You promoted your best people into lead roles.
Nobody prepared them for what that means.
Max Level is a leadership accelerator built specifically for game studios — practical, production-tested, and designed for the leads who are figuring it out in real time.
The pattern is almost universal.
A lead gets promoted. They’re talented, driven, and respected by their team. For the first few months, things look fine. They’re working hard, staying close to the work, keeping things moving.
And then communication starts breaking down, decisions slow, and deliverables start slipping.
The lead is busy — visibly, constantly busy — but the team isn’t moving as fast as it should be. Friction builds between disciplines. Co-dev handoffs come back slightly off, again and again. The lead is carrying more than they should be and asking for help less than they need to.
None of it is catastrophic. That’s what makes it expensive.
The lead isn’t failing. They’re just figuring out a job nobody prepared them for — in real time, under production pressure, while their team absorbs the cost of the learning curve.
It’s not a talent problem. It’s a training problem. And it’s one of the most consistent, preventable, and underaddressed gaps in the game industry.
Max Level
Leadership Accelerator
Max Level is a full-day leadership accelerator delivered to your leads and lead-track people — practical, structured, and built entirely around the specific context of game development
Not generic leadership theory with a game skin on it. Frameworks and tools built for the actual conditions your leads are working in: cross-discipline teams, milestone pressure, co-dev partner structures, and the specific ways the IC-to-lead transition goes wrong in this industry.
By the end of the day, your leads walk away with:
This isn’t a seminar. There are no slides full of bullet points, no generic corporate exercises, and no theory that doesn’t survive contact with a real milestone. Every framework comes from 25 years of game production — built from real situations, tested under real pressure, and taught from the years of industry experience that produced them.
Max Level also includes a 90-minute follow-up session with studio leadership four weeks after delivery. Not a check-in call — a structured reinforcement conversation designed to help Studio Directors and HR leads support the frameworks in the weeks after the day, identify where leads are applying them well, and surface where they need more support. The goal is sustained change, not a good day.
Why game-specific matters.
Most leadership training wasn’t built for this industry.
It was built for organizations where the work is stable, the team structure is clear, and the path from decision to outcome is relatively straight. Game development is none of those things. The work changes shape mid-production. The team is a mix of disciplines that think and communicate differently from each other. The pressure is milestone-driven, not quarterly. And increasingly, the team isn’t just the people in your building — it’s a web of internal contributors and external partners that only functions if your leads know how to operate across it.
Generic leadership frameworks don’t account for any of that. They can’t tell a Lead Engineer how to give a brief to an art outsource partner they’ve never met. They can’t tell a Lead Designer how to make a scope call when the creative director is unavailable and the milestone is in three weeks. They can’t tell a Lead Producer how to surface a risk to a Studio Director without it reading as if the milestone is out of control.
Those are game development problems. They require game development answers.
Max Level is built on 25 years of experience inside game productions — across programming, design, production, and studio leadership, at studios ranging from small funded indies to large-scale AAA. The frameworks aren’t adapted from another industry. They were built here, tested here, and refined here.
Who Max Level is for.
Max Level is designed for game studios with leads who were promoted because they were great at their craft — and who are now navigating the leadership part without a lot of formal support.
The studios that get the most out of it typically look like this:
Max Level is delivered to the leads and lead-track people across disciplines who are doing the actual work of leading teams through production.
If your studio has an internal L&D function or a formal leadership development program already in place, Max Level probably isn’t the right fit. It’s designed for studios where that infrastructure doesn’t exist yet — which is most of them.
There’s no shortage of leadership coaches. Most of them have never shipped a game.
I’ve spent 25 years inside game productions — as a programmer, designer, writer, producer, EP, and Studio Director of Production at studios including BioWare, Bethesda, PeopleFun, and Playful. I’ve shipped titles across almost every discipline and every production phase, from early concept through post-launch live ops.
I’ve lived the IC-to-lead transition from the inside. I know what it feels like to be handed a team and a title with no real preparation for what leading actually requires — because it happened to me. The frameworks in Max Level aren’t borrowed from another industry or adapted from a business school curriculum. They were built from necessity, refined over years of production, and tested under the kind of pressure that only exists when a game is at stake.
I’ve also spent more than 15 years on the other side of that transition — as the EP and Studio Director of Production helping leads navigate it across multiple studios and disciplines. I know what the leads who made it through hard milestones did differently, because I was the one watching, supporting, and sometimes intervening. That pattern recognition is what Max Level is built from.
The studios I’ve worked at — and the leads I’ve worked with — span the full range of what game development looks like: large-scale AAA productions, mid-size AA studios, mobile game studios, funded indies, and lean core teams running co-dev partner structures. That breadth isn’t incidental. It’s what makes the frameworks applicable across the room, regardless of discipline or studio size.
25+ years. Six studios. Every major discipline.
FAQ
Almost always yes — and experienced leads are often the ones who get the most out of it. The problem isn’t that they don’t know how to lead. It’s that they’ve been figuring it out on their own, building habits and workarounds that work well enough but aren’t as effective as they could be. Max Level gives them a cleaner framework for things they’re already doing — and names a few things they’ve normalized that are costing their team more than they realize. The experienced lead who thinks they don’t need this is usually the one in the room who gets the most out of it.
Mid-production is actually when Max Level has the most immediate impact. The frameworks are practical and applicable the next day — participants leave with tools they can use in the production they’re already running, not in a hypothetical future one. The question isn’t whether your leads have time for this. It’s whether you can afford another three months of them figuring it out on the job while the milestone gets closer.
One full day is the investment. The return is leads who make faster decisions, communicate more clearly, and spend less time absorbing the cost of miscommunication and rework. If your leads are too busy to spend one day improving how they lead, that’s usually a sign the problem is more acute than it appears from the outside.
It will help, certainly. But Max Level doesn’t end when the day does.
Four weeks after delivery, we run a 90-minute follow-up session with studio leadership — your Studio Director, HR lead, or both. It’s a structured reinforcement conversation: where are your leads applying the frameworks, where are they struggling, and what does leadership need to do to support the change in the weeks ahead. It’s included in the price of Max Level because sustained behavior change requires more than a good day — it requires the people above the leads to know how to reinforce what was learned.
The day gives your leads the frameworks and the shared language. The follow-up session helps you make it stick.
Generic leadership training is built for organizations where the work is stable, the team structure is clear, and the pressure is quarterly. Game development is none of those things. Max Level is built specifically for the game development context — the IC-to-lead transition, cross-discipline team dynamics, milestone pressure, and the co-dev partner structures that most studios now depend on. The frameworks weren’t adapted from another industry. They were built here.
Yes — and it’s one of the areas where the game-specific framing matters most. Managing across co-dev relationships is a distinct leadership skill that generic training doesn’t touch. Max Level addresses it directly: how to give direction that travels across time zones and cultural contexts, how to build real working relationships with external partner leads, and how to structure handoffs so that miscommunication doesn’t compound across revision cycles.
Max Level works best with six to twelve participants. If you have leads across three or more disciplines — Design, Engineering, Art, Production, Audio — you likely have enough. A smaller cohort often produces richer application moments because the room is more focused. If you’re not sure whether your studio is the right size, send a DM and we’ll figure it out together.
Yes. Max Level is remote-first by design. The application moments and cross-discipline conversations that make the day work don’t require everyone to be in the same room — they require everyone to be present and engaged, which works fine on video when the session is facilitated correctly. On-site delivery is also available for studios that prefer it, with travel costs added.
Let’s talk about your leads…
If Max Level sounds like what your studio needs, the next step is a 20-minute conversation. No pitch deck, no hard sell. Just a straight conversation about your leads, where the gaps are, and whether Max Level is the right fit.
If it is, we’ll figure out the details. If it isn’t, you’ll still leave with a clearer picture of what your leads actually need.