During my time at Activision, I supported 7 teams across three departments and all phases of development from investigation to post-production documentation. Teams were composed of developers from twelve studios and international timezones. While I was primarily embedded in engineering my role involved facilitating stakeholder groups composed of senior designers and engineers. Throughout my time at Activision, I was able to interface with veterans across nearly every game development discipline and assist in pursuing one primary goal: making a great game.
Manager - Alberto Campo
Mentor - Matthew Shin
Worked Closely with:
Britt Porrazzo - CT Producer
Blair Bitonti - Audio Director
Adam Bryant - Principal Engineer
Production Intern
During my time as a Production Intern at Activision, I developed skills that allowed me to keep users at the center of development, facilitate collaboration, and ensure clear communication. I was responsible for gathering and prioritizing user feedback, triaging bugs, and creating opportunities for open discussion, which helped improve both quality of life and user experience. Working alongside designers, I learned how to investigate workflows, connect the right stakeholders, and turn conversations into actionable steps that kept projects aligned with design goals. Additionally, presenting to high-level stakeholders strengthened my ability to communicate ideas clearly and advocate for user-focused solutions, an essential part of effective design work.
Several of my workstreams involved representing user sentiments. Very often we would be developing tools and features and no matter what phase of development we were on one thing remained constant: the user is at the center of development. In my production role I was responsible for triaging issues and bugs, tracking feedback, building agendas to address that feedback, promoting open discussion during weekly meetings, and reaching out to different user groups to ensure everyone's voice was heard.
Because of our collaboration with users, we were able to not only catch the vast majority of issues prior to ship but also greatly improve quality of life.
More often than not, ensuring a project was set on the correct course meant interfacing and reaching alignment with design. I would generally begin this process by assembling the correct points of contact within the context of the project. I would then conduct initial investigation, where I would collect relevant information, evaluate previous conversations, consult documentation, and begin to ask questions relevant to the workflow. From here the most important step was to provide forum and opportunity for conversation. Whether this meant tracking discussion or testing for later conversation or scheduling meetings was heavily dependent on the project.
With design input remained integral, obtaining and investigating while respecting the schedules of the team and stakeholders was also paramount.
When working with industry veterans with time commitments across the board I found it extremely important to respect their time. This meant planning out presentations and conveying information as quickly and concisely as possible while still maintaining times for open conversation to ensure you are able to close the loop in a single session. Working with Activision helped me not only to more correctly prepare for these conversation but also to feel comfortable leading them.