Games Are Not a Simpler Version of Tech. They're a Different Craft.
It took me years to develop it, and I didn’t fully trust it until I was at Jam City.
I could open any match-3 game, play a handful of levels, and know within a few minutes whether the tuning was right. Not from looking at a dashboard. From playing. A well-tuned level has a pull to it, something that draws you forward without you quite knowing why. It comes through the animations, the board setup, the way each element reinforces the pacing of the experience. When it’s working, everything feels inevitable. When it’s off, something sits wrong, the level drags, the difficulty spikes at the wrong moment, the rhythm breaks, and you feel it before you can name it.
Earlier in my career at Zynga, I used content frameworks to identify good and bad levels. I analyzed the data, mapped the drop-off points, tracked completion rates. Those frameworks were genuinely useful. They told me where players were leaving and gave me a place to start. But over time I realized that playing the game told me a different part of the same story. The metrics showed me what was happening. Playing showed me why it felt that way. Neither was complete without the other.
That synthesis is what game product sense actually is. And it’s the reason the assumption that games are a simpler version of tech product management is not just wrong, it’s wrong in a way that causes real damage.
Why the Industry Gets Miscategorized
The confusion starts outside the industry. Investors and analysts look at the margin profile of a successful games company and file it under tech. The distribution is digital, the marginal cost is low, and the best titles generate extraordinary returns. The label seems to fit.
Until you look at the underlying business dynamic, which is not tech. It’s hits.
A small number of titles generate a disproportionate share of the industry’s revenue. Creative risk is embedded in every major decision. The market rewards resonance in ways that are genuinely difficult to predict and punishes misses without much mercy. Sequels from proven franchises fail regularly. Unexpected breakouts change the conversation overnight.
That is a hits dynamic, not a tech dynamic. It is closer to film or music than to software. And it changes everything about how product decisions get made. Tech PMs optimize systems toward predictable outcomes. Game PMs must nurture products whose success depends on whether millions of players feel something. Those are fundamentally different jobs.
Derek Thompson’s book Hit Makers puts it clearly: popularity is not just about quality. It emerges from a mix of familiarity, repetition, distribution, and social context that makes certain ideas feel both recognizable and exciting at the same time. The best game makers understand this intuitively, developed through years of immersion and honest feedback from players who either loved what you made or didn’t. Structured thinking can inform that judgment. It cannot produce it.
Where Tech PM Instincts Break Down
Inside the industry, the failure pattern is consistent. A PM arrives from consumer tech or SaaS with strong analytical instincts and immediately reaches for the familiar toolkit. Retention is soft, so they redesign the onboarding. Monetization is flat, so they add a new offer surface. Session length is down, so they extend the progression curve.
Each of these decisions is locally coherent. Each can quietly destroy a game.
Slowing progression to extend sessions increases a metric while making the experience feel like a grind. Adding friction to drive monetization trains players to resent the economy. Redesigning onboarding to improve completion rates can strip out the teaching moments that make the core loop enjoyable. The dashboard looks better. The game feels worse. And because the damage is experiential rather than numerical, it doesn’t show up clearly until the long-term retention curves start to bend months later.
This is the core failure of applying tech PM instincts to games. The metrics are real and they matter, but they are a lagging readout of the player experience, not a leading indicator of it. A PM who only reads the dashboard is always looking at what already happened, and by the time the numbers move, the experience has been broken for weeks.
The Three Lenses of Game Product Sense
What separates game PMs who develop genuine product sense from those who don’t is the ability to integrate three distinct ways of understanding the product simultaneously.
The first is experiential understanding. This is what the game feels like moment to moment. It’s built through playing, tuning, and developing sensitivity to pacing, difficulty, reward rhythm, and the small friction points that interrupt flow before players can articulate why they’re losing interest. This is the lens most analytical PMs underdevelop, because it feels subjective and therefore optional. It isn’t.
The second is behavioral understanding. This is what players actually do. It’s built through retention curves, funnels, telemetry, and A/B tests. This is where most tech PMs are already strong, and it’s genuinely valuable. The trap is treating it as sufficient on its own.
The third is creative intent. This is what the designers are trying to create, the emotional experience they’re designing toward, the player fantasy they’re serving, the design principles they’re protecting. It’s built through close collaboration, craft respect, and enough curiosity to understand design goals rather than just manage against them. A PM who lacks this lens will make analytically defensible decisions that undermine the creative coherence of the game without ever knowing why.
True product sense emerges when all three lenses work together. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Imagine a level in a match-3 game with solid completion rates and acceptable Day 1 retention. The data says it’s fine. But playing it reveals something the metrics don’t capture: the level is winnable, but it doesn’t feel satisfying. The board resets feel arbitrary. The final moves don’t create a sense of momentum or payoff. Players complete it and move on without the emotional punctuation that makes them want to keep going.
The experiential lens flags the problem. The behavioral lens confirms it in adjacent metrics, slightly lower session extension, a small dip in the rate at which players attempt the next level. The creative lens explains it: the designer intended a slow-build tension that wasn’t executing because a specific mechanic wasn’t triggering at the right moment in the board state.
None of those three readings alone diagnoses the problem. Together, they do. That’s what integrated product sense looks like.
How to Work With Creatives Across All Three Lenses
The practical implication of this framework is that game PMs have to collaborate with designers differently than most product roles require.
In games, the PM’s job is not to define the solution and hand it to design. It’s to bring the behavioral and experiential data into a conversation where the designer brings creative intent, and together arrive at something none of them would have reached alone. That requires the PM to understand enough about design craft to ask useful questions rather than prescribe answers, and to recognize when data is pointing at an experience problem rather than a product problem.
I wrote about the specifics of how to navigate different designer types in an earlier post on working with game designers as a PM. The foundation underneath all of it is the same: you cannot contribute meaningfully to the creative intent lens if you haven’t developed enough respect for the craft to understand what designers are actually trying to protect.
The structured thinker who adds process when they should be listening, who brings a feature spec when the conversation needs a design question, who optimizes a metric when the experience is broken, is not failing because they lack intelligence. They’re failing because they only have one lens and they’re applying it everywhere.
Building the Judgment
Game product sense is not a mindset you adopt. It’s a capability you develop slowly, through the accumulation of real experience across all three lenses. And it compounds in a specific way: each lens makes the other two sharper. Playing the game changes how you read a retention curve. Understanding creative intent changes what you look for when you play. Behavioral data changes the questions you bring into design conversations.
The people who build great games and great careers in this industry are the ones who invested in all three. Not because it was efficient, but because they were curious enough to keep developing judgment long after their existing frameworks felt sufficient.
That curiosity is also what distinguishes the PMs who thrive here from the ones who don’t. It’s not credentials, analytical rigor, or even experience in adjacent industries. It’s the willingness to approach games as a craft that requires genuinely new thinking, and to keep building that thinking even when it’s uncomfortable.
The pull you feel from a great game didn’t happen by accident. Someone developed the judgment to create it. That judgment isn’t given. It’s earned through time.