Develop a Product Mindset for Unlocking Game's Success

Broadly speaking, a product mindset is the ability to identify what your product needs in order to reach its ultimate goal.

How to tell if you need to work on your product mindset

1. Managers/Producers Lack Metric Focus: If producers struggle to link features to specific metrics or can't explain why those metrics are important for achieving key performance indicators (KPIs), it's a sign that a stronger product mindset is needed.
2. Artists Over-Polish or Misplace Their Focus: Artists who spend excessive time on minor details for standard tasks or who review their work in a graphics editor instead of in the game environment or on an actual device, may lack a product-oriented approach.
3. UI Specialists Miss Competitive Benchmarking: When UI designers repeatedly redesign artwork instead of drawing inspiration from successful competitors, they might be missing a product-centric perspective.
4. Developers Choose Inefficient Solutions: If developers insist on building an entirely new code structure when existing solutions would suffice, or conversely, if they rush important modules, leading to long-term stability issues, this points to a need for a more product-focused mindset.
5. QA Limits Testing Scope: When the QA team limits themselves to mechanical testing and fails to replicate real-player behavior, or doesn’t flag features that disrupt gameplay flow, it indicates a gap in product-oriented thinking.

Everyone, regardless of their role, needs to develop a product mindset to ensure that their work contributes effectively towards the overall goals and success of the project.

This entails:

1. Grasping how the F2P model works
2. Knowing the project’s current goals and
3. we’re going to reach them
4. Understanding exactly how their work affects the achievement of shared goals
5. Being able to apply that knowledge in practice in order to accomplish a specific objective

How can you develop your team’s product mindset?

First of all, you need to have people on your team who regularly update the product’s goals and perform high-level tracking to make sure the team is moving in the right direction.

Second, you need to establish an effective process for providing this information to the team in a comprehensible way. People are focused on their own tasks, and most of them aren’t going to want to spend time learning about the product’s needs on their own, especially if the team is large and some specialists are far removed from the decision-making process.

So it’s important to explain to the team where certain goals are coming from, why they’re changing, and what kind of logic is behind your goal-setting process.

Third, you need to delegate responsibility within the team. This means that even if there are specific decision-making points and people who are responsible for those decisions, you need to be able to “let go."

Best Practices:

1) Give everyone who makes key decisions and manages goals, deadlines, teams, and product quality access to business data.

If you want people to share responsibility for the project’s (and the company’s) business results with you, you need to give them the same amount of information you have yourself.

2) Openly share the game’s metrics with the entire team

Let's start doing that before Friday meetings and showcases.

3) Transparently and proactively evaluate the performance of key solutions and features.

Being able to dispassionately evaluate the results of your work and teach your team not to be afraid to look their own errors in the face is an extremely effective (if sometimes unpleasant) way to enhance their product mindset.

Hiding your mistakes just makes it more likely that they’ll be repeated.

4) Set employees’ KPIs through the prism of the product’s current needs.

Sometimes an employee’s KPIs are basically just a set of professional requirements: complete tasks faster or better, learn to do something, augment their skills somehow, etc.

For people who directly depend on feature performance, product-focused metrics such as ARPU, retention, and conversion to a certain number of purchases are always in the foreground. In some cases this might even include a specific amount of revenue for a given feature.

For employees who don’t directly depend on metrics, you can set not only personal, but also team-based objectives that will bring people together via a shared context and give them unified criteria for evaluating their work.

5) Encourage people to do market research and take an interest in products in adjacent genres.

It’s no secret that lots of people who work in mobile game development play PC and console games in their free time. This is fine, but it’s even better if they play games that can serve as points of reference for your company’s own products.

6) “Share” the product mindset of team members who exhibit it at an advanced level.

If the most effective way to develop a product mindset is to use it in practice, then the next-most effective method is to learn by example. To do this, you need to:

• Create a space where your team can discuss the game?
• Encourage experienced team members to share their knowledge and techniques.

If we want to build a team that can complete multiple successful projects rather than just one, provide consistent results, and grow without sacrificing efficiency, it makes sense to invest your effort into establishing a product-based mindset from the get-go.

This doesn’t mean you won’t need the amazing solo performers you already have—every company needs and values these guys. But it does mean relying on the team as a whole and believing that success is achieved through the efforts of every single member of your team.

Sources: Not claiming that this is an original article. It is referenced from DOF article, Twitter posts, and various blogs and sites. This article is for internal reading. But anyone is welcome to read.