Level of Ownership for a Mobile Game Product Owner (P1)

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The Accountability of The Mobile Game Product Owner

Let’s start first with the basic level as a Mobile Game Product Owner, there should be no boundaries for you to start at this level. Remember, being accountable for something is to be able to demonstrate, perform the task to show the result for the stakeholder but it is not an option for us to decide that a certain feature shall be implemented into our product. There are lots of exceptional case to write down as an example for you to elucidate between Accountability and Responsibility, so I would pick out the common ground between different Product Owner, not just only the Game Product Owner:

• Game Making Procedure: the process is there for us to follow and sometimes at your management position, you can even influence and alternate the process based on the required situation. The Product Owner is accountable for ensuring the production pipeline with value chain mapping, meaning that there should be no WASTE between the iteration of different teams. To prevent any rigid or misunderstanding among the implementations, the Product Owner should constantly communicate, clarify and coordinate people to make sure that everyone is on the same page, the same schedule and the same reason why the team should release the feature on time.
• Product health: working as Product Owner will get us to stage of daily monitoring by using a different dashboard such as Firebase console, Google Play Store console, Itune Connect console or even company dashboard from the BI team based on the foundation of Bigquerry, Datastudio, Metabase, Tableau, etc. The reason for this daily activity is because the Product Owner should know the current status of the product, even though the real-time database should not the ultimate goal of the dashboard but the prompt respond of the Product Owner is.
• Documentation: this is to be considered as the technical skill of the Product Owner from every domain. Either you can use the Inception Desk paper version to outline what you and your team need to know or create a Game Design Document for better quality control. Being an Agile Product Owner doesn’t mean that you need to remove all the documents to rely on communication alone. Every single product shall need to transfer to another person from times, so by providing a document, we can ensure that the product is sustainable throughout its lifetime.

Keywords (ranking from high to low priority):

Communication

• Inception desk.
• Communication plan.
• Product backlog.
• Backlog grooming technique.
• Daily Scrum.
• Scrum café.

Game management

• Game design document.
• Meta and non-game features.
• Key metrics for Mobile Games.
• Game release timeline.
• Game behavioural design.
• Scrum Artifacts.

Keys take-away

• Core game loop or core product loop is the main thing to keep track of and promote to other departments.
• Understand the product action point clear enough so that you can describe it for a child with just a few lines.
• The crucial part of the Product Owner is the possibility of the ROI and how to keep the product stable overtimes.
• Sometimes, you can be a Game Designer but do not take this role as your main role because you are still a Product Owner.
• The document is important to keep everyone on the same page as well as refer to it when the team’s member needs it.
• Keep the communication smoothly, daily and practice radical candour to remove any roadblocks as soon as possible.
• Mobile Game Production is a hectic environment, always use the 5W1H to check on the team status or using Inception Desk to re-focus the team.
• An online dashboard is just a number, understand the core game flow (core product flow) is more crucial.
• The daily basis of the Product Owner is to have a quick product check on different platforms, user review, the different implementation of the developer team.
• Be transparent to the related parties in terms of the product health trend, as well as the solution if there is any negative news and require actions.

Coming up next:

• The Responsibility of the Product Owner.
• The Ownership of the Product Owner.