Associate Producer
Summary of Contributions
As an Associate Producer at Gravity Well, my day-to-day work consisted of managing production of the narrative team, supporting our localization initiative, and maintaining our smoke test map in order to ensure a stable game.
Outside of this, I worked on many projects at my time at Gravity Well.
Project Roadmap
With the help of two other colleagues, we developed a comprehensive, strategic roadmap for the rest of the development of our game, taking into account staff, time, and monetary resources. This helped provide insight to key decision makers and provide clear optionality on potential routes to success.
We analyzed thousands of entries in Jira, utilizing automation and Excel to justify our analysis with empirical data.
Milestone Planning Process
In order to ensure we were meeting the standards of production we had set for ourselves, I developed a clear methodology for measuring our goals and planning a milestone, with input from across the production team. Here is a brief write-up of that process at a high level:
Review & prioritize backlog of unfinished work from the previous milestone
Drivers review output from backlog prioritization
Identify default waterfall slice
Prioritize tech debt & tooling needs (Engineering)
Grooming backlog (UX)
Establish high level player experience goals
Drivers, leads, & leadership review potential goals and build consensus together
Reconcile goals against default waterfall slice
Surface potential conflicts
Alignment check across drivers, leads, and directors
Update player experience goals with alignment and prioritization
Adapt milestone epics to represent experience goals
Create Jira record for goals
Evaluate the cost of our goals at the high level (review time estimates)
Horse-trade limited resources
Create falsifiable metrics in which to gauge success of discrete player experience goals
Receive feedback on player experience goals from entire team
Publish confluence page of high level goals
Gauge goals from a high-to-low view for the team
Task and estimate to the extent of the feature’s design stage
Document everything in Confluence and Jira, and then displaying the info in a digestible format for everyone
Allocate time for bug fixing, performance improvements, and stability
Jira Restructuring
Learning from my colleague, Paige Berger, I developed new tools inside of Jira for our team to use in both planning and tracking work. I utilized Jira automation tools, fields system, and a deep knowledge of JQL in order to efficiently make changes to our Jira space to make it fit our needs.
