How to Manage Up and Across: Stakeholder Alignment in Game Development

In data-driven mobile game development, great ideas can fail if the people around them aren’t aligned. Whether you’re pitching a new feature to executives or coordinating with peers in art, design, analytics, marketing, and engineering, your success as a product manager depends on how well you manage up and across different groups.

Stakeholder alignment isn’t about politics — it’s about creating clarity, setting clear objectives, and making it easy for everyone to focus on what matters most. At its core, alignment is about ensuring that every conversation, decision, and document points toward the same outcome. This post breaks down these two directions of alignment, the nuances in each, and best practices specifically from the perspective of working in data-driven mobile game companies.

1. Managing Up: Executives & Leadership

Goal: Give leadership the clarity they need to support and unblock you, while showing them you are driving toward measurable outcomes.

In data-driven mobile companies, executives are highly attuned to the numbers. Your job is to distill the complexity of game design decisions into a narrative that connects to the company’s financial and strategic goals.

Best Practices:

💡 Pro tip: In mobile, executives rarely need the full design doc — they need why it matters, how it moves the needle, and what decision is required.

2. Managing Across: The Development Team

Goal: Provide clarity, context, and a sense of purpose so your artists, designers, and engineers can execute without second-guessing the vision.

This is the core team that builds the product. Your job is to ensure everyone understands why they are building something, not just what to build. Expected Outcomes are critical here — they translate business goals into creative and technical direction and serve as a unifying language for the development process.

When you set an Expected Outcome, you:

• Explain the “Why” behind design decisions.
• Provide a clear benchmark for post-launch evaluation.
• Help the team prioritize features based on impact rather than personal preference.
• Act as a focus anchor in sprint meetings to prevent scope creep.

Example: Instead of saying “Add a tutorial pop-up,” you frame it as “We want to increase Day 2 retention by improving clarity on the crafting system; our expected outcome is a +3% lift in that metric.”

Best Practices:

💡 Pro tip: Over-communication may feel repetitive to you, but it brings psychological safety to the team.

3. Managing Across: Cross-Functional Partners

Goal: Build trust, reduce misalignment, and make collaboration smoother with teams outside of core development.

Daily Interactions: As a PM, you’ll work with marketing, business development, central tech, user acquisition, and other shared services. Each has different incentives and pressures. Your role is to keep everyone focused on the outcome — whether that’s hitting a KPI, supporting a launch, or enabling new technology capabilities.

Best Practices:

💡 Pro tip: Cross-functional alignment often determines whether initiatives are scalable and market-ready.

4. IC vs. Manager Perspective on Alignment

While the principles of alignment apply to both individual contributors (ICs) and managers, the approach and scope differ.

IC Perspective:

• Focus is on execution alignment — ensuring that your direct workstream and immediate stakeholders are clear on goals.
• You manage fewer stakeholders but need to go deeper into details.
• Expected Outcomes are used to clarify your feature’s purpose and to advocate for resources within a narrower scope.

Manager Perspective:

• Focus is on strategic alignment — ensuring multiple teams or pods are working toward the same overarching business goals.
• You operate at a higher altitude, influencing without micromanaging.
• Expected Outcomes are broader in scope, often combining multiple features or initiatives into a single KPI impact narrative.
• Your challenge is keeping multiple ICs and disciplines focused while balancing leadership expectations.

💡 Key difference: ICs align within their lane; managers align the lanes themselves.

5. Mechanisms for Stakeholder Alignment

Alignment isn’t a one-time activity — it’s maintained through consistent mechanisms that make information accessible and expectations clear. These tools and rituals keep everyone connected to the same source of truth and reduce dependency on ad hoc updates.

Cadence of Updates:

• Up: Monthly KPI reviews with leadership, focused on outcomes and decisions needed.
• Across (Dev Team): Sprint kickoffs, daily standups, weekly retros.
• Across (Cross-Functional Partners): Bi-weekly syncs for active initiatives, quarterly planning touchpoints.

Artifacts & Sources of Truth:

• Roadmap visualization (shared doc or board) updated in real time.
• Feature briefs/specs with Expected Outcomes clearly stated.
• KPI dashboards accessible to all relevant stakeholders.
• Decision logs to track context and reasoning behind key calls.

Why It Works:

• Reduces misalignment caused by outdated or siloed information.
• Empowers stakeholders to self-serve context without waiting for a meeting.
• Builds transparency and trust across teams.

Closing: The PM as the Alignment Engine

Managing up and across isn’t two separate jobs — it’s one continuous loop.

• Up secures resources and strategic support.
• Across ensures all peers — in development and beyond — are working toward the same outcomes.

In data-driven mobile games, where KPIs drive decisions and timelines are tight, alignment is your biggest multiplier. The Expected Outcomes you craft are the glue that binds all stakeholders to a shared vision. Nail this, and you’re not just shipping features — you’re moving the entire game toward success with purpose and precision.