My Performance Review Was Conducted by a PS5
How playing on my PS5 and iPhone accidentally made me a better product manager
I used to call it “gaming.” Now I call it cross‑functional, controller‑led professional development. Same couch, less guilt.
Jokes aside, hours with a DualSense in my hands (and entirely too many battery cycles on my iPhone) have sharpened real PM muscles—prioritization, decisionmaking under uncertainty, systems thinking, ruthless scoping, stakeholder comms, the whole glorious backlog. And no, this isn’t just me justifying a Platinum trophy collection: there’s a surprising amount of research (and a mountain of community wisdom) behind why games transfer into work skills. Action games are linked with enhanced attentional control and faster learning; strategy games have been shown to boost cognitive flexibility; team video gaming can improve team cohesion. (ScienceDirect)
Below is my tongue‑in‑cheek but field‑tested manifesto for how PS5 + iPhone gaming made me a stronger product manager—peppered with quotes from Reddit, Steam, and Hacker News, plus studies you can forward to your manager when they wonder why you blocked off Friday night as “competitive benchmarking.”
1) Elden Ring taught me ruthless prioritization (and stakeholder management with dragons)
Game: Elden Ring (PS5)
PM lesson: Always have multiple paths to progress; when one’s blocked, re‑scope and go sideways instead of brute‑forcing.
A top Steam review nails the adaptability:
“If you rush you can make it the hardest Souls game… take it slower and it fits more casual players.” (Steam Community)
That's a roadmap triage in a sentence. Getting smashed by Margit? Pivot to Limgrave dungeons, level up, come back with better gear—exactly how we should treat a stubborn enterprise integration.
Even HN, home of the politely skeptical, frames the difficulty as feedback, not punishment:
“They’re not actually that difficult; they’re just uncompromising and punish mistakes.” (Hacker News)
Transferable bit: It rewired my brain to seek optionality, not grind. At work, I now keep 2–3 viable routes to a metric move instead of stapling the team to a single dependency.
2) God of War Ragnarök reminded me that polish is a feature
Game: God of War Ragnarök (PS5)
PM lesson: Narrative clarity + world‑class UX earns user patience. When you respect the player with feedback, signposting, and accessibility, they give you another sprint’s worth of goodwill.
Transferable bit: Before “hardening” got budgeted, I learned to carry a “polish line”—the minimum audio/visual/interaction fidelity where your core loop feels premium. (Accessibility is PM love-in-action; it’s also retention.)
3) Marvel’s Spider‑Man 2 is the backlog you refactor
Game: Marvel’s Spider‑Man 2 (PS5)
PM lesson: Shipping a sequel isn’t cramming in features; it’s deleting the right friction (faster traversal, cleaner missions) so the core fantasy pops.
Transferable bit: We run “sequel sprints”: first ten tasks are removals or simplifications. Velocity goes up not by adding code, but by pruning.
4) Gran Turismo 7 turned me into a telemetry gremlin
Game: Gran Turismo 7 (PS5)
PM lesson: The game is a masterclass in telemetry‑driven coaching. Ghost laps + sector times are a PM dream for breaking a big problem into measurable segments.
Transferable bit: I shamelessly copied the pattern: we replaced a monolithic “activation” metric with split‑sector KPIs (visit → create → value moment), plus “ghost runs” from the best users.
5) Returnal and Hades: iterate faster than your instincts
Games: Returnal (PS5), Hades (PS5/mobile cross‑play adjacent)
PM lesson: Roguelike loops are accelerated discovery engines. You die, tweak, re‑run—tight feedback loops beat big‑bang launches every time.
Transferable bit: We adopted “rogue reviews”—short, brutal post‑mortems after every experiment, one insight per death. Release, learn, roll again.
6) Baldur’s Gate 3: player agency is the roadmap
Game: Baldur’s Gate 3 (PS5)
PM lesson: When you give players genuine agency and react to it, your community becomes your content engine.
Transferable bit: In product terms: parameterize outcomes. If your system can respond to user intent in more than one way (and do something delightful when it does), you’ve made retention, not just a release.
7) Pokémon GO & Among Us: design for coordination under chaos
Games: Pokémon GO (iPhone), Among Us (iPhone)
PM lesson: Raids and emergency meetings are masterclasses in short‑lived, high‑stakes collaboration. Clear roles, time‑boxed decisions, just‑enough UI.
Transferable bit: I made our incident bridge mimic an Among Us emergency meeting: short timer, one goal, one owner, everyone speaks once. MTTR dropped.
8) Genshin Impact: systems thinking (and economy ethics)
Game: Genshin Impact (iPhone)
PM lesson: Live‑ops at scale is systems design plus incentive design. Even HN—rarely sentimental about gacha—credits miHoYo for avoiding predatory PvP pressure:
“They’re one of the most profitable… but could pull more levers; most gacha push pay‑to‑win—miHoYo mostly doesn’t.” (Hacker News)
Transferable bit: It sharpened my sensitivity to monetization choices that trade short‑term ARPU for long‑term trust.
9) Clash Royale & Call of Duty: Mobile: balancing is product strategy
Games: Clash Royale, Call of Duty: Mobile (iPhone)
PM lesson: Weekly balance passes are living proof that product/market fit is maintained, not achieved. Small dials (HP, cost, cooldown) = big meta shifts.
Transferable bit: We institutionalized “balance notes” with every release: explicit calls on what we’re buffing/nerfing and why.
10) Monument Valley 2: minimalism is a shipping tactic
Game: Monument Valley 2 (iPhone)
PM lesson: Restraint and clarity create effortless comprehension. If someone can’t use your product one‑handed on a train, it’s not minimal—it’s unfinished.
Okay, but is there research?
Action games & attention/learning. Reviews and experiments by Bavelier, Green, and colleagues show action gaming is associated with better attentional control and may even speed up “learning to learn”—improved learning rates on new tasks. Translation: faster ramp‑ups, quicker pattern recognition, smoother context switching. (ScienceDirect)
Strategy games & cognitive flexibility. Training in real‑time strategy (StarCraft in the lab) increased cognitive flexibility, the trait you need to reframe problems and switch rules mid‑sprint. (PLOS)
Decision‑making under pressure. fMRI work at Georgia State found frequent gamers showed superior sensorimotor decision‑making and distinct activation patterns—exactly the sort of snap judgment we do in incident response. (Georgia State News Hub)
Team cohesion via gaming. Randomized studies show team video‑gaming sessions can improve cohesion and team flow compared with traditional team‑building. (PMC)
Surgical transfer (hand‑eye, precision). Classic surgical research (yes, really) found gamer surgeons were faster with fewer errors in laparoscopic tasks. If skills transfer to the OR, your backlog is probably safe. (PubMed)
Harvard Business Review even argues for mapping gaming skills to careers (spatial awareness, faster processing, mental health benefits). It’s not a randomized trial—but it’s a practical bridge from research to work. (Harvard Business Review)
“But don’t games just make you better at… games?”
Sometimes! HN keeps us honest:
“You are only ‘getting better’ at the game… skills don’t translate to the real world.” (Hacker News)
The nuance: not all play transfers, and excess play absolutely hurts. But certain genres and structures (action, strategy, team‑based) have repeatedly demonstrated transferable skills—attention, flexibility, coordination—especially when you reflect on them and map them to your work context. (PNAS)
Reddit, where N=everyone, offers the field notes:
“Leading guilds in MMOs absolutely gave me confidence… helped prepare me for management responsibilities in the workplace.” (Reddit)
“Elden Ring almost forces the player to… take [death] as a lesson, not a smack in the face.” (Reddit)
How I turn game hours into PM superpowers
Treat failure like a roguelike. After a sprint that whiffs, write a 3‑bullet “death recap”: what killed us, what we unlocked (insight), what we carry forward. (Thanks, Hades.)
Shadow your best users like a time trial ghost. Record top‑quartile sessions and replay them; the “ghost lap” shows where novices lose speed. (Thanks, Gran Turismo 7.)
Design optionality, not just difficulty. Provide multiple paths to the value moment—“grind, summon, or explore.” (Thanks, Elden Ring.)
Run live‑ops rituals. Monthly balance notes, seasonal events, and “patch‑day” comms. (Thanks, Genshin / Clash Royale.)
Borrow the emergency meeting. Incident channels get a timer, one owner, and a single objective. (Thanks, Among Us.)
Keep a “polish line.” The minimum level of haptics/latency/visual clarity you won’t ship beneath. (Thanks, Ragnarök / Monument Valley 2.)
Practice decision sprints. 10 minutes, 3 options, choose 1—then commit. (Grounded by research on gamers’ faster perceptual decisions. ) (Georgia State News Hub)
Host a team game night with purpose. Co‑op titles improve cohesion; use them as a low‑stakes lab for roles and comms. (PMC)
Community chorus: a few more gems
“Calmness, focus and patience solve all problems… every tough thing is training for a larger, tougher thing.” (on Malenia in Elden Ring) (Reddit)
“Being a leader in team‑based games is a good way to build experience of handling control under pressure.” (Reddit)
“Life isn’t fair… when you try to skew the balance, there’s no way to tell if it will work out.” (co‑op/invasions insight) (Reddit)
Short, sharp, and suspiciously applicable to your next OKR.
Closing boss: framing your hobby at work
I don’t claim gaming is a magic productivity potion. But structured play, especially in demanding, feedback‑rich games, is an underrated training ground for PMs. There’s enough evidence (and lived experience) to argue it builds attention, flexibility, decision speed, and teamwork—the exact skills you need when your roadmap looks like Caelid at noon.
So yes, I still game for fun. I just log the XP twice.