I write and talk about the skills nobody teaches you in game development: managing people, making decisions, and building teams that actually work.
I started my career as a tester in a windowless basement and worked my way up to Lead Producer at a multinational gaming company over two decades. Along the way I managed teams of 30+, created a role that didn't exist in the mobile gaming industry, and learned everything the hard way. I wrote it all down so you don't have to.
My work is focused on practical production leadership: how to make uncertainty visible, how to keep trust intact when plans change, and how to help specialists do their best work without turning every conversation into a status meeting. The lessons here come from the unglamorous parts of shipping games: clarifying ownership, translating decisions between disciplines, spotting risk before it becomes drama, and helping teams stay honest about scope.
A Producer's Playbook. Practical insights for game development leadership.
Available on Gumroad and Amazon Kindle.
Leadership, Production and Game Dev insights from the front lines.
Connect professionally and join the conversation on game production.
Practical field notes on the skills that sit between planning, trust, and delivery.
01 / Role
A game producer helps teams turn uncertainty into shipped work. The role combines planning, communication, risk management, prioritization, and people leadership. After two decades in game development, I write about the producer skills that are rarely taught directly.
02 / Audience
From the Basement Up is for new producers, senior developers moving into leadership, and team leads who want practical language for the messy human side of production. It is written from lived experience: starting in QA, growing through production, managing teams of 30 or more people, and learning how to lead without pretending the job is cleaner than it is.
03 / Leadership
Many people enter game production from another discipline and learn by improvising under pressure. I want to make those lessons easier to find. If you are trying to become a lead producer, manage a game development team, or understand what production leadership really asks of a person, this site collects the ideas, stories, and resources I wish I had earlier in my career.
Five questions before a production decision becomes a production problem. This checklist distills the kind of production thinking behind From the Basement Up and gives teams a fast way to test whether a decision is clear enough to act on.
See the book01
What problem are we solving, and what are we choosing not to solve today?
02
Which teams or roles need the decision translated before work starts?
03
What changes if the estimate is wrong by 20 percent?
04
Who owns the next visible update, and when will the team hear it?
05
If this decision creates tension, what trust has to be protected first?
A producer's job is not to remove every hard conversation. Healthy teams still disagree, estimates still move, and creative work still reveals surprises. The difference is whether the team can see the risk early enough to respond. I use simple signals because simple signals travel well: people remember them during planning, leads can repeat them in standups, and executives can understand them without needing the whole backlog in front of them.
The table below is the kind of practical comparison I use when coaching producers or reviewing a plan. It is not a replacement for judgment, but it gives the conversation a shared starting point. If a team can explain the decision, name the owner, describe the tradeoff, and show when the next update will happen, the work is usually manageable. If those answers are vague, the producer should slow the decision down just long enough to make the next step visible.
| Production signal | Weak pattern | Producer response |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Everyone agrees, but nobody can name who makes the final call. | Assign one decision owner and one update owner before work starts. |
| Scope | The team says yes to the goal without saying what will not be done. | Write the tradeoff in plain language and make the excluded work visible. |
| Risk | The plan only works if every estimate lands perfectly. | Ask what changes at plus or minus 20 percent effort and prepare a smaller option. |
| Communication | Different disciplines are repeating different versions of the same decision. | Translate the decision for each group and confirm the next visible milestone. |
— ALLAN STOWE, FROM THE BASEMENT UP