Stay in your lane

At some point in my career I got feedback in a review that I was doing production work instead of focusing on my own department. What I had actually been doing was solving cross-department problems that were blocking my team, because nobody else was picking them up.

That review landed hard, not because it was unfair (it was), but because it told me exactly what the org valued. Stay in your lane. Don’t reach across. If something outside your department is broken and it’s hurting your people, that’s still not your problem to fix. I’ve since talked to leads at other studios who’ve had almost the same conversation, so I don’t think this is rare.

What silos cost

Game development is one of the most cross-disciplinary things you can work on. A level needs design, art, audio, narrative, lighting, performance work, and someone holding the player experience together across all of it. If the lead responsible for that space is told to only think about one slice, the space suffers. Not loudly, not in a way that shows up in a sprint report, but in the seams between departments where nobody is looking.

The best teams I’ve been on had leads who talked to each other constantly and stepped into each other’s areas when something needed fixing. Not to override, but to unblock. The worst had invisible walls between departments and leads who only spoke through producers. Everything moved slower, and the problems that lived in the gaps between teams just stayed there, growing.

When feedback doesn’t match the work

I’ve been in situations where the feedback I received measured a version of the role that existed on paper, not the version the project actually demanded. One example: getting art-direction feedback on level work where my goals were about flow, pacing, and player decision-making. Feedback on visual composition is useful, but it wasn’t what the role was for, and the things I was actually solving went unnoticed.

Being measured on the wrong axis is demoralising in a quiet way. You hit your actual targets and nobody notices, because the scorecard is looking somewhere else. I’ve seen this happen to other leads too, in different disciplines, at different studios. It’s always the same feeling.

The pattern underneath

Both of those situations, being told to stay in my lane and being reviewed against the wrong criteria, come from the same root. The org didn’t have a shared understanding of what a lead actually does. When that’s missing, the role becomes whatever your manager thinks it is, and that can shift under you without warning.

I’d rather work somewhere that defines leadership as “make the people and the project around you better” and then actually measures against that. The studios that do this well tend to have leads who are trusted to cross lines when the work demands it. The ones that don’t tend to have a lot of lanes and very few people looking at where they all meet.