Xbox Game Developer Network Portal (2011)

In 2010 Xbox began the largest digital supply chain overhaul for Xbox Live since 2002. We launched the Game Developer Network Portal, developed channel integration for 3rd party OEMs & partners, and integrated Windows 8 OS, Office 365, Xbox Apps and Windows Phone into the digital supply chain.

I was still a Portfolio Manager for Xbox LIVE when this project was kicked off. I got tapped as a resource for the engineering team as I had spent the last two years working closely with them to develop Avatar assets as a media type within the Xbox ecosystem, built the SDK and tools alongside eng, and developed policy and operational workflows to support it all. Avatars at the time were the newest shiniest digital asset, and the least complex to begin building out workflows around in this new digital supply chain overhaul.

I transitioned over to the role of Channel Manager in Xbox Digital Supply Chain Business Operations (BizOps), while supporting this project. I was managing the day-to-day games services pipeline, and acting as SME in broad areas of ingestion, compliance, and policy for the legacy system, Xbox Live Authoring and Submission Tool (XLAST) while consulting and collaborating to build the new end-to-end digital supply chain ecosystem for Xbox.

This was the wild wild west. We had a massive team of engineers eager to make their mark in one the biggest gaming platforms in the world. To this day I have never worked with an engineering team so determined to listen and to get it right. While the basics of the ingestion and certification pipeline were being built, the TPMs and PMs were spending countless hours documenting the many teams, roles and responsibilities, layers of permission, unique workflows, pricing analysis, global regulation and policy, and more to create a “one content management tool to rule them all”. Scrum, sprints, post-mortems, oh my.

At the time, I managed a “channel” of digital goods, which was games (full title, arcade and indie) and game assets (map packs, consumables, themes, gamer pics, etc) globally. We were turning the old ways of thinking about game ingestion and asset management on its head. We spent hours brainstorming in post-it sessions and looking at the lifecycles of other, more mature, digital media types and developing hypotheses that we would then test and run through against industry knowledge, Xbox policy and government regulations.

We visited games publishers and development teams globally. We learned how they worked, what assets were managed by who and what they needed along the way.

This was a time of innovation. We had (relatively) unlimited resources, game nerd engineers chomping at the bit, and no clear timeline of delivery to make something epic that would enable scale and make complexity simple.

We launched the Game Developer Network Portal in 2011, and we face planted. Hard. In theory everything worked brilliantly, but we had hog tied ourselves with the UI and the layers of approvals required in order to ship a game. Our on-time game delivery numbers plummeted.

The teams rallied. The engineers put together an internal only tool that pulled in all logs and status on the backend and enabled the Ops and Cert teams to access it. The Ops team restructured their vendor resources to work against set criteria in queues. Suddenly, we went from minimum two weeks to get out a game, to two days.

Engineering kept listening, kept working and moved to weekly sprints. They’d push code out every Thursday like clockwork and the Ops team would learn the changes Friday to workflows and adjust accordingly the following week. It became a running joke that if you took time off that you’d come back and not know how to do your job. It was brilliant. GDNP became a success.

At the time, Microsoft had been making major changes in reorganization and in digitalization of products. We launched Kinect, added Apps to the Xbox, and launched Windows Phone. We were secretly working on the Xbox One, and getting ready to launch Office 365 and Windows 8.

GDNP integrated all of these product work streams. Ultimately what started out at as an innovative and flexible games content management and ingestion system became the “one to rule them all” supporting all of: games (including Games On Demand (GonD) and Games for Windows Live (GFWL)), games DLC, consumables, avatars, themes, gamer pics, Xbox Apps, Windows Phone Apps, tokens (including Point-of-Sale-Activation (POSA)), Microsoft Points (currency), OEM licensing, Windows 8 and Office 365.

This was a product I was super proud to have been part of and I learned so much while doing it. I cut my teeth with the Xbox Engineering team in the not-to-be-replicated perfect storm of GDNP in an era prime for innovation and change.