Summary of key players on a software product team

What you'll learn

Core Application Development Roles

Creative and Design Specialists

User Experience and Content Creation

Operational Support and Management

The purpose of this post is to provide a brief summary of what the various roles might be within a team building an application.  We will break the roles up into a pretty granular detail - but understanding that depending on the size of your application studio, a single person may be wearing multiple hats.  Also it is important to note that this list does not encompass roles that are dependent upon size of the organization.  For example, if your studio has 1 Software Engineer, then technically that person plays the role of Developer, Architect, Lead and Manager.  Whereas in a studio of 20 individual developers you may have several Leads, one or two Architects and a Manager.

Product Manager

The product manager is primarily responsible for the success of the game.  Product managers identify needs within the game (such as a need to grow viral stats) and connect that need with features that are designed to fix the problems.  Product managers are generally in charge of the feature pipeline and help to create feature specs which is a blue print that artists and developers use to create a feature.

Software Developer

The software developer is primarily responsible for writing the code that makes the game work.  The software engineer typically works very close with the product manager to code features according to establish feature design documents.  Software engineers are also responsible for the health of the code once released to the public and spend a great deal of their time dealing with unforeseen issues (bugs) within their code once it is exposed to millions of users.

Artists

The artists are responsible for creating the 2d, 3d or video assets needed within an application.  Artists work very closely with the product managers to bring to life the ideas that the product manager has described within their feature planning documents.  Artists generally hand their work off to the engineers for implementation once the artwork is completed

UI Designers

The UI designers are concerned mostly about user flows and progressions within the game.  The UI designers will evaluate a product managers ideas and provide guidance on how to set a feature up so that it makes sense from a users perspective.  While the artists are working on bringing that design to life the UI designer will work very closely with the artists to ensure the work will be appealing and easy to use to users.

Game Designer

if the app being developed is a game, then the use of game designer is very critical.  the game designers challenge is to focus on what a game users session and progression looks like. For example, if progression in the game is too easy, users will get board and leave.  By contrast, if the game is too hard, then users will get frustrated and stop playing.  A game designer needs to understand how to balance a games challenge and progression levels to maintain a fun and exciting game

Producer

The producer is often responsible for generating content that the application needs.  Or put another way, if responsible for the applications story line.  For example, if you app has a level progression concept to it, let’s assume levels 1 - 100, then generally the producer is responsible for creating all of the various names that are assigned to each level.  Another example would be if you wanted to create in game characters and give each character a background story.  Often the producer will be responsible for creating this background story.

Quality Assurance Agent

The quality assurance agent is the individual that tests the application 1,000 times over to find as many issues as they can with it.  They generally report their finds in tickets or reports and give them to artists, producers or developers to fix as appropriate.  Quality assurance agents need to pretend that they are the end user and act like they would act.  This means that even if the application designed a feature to be used in a  certain way, the quality assurance agent should use it how an actual user would and then report their findings and issues.

Customer Service Agent

The customer service agent is responsible for monitoring, collecting and handling user feedback. Often times bugs will slip past developers and quality assurance agents.  users then need a way to reach out to customer service agents to resolve their issues.  Customer service interacts with these users, resolves the problem if they can and then fosters good will for the future with this user.

Community Manager

The community manager is often in charge of community facing aspects of the application.  For example, the community manager might manage a dedicated Facebook page representing the application.  The community manager might make regular content posts to this page to share announcements, application updates and more.  The community manager can often collect user feedback through these channels for issues that are being experienced and may even offer help and assistance as appropriate for users to get around the problems.

Statistician

The statistician spends time analyzing the player data to identify trends, reports, issues and more.  For example, the statistician might analyze user level progression to see at what level user play starts to fall off.  The statistician can then provide this data to the Product Manager who can design changes to game play around the levels where drop off is experienced.  The statistician often has a very challenging job of not only how to collect an enormous amount of data but also what to do with the data once collected.

Release Manager

The release manager is responsible for getting new releases out to the public.  This requires a lot of work with the individual apps stores as well as with the internal team members.  For example a test very of the release needs to be tested by the quality assurance agents in an isolated fashion.  Pending the results of those tests, the release manager may need developers or artists to fix issues and make a new release candidate.  Once the ok is given from quality assurance the release manager can work with the app stores to have the release candidate reviewed and published.

The project manager in a way is the glue between all of the various internal teams.  A lot of moving parts occur in an active application studio.  From art to design to developing to testing, etc.  The project manager is responsible for watching and maintaining all of the various schedules and pipelines.  The project manager identifies when a particular blocker is preventing a team member from accomplishing their goals.  the project manager works to help resolve the blocker so that the team can stay on track.

Conclusion

There may be many other positions out there that an active application studio employs.  This list is designed to help highlight the most common positions and provide a basic overview of their tasks and responsibilities.  As mentioned at the start of the post, high level manager roles are not included and it is not uncommon for a single person to wear multiple hats in a smaller studio.