How a Game Marketer Should Request a Feature

So there are many times when the marketing team needs something to be added to a game. We are a needy bunch, game marketers. Especially for live service games. 

We want Attribution Tracking, CRM SDK integration, game data API’s, better game capture tools, in game survey capabilities, launcher/patcher promo real estate, deep linking, in game CS ticketing systems, data outputs for dashboards… the list is seemingly never ending.

Having been in charge of large publishing organizations I can empathize with both the needs of marketers and bandwidth demands of the dev team.  Usually it comes down to the Product Manager (PM) to decide what features are prioritized or killed and what features make it into the dev backlog. 

So to my marketing friends here is the secrete to getting your PM to take you seriously with your dev feature asks! 

WRITE A CLEAR FEATURE REQUEST DOC

Its really that simple.  You cant claim to be a victim if you don’t justify your ask. But what should go into a feature request doc?  Good question!

In my experience if you can be clear and concise on these elements your will get your fair shake from the PM. And if you can write it as a “user story” you will be ahead of most:

Describe the problem you are trying to address (best if it’s a customer problem you are trying to fix)
Propose the solution to your problem (best if you don’t give a technical solution, let the experts figure that out)
Describe the use case (again best if described from the customers point of view)
Provide a desired outcome and critical dates (best if expressed in a numeric form)
Provide examples and research (who has done it and what was their result)

That is about it. Its not hard, just very seldom done by marketers and your PM will love you for it.  Oh and last don’t try and sneak to the front of the backlog by disguising your feature ask as a bug..