Production 101 - #6 The Traits That Separate Good Producers From Everyone Else
What high-performing producers actually do differently, from day one
Emotional intelligence and active listening are the foundation of everything else.
Decisiveness matters more than always being right.
Empowering your team means giving people clarity, not just freedom.
Composure under pressure is a skill, and you can practise it.
This is part of the Production 101 series. If you’re just starting out in game production, the earlier posts cover what a producer does, the main job roles, and the difference between internal and external producers.
Everybody starting out in production wants to know what the job actually requires. The formal job description will mention scheduling, stakeholder management, and risk mitigation. Those things matter. But they’re not what separates the producers who build genuinely good teams from the ones who just keep the spreadsheet up to date.
What separates them is much harder to teach and much easier to overlook. You can learn Jira in a week. The rest takes years.
Emotional intelligence first
The single most consistent trait I’ve seen in good producers is emotional intelligence. That sounds vague, so let me be specific about what it actually means in practice.
A producer with high emotional intelligence knows what they’re feeling and why, and they don’t let that state leak onto their team. They can read a room. They pick up on the difference between someone who’s frustrated with a problem and someone who’s frustrated with a person, and they respond accordingly. They don’t need to win arguments; they want the right outcome.
This is not about being soft. It’s about having enough self-awareness to stop your own mood from becoming the team’s problem.
“They can read a room. They pick up on the difference between someone who’s frustrated with a problem and someone who’s frustrated with a person, and they respond accordingly.”
New producers often underestimate this. They spend their first months worrying about process and tools, when the biggest lever they have is understanding how their team is actually doing on any given day.
The discipline of listening
Related to emotional intelligence, but worth separating: the discipline of actually listening before you speak.
The habit I’d recommend building from day one is speaking last in meetings. Not because you have the least to contribute, but because when you speak first as the producer, you set the direction before anyone else has a chance to. People conform. You get agreement without input.
Speak last. You’ll get better information, and your team will feel heard, which is its own form of motivation.
Active listening is a specific skill. It means absorbing what someone says, checking your understanding before responding, and asking questions that open up the conversation rather than close it down. It’s harder than it sounds. Most people are mentally composing their reply while the other person is still talking.
“Speak last. You’ll get better information, and your team will feel heard, which is its own form of motivation.”
The payoff is real. Decisions made with good information beat decisions made quickly from the top. You will be wrong less often.
Communication norms you set early
How the team communicates is something you establish in the first few weeks, whether you intend to or not. If you respond to Slack messages at 11pm, you’ve set a norm. If you let meetings drift without clear outcomes, you’ve set a norm.
The better approach: decide explicitly what good communication looks like and make that visible to the team. What’s async, what’s synchronous. How decisions get documented. How feedback is given. What counts as escalation.
Setting these norms explicitly, at the start of a project, saves an enormous amount of confusion later. Teams don’t struggle because people aren’t skilled. They struggle because people have different assumptions about how they’re supposed to work together.
Empowerment, done properly
Empowerment is a word that gets used loosely. What it means in practice is giving your team the clarity they need to make decisions without you.
That requires three things: they need to understand the goal, they need to know the constraints (time, budget, quality bar), and they need to believe that making a call and getting it slightly wrong is safer than not making a call at all.
The last point is the one most producers get wrong. If people feel like taking initiative will be punished when it goes wrong, they’ll stop taking initiative. The creative work in game development depends on people having the confidence to experiment.
Your job is to create the conditions for that to happen. That means absorbing some of the risk yourself. When something goes wrong that your team decided, you own it with them.
Decisiveness as a service
New producers sometimes confuse decisiveness with impulsiveness. They’re different things.
Decisiveness means gathering enough information to make a reasonable call and then making it. It means not leaving the team in ambiguity because you’re waiting for certainty that isn’t coming. Game development rarely offers certainty. Waiting for it is its own decision, and usually a poor one.
The team looks to you when things are unclear. If you’re visibly uncertain and unresponsive, that uncertainty spreads. If you make a call clearly and explain your reasoning, the team can move. A slightly imperfect decision made at the right time usually beats the perfect decision made two weeks late.
I’ve got this wrong in both directions: made calls too quickly without enough context, and sat on decisions too long while the team stalled. The calibration comes with experience, but the principle is simple: bias toward action, stay open to revision.
High personal standards (yours, not theirs)
Producers don’t write the code or make the art. Their output is harder to see, which makes the temptation to let standards slip easier to rationalise.
The standard I mean is this: do your work properly. Prepare for meetings. Follow up when you say you will. Write clear documentation rather than ambiguous notes. If the project is behind schedule, tell people accurately rather than rounding up.
The team watches the producer more than most producers realise. If you cut corners, they notice. If you’re thorough and honest, they notice that too. You’re modelling the standard of work you expect, whether or not you’ve said anything out loud about expectations.
High personal standards aren’t about perfectionism. They’re about reliability. Your team needs to be able to count on the things you say being true and the things you commit to getting done.
Confidence without arrogance
There’s a version of confidence that’s off-putting: the producer who has an answer for everything, who never says “I don’t know”, who treats uncertainty as weakness. That’s not confidence; it’s a performance.
The confidence that’s worth having is quieter. It’s the ability to say “I don’t know, but I’ll find out” without it feeling like a failure. It’s staying steady when a milestone slips. It’s making a clear recommendation when the team is divided, without needing everyone to agree before you’ll commit.
“The confidence that’s worth having is quieter. It’s staying steady when a milestone slips. It’s making a clear recommendation when the team is divided, without needing everyone to agree before you’ll commit.”
Teams draw a lot of information from how the producer behaves. If you’re anxious, they worry. If you’re steady, they can concentrate on their work. That’s not fake positivity. It’s the job.
Composure under pressure
Game development generates pressure in reliable quantities. Deadlines, content cuts, platform cert failures, publisher feedback that arrives two days before you needed to lock. You will be in situations where someone in the room is panicking, and it will sometimes be your fault.
Composure under pressure is not the absence of stress. It’s the ability to keep thinking clearly anyway. To identify what the actual problem is, separate from the noise. To figure out what the next right move is rather than thrashing.
Practically: slow down in the moments when everyone else is speeding up. Ask one clarifying question instead of trying to fix everything at once. The producer who stays calm when things go wrong doesn’t just manage their own state; they give the rest of the team permission to stay calm too.
This is a skill you build deliberately. If you notice you tend to react fast and loudly when things break, practise pausing. Literally: pause before you respond, even by two or three seconds. It makes a larger difference than you’d expect.
Knowing when to push and when to stop
The last trait, and in some ways the hardest: understanding when to apply pressure and when to ease off.
Creative work isn’t linear. There are periods where the team needs to move fast, ship frequently, make decisions under pressure. And there are periods where the output requires slower, more considered effort, or where people are depleted and need space to recover.
Producers who only know how to push get short-term results and long-term burnout. Producers who over-protect their teams from urgency get comfortable but unproductive ones.
Reading the team’s energy and calibrating accordingly is a skill that’s hard to describe in a checklist. It comes partly from paying attention, partly from experience. The rough heuristic: if you’re seeing more errors, slower communication, and less initiative, those are signals. A team under unsustainable load starts looking like a team that doesn’t care, even when they do.
Your job is to keep the work sustainable enough that people can do their best work over the full length of the project, not just the first quarter of it.
These traits don’t arrive fully formed. You develop them by making mistakes and paying attention to the results. The producers who improve fastest are the ones who treat the job itself as something worth studying, not just something to get through.
Post #7 in the series looks at what a Product Owner does and how that role sits alongside production.