Having heard more about the role you play in previous 10FT Producers videos, I wondered if you could explain any differences between being a producer and being a traditional project manager. Is this more down to industry terminology or does a producer entail more staff management than would be expected in typical project management roles? Could I become a project manager in my current company and one day take the jump to becoming a videogame producer?asked by Wintermute

Great question!

It is, and there's a lot of yes and nos to that.

I think the reason this one's so tough is because there are so many intertwining responsibilities for these two roles.

Yeah, they have a lot of overlaps.

The term gets bandied about differently based on region, based on organization, based on company, based on people's previous experience. There are a lot of similarities. There are a lot of crossover. We do budget reviews, we do schedule building, we do team management, we do personnel management and even within CIG we have some project managers and some producers and we are overwhelmingly intertwined quite a bit.

Yeah.

So, to your first question, yes there are a lot of similarities between the two and it's a lot of preference based on the company itself and based on what their previous experience has been. And then to your second question, could I become a project manager in my current company? Yeah, totally. Absolutely. There are skills that you would learn at a regular software company doing project management, specifically project management...

There's even certifications. Like PMP certifications on Scrum.

Absolutely. These are all techniques that would help you understand what it would take to get a project done within games.

A good example of this is my brother. He is a technical project manager for another video game company and he actually doesn't actually touch the games himself which is why he's not considered a producer at that company. He is an internally-facing producer. So, in that company, he is considered a project manager because he deals a lot more with the console side of the technical aspects of it. Where people on his team who are actually game-facing, they are considered the producers at that company.

Yup, totally. You've seen it where some companies will deem somebody producer because they may have a little more creative input, let's say, than a project manager. So, it really does depend on the company and it's more important to look at the job description more than anything else, or what the person's looking for, if you're going for a job as one of these two roles.

Good question!