Roles and Responsibilities

With Saints Row (2022) out in the world, it was time to get down to business and go full steam ahead on DLC. Volition was transitioning into scrum practices and I served as project manager for the character team. This was a group of twelve people that would be responsible for creating wearable rewards, emotes, crib collectibles, weapon skins, and costumes for DLC missions. 

My goal for the team was to promote work-life balance. We didn’t have much of a break between the launch of the game and DLC. I wanted to ensure the artists could recharge and learn new ways to work with people outside their department. In addition to our general teams channel, I made a non-work topics channel for us to get to know each other, post memes, and meetup outside of work. Since we started on making holiday themed DLC, I would ask people to post their holiday traditions in the non-work channel. On Fridays, I would ask the team to share their weekend plans in addition to work updates.

One of the biggest challenges to DLC was the amount of meetings. As employees moved onto other studios, the more work the remaining employees were left to take on. This led to some people being triple booked if they were assigned to multiple scrum teams. I had to re-evaluate the character team meeting load. I wanted to keep stand ups and retrospectives because I liked keeping everyone on the same page. However, not everyone was needed for backlog refinement. I reduced the occurrence to once every two weeks and updated the meeting invite lists so a team member knew when their attendance was optional. The other challenge was providing a backup plan for external teams. Our outsourcing team was based in Ukraine at the time so I would need to account for a buffer in case of current events in Russia. 

Employee Resource Group Work

In between running the character scrum team, I participated in three employee resource groups. For the education group, I volunteered at my former graduate school, FIEA, and gave a talk on how to make a resume, cover letter, and website. I wanted to give back to the place that had prepared me so well for the game industry. The Volition education group created a studio tour for students and local scouts. I helped with the station that explains a producer’s role. 

In the women’s group, I contributed to the monthly newsletter by writing articles about indie games that were worth checking out. The most interesting ERG experience I had was in the BIPOC group. One of their goals was to hold character retrospectives on people of color in past Volition games. We used the SWOT analysis method to evaluate characters from as early as Red Faction and the first Saints Row games. It was awesome to see how the group had mature conversations about the presentation of older games and how we could improve for the future. I helped teach the representative, Tyrin, how to use Confluence so we could upload the notes to the company.