keep going on and on and on. Now you've burned through most of that profit already because you're investing in the company. Now you release your second game, and it's awful. Tanks dies, stinks. Now how are you going to be paying the 160 people you have versus the 80 you had when you were safer? Some companies work like that. Because when it pays off, now they're like 3-400 people, and they're cranking out three games a year. I mean, that's definitely an aggressive way of doing it. I don't look down on it. I'm just saying that's the way it works. Like I said before, gaming is fun. It's a relaxed atmosphere. You probably do more than you would an insurance company or something. I hate naming names because I tend to do that, and I'm like, I can't do that. He's recording. Just remember, you have a product to deliver. Gaming companies are fun to work for. There is more relaxation. There is more opportunities to do some cool stuff. But you know what? That's in a lot of companies nowadays. I worked at Wizards for six years, and when I interviewed at Google, I would have left for the food bar at Google in a heartbeat. I think it was amazing. Avoid getting jaded and taking criticism personally. Reflect within. Now, I know that sounds all like, you know, yoga-y type, spiritual. No, that's not me. But I'm saying is that you are going to make decisions, and if your game has got a huge audience, you are going to get people ripping you apart for something as stupid as a font change or a one-word text. Something so minute that you never thought about that was going to be a big deal is there's going to be someone in Arkansas who's got like, you know, 75,000 Twitter followers and like, you know, ah, Tony, wreck this. And then next thing you know, your phone's buzzing every six minutes because they found your Twitter profile and now you're getting destroyed. You can't take it personally. Okay? If you're a gamer and you're going into the gaming space, you need to, and I say reflect within, you need to think about how you used to act. Okay? I did that. And it cost me about 18 hours of scrubbing Twitter and other social media sites because I was one of those obnoxious people. I was the one who was sitting on the sidelines yelling at the company, you don't care about us. You're not good at what you do. What are you guys, what are you idiots doing over there? And then when I got to the other side of the coin, I said, man, what am I doing over here? This is weird now because I was taking the heat on the other side. You just gotta understand that people are passionate. They love their games. It's what makes them happy. And if you're infuriating people in a way you're doing a good thing because you know that people are paying attention to your game, you know that they're giving you an opportunity to make it right. And if you do that, you will earn a lot of credit as being caring for the customer. Now, not everything you can change that they hate. Sometimes you do it for a business decision, but it's important to always keep on top of that. The last thing is keep on top of trends. They change way faster than you think. Like I said, I was a programmer for about eight years. I worked in Pearl, PHP, some command lines, languages. And when I moved into management and moved into the product side, I had stopped programming. And we would start talking about different ways of integrating certain services or integrating building certain portfolios or whatever. And I'd be talking about, oh, we should try doing this. That's like six years old. Like, oh, what are we doing now? And they would list some new framework that's being used. And I don't know what that is. But me being me, oh yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Let's use that. Yeah, that's a much better idea. So you got to keep on top of that. That's why I got back about maybe two years ago I started programming again. I started working in Python. Considering I'm working in the data analytics space now, it's very helpful, especially with machine learning. I can build apps. I can do stuff on the web. I taught my kids Python. So it's great now because we have, I'm doing the data analytics machine learning stuff as part of my learning. My son's using the Python SDK for mobile apps. My daughter's working in the web framework to Django. I mean, I just got to have like three more kids and we can have a testing team. And then we got a company. But keep on top of those trends. Look in terms of like, even with blockchain now, there's a lot of blockchain based games that are becoming very popular, especially not just crypto, but the actual blockchain technology. There is other companies getting into the crypto space. I'm not touching that. I'm not even talking about that. I'm just talking about the blockchain technology.