PM 591 Week 2 Agile Teams and Leadership Example

The Creative Director Is Not the Product Owner: Designing Agile Teams and Leadership Roles at a Game Studio

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PM/591: Agile Project Management

Week 2 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Bluebonnet Forge Games, its teams, leaders and figures are composites written for a model paper.

Week 1 recommended that Bluebonnet Forge Games, the composite Austin studio in this course, adopt Scrum for the feature teams building its new action role-playing game. The studio's previous structure was organized by discipline: designers, programmers, artists, animators, audio and quality assurance, each with a lead who assigned tasks, and a producer who coordinated schedules across them. About 140 people will work on the new title at peak. This paper designs the teams and the leadership roles that agile delivery requires.

Team Design Principles

The team design rests on five principles. Teams are cross-functional, containing the skills to take a feature from idea to playable build. They are small, seven to nine people, so that everyone can take part in planning and review. They are stable, kept together for at least a year, because trust and shared understanding take time. They are organized around player-facing outcomes rather than disciplines. And they have a clear mission and boundaries, so that autonomy is real but bounded.

Lee and Xia (2010) studied software development teams and found that team autonomy improved a team's ability to respond to changes efficiently, while team diversity improved the extent of responses, but that too much autonomy without coordination could reduce effectiveness. The principles aim for autonomy within clear missions and coordination mechanisms.

The Team Structure

Twelve feature teams each own part of the player experience: combat, enemies, exploration, quests, progression, companions, crafting, user interface, world building in two regions, cinematics and onboarding. Each team includes two or three programmers, a designer, two or three artists or animators, a quality assurance tester and, shared between pairs of teams, an audio designer. Two further teams serve the others: a platform team for the engine, performance and console requirements and a tools team for the content pipeline. Art outsourcing for large volumes of environment assets is coordinated through a small content production team that works in flow rather than sprints.

Separating Vision From Backlog

Under the old structure, the creative director made design decisions down to individual features, and producers decided schedules. Agile roles require a sharper split. The creative director owns the game's vision, its pillars and the bar for fun, and reviews every feature at sprint reviews against that bar. Product owners, one for each pair of feature teams, drawn from senior designers, own the backlog: which items come first, what is good enough for this sprint and which trade-offs to make within the vision. When a product owner and the creative director disagree, the creative director decides whether a feature meets the vision; the product owner decides how to get there and in what order.

A vision that decides everything leaves the team nothing to own; a backlog without a vision builds features nobody wanted.

New Roles for Old Leaders

Discipline leads no longer assign daily tasks. They become coaches and standard-setters: the lead animator, for example, sets animation quality standards, runs a weekly guild meeting for animators across teams, reviews work and develops people's skills. Producers become scrum masters or program-level coordinators, removing obstacles and running cross-team planning. A review of servant leadership research (van Dierendonck, 2011) identified six recurring features, among them developing people, modesty, genuineness and stewardship, and stressed that a servant leader still points the way. That balance fits the leads' new role: serving teams while protecting the standards that make the game look and feel consistent.

How Teams Coordinate

Twelve teams building one game must stay coordinated. Every two weeks, all teams plan on the same day, and a one-hour cross-team session follows in which product owners and team representatives identify dependencies, such as a combat team needing a new animation system from the platform team. A shared board shows these dependencies with dates. Discipline guilds, one for each craft, meet weekly to share techniques and keep standards consistent across teams. A playable build of the whole game is assembled every night, so integration problems appear within a day rather than at a milestone.

Moving People Into Teams

Assigning 140 people to teams was itself a change project. The studio asked each person for three preferences, balanced skills across teams and kept pairs who worked well together where possible. Leads explained the reasons for each assignment in person. Two senior artists who preferred to stay in a pure art group were placed on the content production team, which works closest to the old structure. People can request a move after six months, which reassures those uncertain about their first placement.

Psychological Safety

The last project's late redesigns were partly a story of silence: several designers doubted the combat system months before it was rebuilt but did not say so to the creative director. Sprint reviews only help if people speak honestly about what is not working. The creative director will open each review by naming one thing in the build that is not yet fun, modeling candor, and retrospectives will be held without leads present once a month so that team members can raise concerns freely.

The Limits of Autonomy

Teams decide how to build features and in what order within their backlog, but not everything is theirs to decide. Engine architecture belongs to the platform team, art direction to the art director, the game's pillars to the creative director and release dates to the studio leadership with the publisher. Parker et al. (2015) studied self-organized teams and agile leadership in a service organization and found productivity gains when leaders shifted from control to support, provided boundaries were clear. Writing these boundaries down prevents both overreach and the opposite problem, teams waiting for permission they already have.

What Managers Stop Doing

The shift is clearest in what leaders stop doing. Discipline leads stop writing daily task lists and stop approving every asset before it enters a build. Producers stop maintaining a master spreadsheet of tasks for 140 people. The creative director stops attending every team's planning meeting. Each of these was a habit that once felt like control and now slows teams down; naming them helps leaders notice when they slip back.

Team Health Measures

Five measures will show whether the design works: a quarterly team health survey on clarity of mission, psychological safety and workload; the share of sprint goals met; overtime hours per person; voluntary turnover by team; and the number of decisions escalated to the creative director per month, which should fall as product owners gain confidence.

Conclusion

Bluebonnet Forge's new structure replaces discipline silos with twelve stable, cross-functional feature teams and two supporting teams. It separates the creative director's vision from product owners' backlog decisions, turns discipline leads into coaches and producers into scrum masters, builds psychological safety into reviews and retrospectives and defines clear limits to team autonomy. Measures of team health will show whether people are working in the sustainable, candid way the new title needs.

References

Lee, G., & Xia, W. (2010). Toward agile: An integrated analysis of quantitative and qualitative field data on software development agility. MIS Quarterly, 34(1), 87-114. https://doi.org/10.2307/20721416

Parker, D. W., Holesgrove, M., & Pathak, R. (2015). Improving productivity with self-organised teams and agile leadership. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, 64(1), 112-128. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPPM-10-2013-0178

van Dierendonck, D. (2011). Servant leadership: A review and synthesis. Journal of Management, 37(4), 1228-1261. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206310380462