A Conversation on Breaking Into Game Product Management

How to Break Into Game Product Management | Eric McConnell

I recently joined The Party is Full podcast to talk about how I got into games, how I ended up in product management, and why almost none of it happened in a clean, planned way.

We talked about the part people usually smooth over: the weird jobs, the layoffs, the side projects, the stretches where your career makes no sense on paper, and the amount of work you do before anyone gives you a title that sounds impressive.

That was a lot of my path.

I’ve worked on top-tier games. I’ve also worked on games so bad everyone basically knew the ending before launch. I’ve taken jobs because they were interesting, because they were adjacent to games, and sometimes just because I needed to pay my bills and keep moving.

Looking back, that path makes more sense than it did while I was living it.

That was one of the big themes of the conversation: a lot of careers in games only connect in reverse. The random role, the scrappy company, the side project you made at night, the thing that felt like a detour, later, that becomes the proof that you were serious and the story that gets you the next shot.

We also talked about product management in games, which is still one of the muddiest jobs in the industry. My simple version is this: product’s job is to help games make better business decisions. Metrics matter. Modeling matters. Judgment matters. Influence matters. But games are still art, which means sometimes the hardest part of the job is knowing when the numbers are enough and when they aren’t.

That tension is the job.

Anyway, it was a great conversation. If you’re trying to break into game PM, already in games, or just curious how these careers actually unfold, you might get something out of it.

Watch here:

Thanks again to The Party is Full for having me on.