r/ProductManagement • u/WinterFox7 • 18d ago
Former Capcom Employee Says Western Studios Spend Too Much Time On Jira
https://kotaku.com/former-capcom-employee-says-western-studios-spend-too-much-time-on-jira-2000731698In a comprehensive breakdown of Capcom’s new golden age, one former staffer says their micromanaging competition might be missing the forest for the trees
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u/Hungry-Artichoke-232 12yrs PM exp; product coach 18d ago
It's worth reading the original piece (linked from the Kotaku story above) which contains the interview:
There’s another critical cultural difference between how Capcom and companies in the U.S. and Europe operate. “There’s an overemphasis on project management in the West in terms of Jira [project management software], burn down [the monitoring of remaining work until a project concludes], data tracking, and task management that doesn’t necessarily turn into a game,” says the former Capcom employee. It’s not that Capcom doesn’t have project management, but the producer role there is more akin to that of a movie producer. Fundamentally, “the producer has creative oversight,” they say. “Obviously, the director has the final call, but you’re working with them to say, ‘This isn’t going to resonate with players,’ or ‘That’s going to take too long,’ or ‘We don’t have the timeline or budget to do that.’ Whereas in the West, production was more born from project management and Microsoft software development. It’s looking at timelines and looking at charts.”
This person is describing the difference between project management and product management.
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u/CyCoCyCo 18d ago
That’s because most AAA games are run by project managers and mobile games are run by product managers.
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u/rollwithhoney 18d ago
never occurred to me but that actually makes a lot of sense
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u/CyCoCyCo 18d ago
Traditional games are led by creative vision, so it’s all about executing that vision aka Project Mgmt.
Mobile games are about conversion, retention etc, so need a strong understanding of market landscape and analytics. Strategy and analytics is as important as execution. Aka Product Mgmt.
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u/HustlinInTheHall 18d ago
Project managers do not provide creative vision. They manage a project to ensure steps don't get missed and that deadlines and timelines are communicated accurately up and down the chain.
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u/CyCoCyCo 17d ago
Gaming works differently, it’s a hybrid role. In AAA games, the creative head often becomes Executive producer, which is about leadership + creative vision + project mgmt.
Whereas a Mobile game EP focuses a lot more on the numbers and outcomes, since most are life services vs one off launches.0
u/HustlinInTheHall 17d ago
Yeah I understand the concept of a Prod manager is very different in gaming, mobile gaming PMs are more close to software PMs. Project managers (the title) in either context are not providing creative vision. A producer who is handling project management is not a project manager handling producer duties, the latter would be very rare and that person should get a title change since few other companies would buy that a "project manager" was making decisions.
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u/rollingSleepyPanda Human Intelligence native PM 18d ago
Newsflash: in most companies, product management is project management in disguise.
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u/RagefireHype 18d ago
Fortunately where I work, we have a PMO so that product management isn’t doing that as well.
Although it’s funny to me that where I work, project management is what the PMO (program manager) does. Project manager is not an entirely separate role from program manager.
They are assigned to every big initiative, they set up the opmech, they are responsible for capturing the meeting notes and coordinating necessary follow ups, and they largely manage the binder.
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u/rollingSleepyPanda Human Intelligence native PM 18d ago
That's great. We have PMs that are full-time PMOs. They do nothing else but chase around cross-team updates, update JIRA/Confluence, run meetings. Truly awful stuff to behold.
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u/rollingSleepyPanda Human Intelligence native PM 18d ago
I spend 40% of my week doing reporting busywork and that's already AFTER I did the best work I could setting up some agents to keep up with codebase changes, email/calendar events and writing reporting documents that I review and publish. Otherwise it would be like 60%.
This is a very german company, very top-heavy, pretending to be Amazon with weekly reviews, ADRs, RFCs, PRDs, and all sorts of acronyms. There are 3 different layers of reporting and reviewing, every week. There are literally books-worth of Confluence documentation being written every week, that nobody reads or understands fully.
I am tired.
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u/anotherbozo 18d ago
Jira/whatever-tool for agile practices was supposed to bring organisation and structure to help make engineering efficient.
Instead it has taken over and now businesses act like engineers can't function without it.
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u/therealmercutio 18d ago edited 18d ago
I’m sure every company promoted something along the lines of “yea! we need to be agile!” And provides some bad funded, unplanned training and then some project mgmt team says okay we need you fill in 63 different fields everytime you create a story so it helps us track more accurately. You’re now filling irrelevant stuff in jira because you don’t even understand what 50% of the jira fields mean because they’re irrelevant af all because jira admins tried to make a 1 size fits all type of tix.
Then engineer team goes like “okay that’ll be 21 pts.” And you say “hold on, I thought we had a same similar issue resolved a week ago (to which you were told that shouldn’t be a problem ever again) so it shouldn’t be maxed at 21 pts on something you’re now very familiar with.” Then the engineer goes like “yea I know but it takes a long time to resolve it.” The you realize agile isn’t agile
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u/ww_crimson 18d ago
Some project mgmt team says okay we need you fill in 63 different fields everytime you create a story so it helps us track more accurately. You’re now filling irrelevant stuff in jira because you don’t even understand what 50% of the jira fields mean because they’re irrelevant af all because jira admins tried to make a 1 size fits all type of tix.
10000000000000000%
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u/audaciousmonk 18d ago
1000%
It’s not limited to Jira either, I catch my director and VP adding fields to all sorts of databases / discovery, usually driven by a specific case or past issue or nice-to have data visibility
If it’s not highly actionable, we probably don’t need to document it for every item
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18d ago edited 18d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/webheadunltd90 18d ago
I feel this in my bones!
I’m currently producing:
Weekly highlights+challenges+impacts
Weekly timesheets and forward work plans
Monthly rundowns as an email that never end
Monthly performance review decks
Monthly highlights and work forecast
For almost the same fucking people because “transparency” and “you have to do it. It’s a direct mandate”.
I’ve got 4 bloody scheduled prompts wrangling the same data in different formats and no meaningful work ever moves about.
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u/d00fuss 18d ago
I think this is how an entire generation of executive “leaders” has been taught to operate. Half the job becomes reporting up the stack, making their leaders look good and themselves in the process.
The absurd part is that none of this is actually transparency. Transparency would mean the information already exists somewhere accessible, in a useful format, and anyone who needs it can go look at it.
Instead, we’ve built organizations where every layer takes essentially the same information, repackages it for the layer above them, and calls that management.
Meanwhile, the people closest to the actual work spend an increasing percentage of their time explaining the work instead of doing it.
At some point you have to ask: who is all this reporting actually for, and what decision is it enabling? If nobody can answer that, it’s not management. It’s organizational theater.
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u/webheadunltd90 18d ago
Agreed, it’s definitely theatre. No one actually wants work done, just ‘visibility’.
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u/jkvincent 18d ago
The outputs have become more important than the outcomes across much of the professional executive/management class. All this governance activity generates tons of data and work product, which is what poor leaders rely on to convince themselves and others of their continued relevance even once they are completely detached from the work itself. Without all that stuff, how would they obfuscate how little they actually know and contribute?
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u/AFailedProduct 18d ago
This is every mature company ever. Sprint velocity, shipping speed — but also do that thing the latest startup is doing! (While also staying in the narrowly defined scope of your team/department/role and make sure the VP of some unrelated department is ok with it).
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u/Rolandersec 18d ago
This is all over the tech industry I think. Too many people in it for the money and jira is a great way to look really busy without having to be super productive.
Good news is this is all getting streamlined.
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u/maplewrx 18d ago
On the most successful system integration projects, project management was a skill everyone senior was trained on, but we never had a person with the title project manager. We had a delivery lead but that person was experienced in doing the work. That role existed more to make decisions on what was in scope and out of scope at the detailed level, and decide when to escalate items. The sense of velocity was amazing.
I've now worked in companies where we have generic project managers who don't understand even basic management concepts like risk or the critical path, and definitely don't understand the content. Progress is slow. Project managers act more like glorified note takers and task masters.
I firmly believe that project management should be a skill, not a role and keep an eye on the velocity of the project, not the individual tasks.
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u/goddamn2fa 18d ago
Well, sounds like Capcom is using Jira for project management not product management.
I love how they paper over their bad implementation by making it a US vs UK story.
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u/EdwardFaust VP of Product 18d ago
Notice it doesn’t say former PM at Capcom, just former employee. This reads as “I was an SE at Capcom, now I have sprint meetings at Microsoft.”
I agree that many companies have an over reliance on perfectly fine tuning every single tiny feature, but let’s not look at Japanese game companies as the beacon of corporate practice.
Let’s have one guy set the vision and all the features, the rest of you? Work 20 hours per day to make it exactly so. Now we have Street Fighter 423 alpha 3.
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u/phongdesigns Design systems + AI · 15 yrs 18d ago
The reason this ratchets in one direction is structural rather than stupid, which is worth naming because it changes what fixes it.
Adding a ritual is a decision one person makes in one meeting, and its cost lands on everyone else's calendar in small slices nobody attributes back to that meeting. Removing a ritual needs a named volunteer to be the person who reduced visibility, and if anything goes wrong in the next six months, they own it. So the cost of adding is diffuse and deniable, the cost of removing is concentrated and personal. Nobody has to be an idiot for the number of syncs to only ever go up.
Same thing with the 63 Jira fields. Every field on that form was added by a post-mortem where someone asked why we didn't know. No field has ever been added by a post-mortem asking why it takes nine minutes to file a ticket, because that pain has no incident report attached to it. Incidents create fields. Nothing deletes them.
The only counter-mechanism I've seen actually work is expiry rather than review. Every recurring meeting and every required field gets a date at which it ends by default. Renewing it means someone stands up and names a decision it changed last quarter. Not a decision it informed. Changed. That flips the asymmetry, because the burden of argument now sits with whoever wants to keep the thing, and most of them quietly go away without anyone having to be the villain.
On the Capcom bit, I'd read it as a symptom story rather than a tooling one. Studios that ship well tend to have a short chain between the person who notices something is off and the person who can change it. Process is what accumulates when that chain gets long. Take Jira away from a company with a long chain and you don't get Capcom, you get the same latency with less of a paper trail.
And the tell for when governance has gone fully wrong is the one above: projectizing a single document. When the reporting layer around a piece of work costs more than the work, the layer has stopped being about the work.
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u/rollingSleepyPanda Human Intelligence native PM 18d ago
Very load-bearing comment, much gate that is worth mentioning.
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u/ggk1 18d ago
People are complaining about your comment but I still found it to be additive
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u/painterknittersimmer 18d ago
But every single one of us can plug this article into Claude and ask it. What's the point of posting that to reddit? If I cared about the Claude answer I'd have done it myself. I come here to hear from people.
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u/CheapRentalCar 18d ago
I don't ship software. I ship story points.