Michail Katkoff

A disadvantaged position can be turned into an advantage in a negotiation. For example, say you're pitching against another service provider that is larger and more established. In this situation, you should position yourself as a company that tries harder. You won't take the client for granted unlike your larger competitor could do. In other words, never try to match the strengths of your competitor but rather change the metric so that your weaknesses become strengths.

It’s hard to find people working in the industry who are not lifelong gamers. And that’s an amazing passion that brings so many people with such a diverse skill set together. But passion is also a double edged sword. Firstly, it can blind our decision making where we end up making niche games for ourselves rather than the broader audience. Secondly, it makes us vulnerable to a but of abuse. We work longer hours at a smaller pay, because we often consider that the games we make are an expression of us as creators. Finally, you should be be aware that your passion for games may subside over years as you will be experiencing them differently. Deconstructing them rather than immersing into them.

Inclusion, in my opinion, is best achieved when the game is so good that it’s played and beloved by people of all backgrounds around the world. I also don’t see inclusive game design being enabled only with the level of the diversity of the team working on the game. But rather in how much the team cares about the broad audience they are creating the game for. It is also important that the team is not sacrificing immersion for representation. The colorful cast of Street Fighter only makes the game better. But the same approach to Ghost of Tsushima would likely be less appreciated by the players longing to be immersed in the Japanese middle-ages.

Breaking a problem into a string of smaller goals and populating a roadmap with actions to tackle those goals is the essence of a Product Manager's (PM) role. For example, one of my favorite interview questions for PMs was "how would you double our daily active users?" Most PMs failed the question by coming up with lofty ideas from celebrity campaigns to movies and on-site events. The PMs who cleared the question, and got the job, broke down daily active users to new and returning users. And then started further breaking down sources for installs and triggers for retention closing their argument with a prioritized list of actions. That's breaking a big problem into many achievable steps that the team can get behind with.

These days you can build a foundation of a professional network without traveling to expensive conferences. This network will help you to promote your services. The key to achieving this is consistency. Choose appropriate medium where you’re most likely to reach your customers. Mark your calendar so that you’re creating valuable content at a consistent pace. This depends on the type of a content you share and the medium you share it on. Finally, commit for a period of time to see if the chosen strategy is working or not. If you’re not seeing any traction in time, modify the type of content you produce and/or the medium you use to share it.

There are no right frameworks but the there are wrong ones. In my experience, it’s important to commit to a framework, evaluate it at set periods and evolve it over time to better suit with the type of games your studio is developing. The worst situation occurs when every team uses a different approach making it impossible to answer a simple question “how do we make games in this studio”. At that point evaluation criteria for progress becomes easily political.