How awesome is it to be the Product Manager for an esports company?

Pretty awesome, it turns out!

Snapshot of me running an Esports One design sprint

“So how are you liking the new job?” I must have heard this question a dozen times from friends and family over the past few weeks, and every time I have the same answer: “I LOVE IT!” It’s not one of the those statements where people say things are great when they’re really not, I really mean it. We have Twitch streams playing all day, I stay up to date on the latest in the gaming and esports worlds, and I work on some incredible products. I’m essentially getting paid to do what I would be doing anyway.

How did I get here? Well in college I studied history because I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and figured it would be a good idea for my indecision to cost me thousands of dollars. Since I took a lot of summer courses, I ended up finishing my required credits early, which gave me some time to ponder my life before graduation and the real world kicked in. As a firm proponent of doing what you love, I decided I was either going to be a DJ, a stand-up comedian, or a game designer. Yeah, I know. My family was very proud. Considering I’m not all that funny and I have no musical abilities to speak of (hence a DJ), I decided the brightest future would be in video games. Since I hadn’t the slightest clue of how to build games, I decided to take a year and half crash course associate’s program on how to do it. The program covered everything from art to game design to programming, and I loved every second of it.

Love ‘em.

My first job was as a game tester which was a pretty sobering experience. The hours were long, the wage was minimal, and the work was painfully dull. I made some great friends though; call it bonding through shared suffering. From there a friend reached out to join the THQ marketing team. It wasn’t making games, but the hours and pay were better. In any case, 9 months later the company went bankrupt, I made a reddit post about it, and everyone lost their jobs. Good times. After a few grueling months of unemployment a few of my friends from game school reached out about a game producer job at a small company making licensed web games for Disney, Marvel, and Activision. It was a fantastic job, but as my friends started to leave, I ended up selling out to be a producer at a company that had nothing to do with games. I call these “the years of doing work you don’t care about, knowing that you don’t care, and doing nothing about it”. So much for doing what you love! I tried one other non-game-industry job at “the ideal” tech company but it still wasn’t the same as working in games.

I’m a lifelong gamer. I’ve committed countless hours to something I learned about in game school called “The Magic Circle”. Per wikipedia, it means the space in which the normal rules and reality of the world are suspended and replaced by the artificial reality of a game world. I’ve played every category of game you can think of: FPS, RPG, MMO, RTS, Puzzle, Platformer, Horror, you name it. Sometimes I’ll think about how my life would be different if I spent those hours honing a craft or skill, but then I remember all the friends and amazing experiences that games have given me. Previous generations remember where they were when America landed on the moon, I remember where I was when my guild first downed Nef in Blackwing Lair. Needless to say, when I had the opportunity to join Esports One, I jumped ship from my old job and industry to return to my passion.

The Magic Circle at scale.

As Product Manager at Esports One, my role is essentially to prioritize what we work on next and ensure that what we build aligns with the vision for our company. In the world of software development, there is no shortage of great ideas and it would be great to work on all of them if we had infinite time and resources. Since this is never true, we have to pick and choose what we build. Determining this is a mix of art and science, and while there’s no guarantee of getting it exactly right, there are ways of getting close. Trial and error through rapid iterations and tight feedback loops are my preferred methods of building products, and I am excited to implement this process at Esports One. It starts by taking a 10,000-foot view and defining what the overall vision is for the company, which is to enrich esports experiences through real-time data and analytics. This means using innovative tech like computer vision and machine learning to recognize in-game events and serve interesting and useful information around what’s happening.

Esports One’s Vision: Enrich esports experiences through real-time data and analytics

I like to frame the vision in the context of a story. Let’s say you love video games, you want to get more into the esports scene, and have decided to find an esports match to watch. You google “esports calendar” and click a site called Esports Calendar (owned by Esports One). You filter the calendar by your favorite game and see that there is a pro match happening right now! You click the watch button and are taken to the Twitch stream of the live event. The broadcaster of this official game stream has partnered with Esports One to leverage our special Twitch extension, which gives you interesting stats, tips, and predictions about what is happening in the game in real time. What’s more, the announcers of the broadcast are using an Esports One console of live stats to give them interesting talking points throughout the game. Throughout this whole journey, Esports One is there every step of the way to make your esports experience that much better.

Early mockup of esportscalendar.com

A vision is all well and good, but it means nothing if we don’t do real work to achieve it. So how do we decide what to build? First, we research what users want through qualitative feedback and quantitative metrics to come up with new ideas. We then identify the ideas that align with our vision, are reasonably achievable, have the highest impact on our business, and reach the most users. The ideas that most satisfy these criteria are built first. When it comes time to build these ideas, we break them down into product features, break the features down into individual user stories, and break the stories down into tasks. Once we have the tasks, we give ourselves a deadline to complete them and our incredible development team gets to work. When the deadline hits and we release something new, we repeat this process to ensure we are building the right things. From start to finish, this entire cycle takes about two weeks.

So that’s who I am and what I do at Esports One. I joined Esports One because I believe in what we are working on. We are pioneering some really cool tech to help drive forward an industry that I love and care about. In case you’re still wondering why I joined Esports One, I’ll let Tim Robbins tell you: “I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying.”

See you in the magic circle!

P.S. — My favorite part about working at Esports One? Barely any emails.