DAY IN THE LIFE OF... A PRODUCT MANAGER
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What’s life as a product manager at Hutch like? Here’s Maria to take us through a typical day, including the one thing she couldn't do her job without...
What brought you to Hutch?
Product management is a role in the games industry where responsibilities and expectations vary significantly between companies. My background is in non-gaming digital products so I was looking for a company where this role aligned with the day-to-day that I love. I found Hutch’s job ad on LinkedIn and through its description I knew we were on the same page!
Tell us a bit about your role?
The core goal of a product manager is to maximize the value of what the team’s delivering. We sit in the intersection of business, design and development, and the starting point is to define the product’s strategy that helps deliver the company’s vision and its own holistic strategy.
In my experience ideas are never lacking because everyone can have a great idea; they can come from team members, players, leadership, you name it! It’s the product manager’s responsibility to ensure that we’re working on the most valuable ideas and guiding the scope we need to develop to deliver the intended value.
Maria's Day
What’s the first thing you do when you get to work?
Make coffee if I’m the first to arrive at the office, spend a few minutes reading through our social channels and the game’s key metrics. I really enjoy starting the day connecting with players and knowing how the game’s performing to get motivated and be reminded of why the day’s going to be exciting.
A typical morning task is…
Focus work before the first scrum stand-up at 10:30am because there are no meetings before then. Task examples are live ops content design, exploring the design of a new feature or writing feedback for a proposed design.
A typical afternoon task is…
Meetings and speaking with people across most disciplines!
Some examples include kicking-off or refining a new feature with the team, aligning with the game director, sprint planning, quick catch-ups to collaborate on the iteration of a feature, team meetings if there’s an issue being regularly raised by the community and we need to discuss next steps to resolve it.
My favourite kind of meeting is…
Can I have two favourites? I love creative meetings where we’re bouncing ideas off each other and the final outcome is light years better than the initial draft. I also enjoy difficult meetings where there’s a complex problem to solve and we manage to find the best outcome everyone’s aligned with.
I couldn’t do my job without…
Teammates! We’re in it together and everyone has an important role to play in achieving the game and company’s success. Everyone I work with is amazing and has taught me something to make me a better person and product manager. I’m very grateful for being able to work with such an awesome group of people.
The best part of my job is…
Seeing players have fun because of something we did, there’s not much in the world that can beat the feeling of making others happy.
The Hutch Family:
Describe Hutch using 3 words.
Humble. Truthful. Caring.
What’s your favourite thing about working at Hutch?
Without a doubt it’s the culture and the people that add to it.
As a woman, in the past I’ve found it hard to have a voice that’s heard in the room because I’ve always worked in industries where women are underrepresented; even more so in games when I’m relatively new in terms of track record in the industry. At Hutch everyone will actively listen and value new ideas or different veins of thought regardless of who you are and how long you’ve been in the industry.
This is exactly the culture we need to continue the game industry’s journey on massively improving its diversity, inclusion and equity as not everyone will have had the opportunity to be here for 5 years or more due to its high barriers of entry.
Like the sound of working at Hutch? Check our our latest vacancies here: https://www.hutch.io/careers/
And follow us on Insta and LinkedIn to get more glimpses into life at Hutch.
Thanks for reading!
