The most insightful thing I have learned working on live F2P mobile titles…
is that good data doesn’t speak for itself. A PM’s job is not just writing specs and analyzing data, but also actively shaping how the team perceives the game’s performance before, during, and after every release. At TinyCo, I tuned a weekly update for the Star Trek event in Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff to be intentionally challenging (based on content restrictions, sales data, and player progress). After release, players complained loudly on social media. But our metrics looked great: engagement was up, and the day of release became the highest-grossing day in the company’s history—all without us using an inflationary sale to achieve that. Coworkers, seeing negative social media posts, pushed for mid-event retuning. As a new PM, it would have been easy to relent, but doing that would have undercut monetization and engagement. I was sure of my tuning numbers and of the data we were getting back. I realized then that part of my job wasn’t just managing the product, but ensuring the team understood the reasons behind game decisions, felt confident in our plan, knew what metrics we would be watching, and trusted that we would adjust as needed. Doing this helps avoid reactionary tuning changes as well as reduce the unspoken beliefs that can come to unintentionally shape the game’s roadmap. I have also noticed something similar happen around how product teams can absorb a lot of the negativity around monetization mechanics and be seen almost as the “bad guy” that keeps games from being fun. That perception can come from the relative seclusion that pricing and monetization is done in. Bringing other people into the product vision, filtering noise, and anchoring everything in data builds trust and team morale–which can also impact the messaging our team uses with the external community on new releases. I turn to quotes to help me summarize product lessons I’ve learned. One for this situation is Newton’s 3rd Law: “For every action, this is an equal and opposite reaction.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our highest day of revenue was also the day we got the strongest pushback from players. Pushback from players isn’t always bad—it’s a sign that they really care and are invested in your release. A good PM can (use data to) thread the needle between excitement and frustration, keeping players hooked without driving them away. Another quote that I keep in mind is “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” In this context, I use it to remember that we can all get so bogged down in the details of the releases, that we underinvest in inspiring our teams and making sure they have the context they need to succeed. Meetings can be seen as wastes of time when everyone is busy, but keeping everyone on the same page is a critical, ongoing process in game production.