^
Sure. But it’ll be a nightmare (even if it actually succeeds).
one can with lots of money 
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Maybe if they had experience directing a movie? Producer of a radio show?
As in sub everything out?
yep or making lots of expensive errors 
but speaking seriously, hiring a project manager with game dev experience is possible.
But you have to pay the programmers and artists right?
you said “lead” not “do the entire”
ofc if you need all work to be done, you may pay people for that, unless you have plenty of animal magnetism and some guru skills and you are able to make people follow you in the name of love…
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Seems like you still need somebody with knowledge of making the software to act as an intermediary.
there are some project managers available from time to time when they finish a project, jumping to another.
a project manager will tell you what kind of persons you need to hire and eventually will be able to recruit them (or define position).
you can hire this person as part time consultant, i think some here are able to do the job… if you pay them for.
Everyone’s got to start somewhere. My general suggestion is to learn game dev by jumping on to an existing project and completing that. Preferably a paid role with an established studio.
However its also possible to jump straight in and do things yourself. Just be prepared to learn a lot of lessons the hard way.
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There are a lot of project managers that manage coding projects with zero coding experience.
Often they are not as good as leads with actual experience.
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right, a project manager is a manager…
a project manager with background is a good manager
but hey, Anselmo, if you fell you have the guts to manage a team, then go for it, but you’ll have to give them money or a seriously designed and inspiring project , lots of indies just work this way.
They’re actually called project “destruction” specialists, they take a simple concept and wrap it in so much red tape / procedures that a simple premise that takes a week all of a sudden takes a month.
Hell if the big bosses ever cottoned on that people could write documentation and schedule their own stuff in their calendars, the un-employment queue would spike over night…
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All I have to say is that if someone wants to lead a game design company with no design or programming experience, they need to understand and accept the limits of what can be done and when. I worked a lot in food service, and saw first hand too many times where the corporate big-wigs made a rule to affect the kitchen and clearly never worked in a kitchen in their lives, let alone the ones they owned.
This is like the US and the Congress’ Committee on Science and Technology, run by politicians making decisions on science with no clear understanding of any science at all.
So if you’re in charge with no coding/designing experience you need to consult with the lead programmers and make sure what you want can be done and how long it will take.
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The reason I ask is because of a recent experience I had, where a project making little progress had recently lost several people and when I tried offering suggestions, I was met with the proverbial wall of “don’t question me” from such an individual… kinda gave me a few chuckles. Just wondered what the ol community had to say about it.
Sounds like a loss TBH, if people are leaving and the rest remaining don’t listen it sounds rather Titanic.
Really depends on what the reason for the lack of progress was. Can’t blame management if the work wasn’t actually getting done. You can blame management if they led the team along a course of a series of missteps that resulted in a lot of wasted work. People leaving can be the result of either of those. But it sounds like it might have been because management was unwilling to offer compromises.
Curious what your suggestions were…
A combination of everything you just said.
I suggested the manager decide what everybody was supposed to do… very controversial
I find its marketing that makes your life miserable… this is when a pm with coding experience is best, because they understand the repercussions of that wizzbang feature some dimwit from marketing told the customer they could have.
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