A guide to getting issues out into the open and solving them through constructive discussions

So far in this series, we've looked at how to define what your studio is and what it stands for, and how to set goals that give your studio direction on both a long-term and short-term horizon. This week, we're getting into something a little less exciting, but just as important: the problems.

Plenty of issues in a game studio are straightforward enough. Anything related to the development process itself can usually be flagged and solved by the people responsible for that part of the process.

But studios also accumulate a different kind of problem, of the kind that doesn't fit neatly into a Jira ticket. Think, for example, of team tension that's starting to affect the work, of a publishing deal that's stalling and nobody's sure who should be driving it, of a nagging feeling that your game's core loop isn't landing but there's no consensus on why. These are the kind of issues that tend to linger, because they don't have a clear-cut solution, they don't belong to any one obvious person on the team, and there's no obvious moment where you sit down and deal with them.

Left unaddressed, these are the issues that can quietly derail studios – and today we'll look at ways to fix that.

The first bottleneck to getting issues out in the open is to get them out of people's heads . When there's no obvious place to dump issues, people tend to hold onto them.

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