Star Wars Outlaws™ Ubisoft · Massive Entertainment
In collaboration with Disney & Lucasfilm Games
Ghost Recon BreakpointLead UI Artist · PVP
Ghost Recon WildlandsUI Artist · Open World
Ghost Recon FrontlineAssociate Producer · Multiplayer
8 yrs
at Ubisoft
Bucharest

Ubisoft · 2016 – 2023

AAA Game Production

Final Role

Associate Producer

Studio

Ubisoft Bucharest

Titles

Star Wars Outlaws, Ghost Recon series

Timeline

January 2016 – November 2023

Strategic framing

A game producer is a product manager.
The difference is the medium.

The product

  • A shipped game feature or mode — scoped, scheduled, and quality-validated
  • Defined by a release milestone and a player experience bar, not just a spec
  • Continuously refined through playtests, feedback loops, and iteration

The customers

  • Players — the only real quality metric is whether the experience lands
  • The studio — features must ship on time, on budget, and to standard
  • The IP holder — in Outlaws, Lucasfilm held approval authority over every creative decision

My role

  • Own the roadmap and milestone plan across 50+ people and multiple disciplines
  • Translate between design intent, engineering constraints, and stakeholder expectations
  • Make scope calls grounded in player impact — a perspective sharpened by years as a UI/UX designer before becoming a producer

A Career Built Title by Title

My nearly eight years at Ubisoft Bucharest were defined by continuous growth — from crafting individual UI elements as a junior artist to leading production on gameplay features for some of the most high-profile games in the industry. Each role was a deliberate step: more ownership, more complexity, more people to align. The thread running through all of it was the same instinct that now drives my product management work: understand what the product needs to be, translate that clearly to the people building it, and remove every obstacle in their way.

Career Progression

2016 – 2018

UI Artist — Ghost Recon Wildlands

Designed and implemented menus and HUD elements for this open-world tactical shooter. Post-launch, led UI delivery for Ghost War PVP mode — coordinating the team, managing task pipelines, and mentoring junior artists.

2018 – 2021

Lead UI Artist — Ghost Recon Breakpoint

Owned the full Ghost War PVP UI from concept to ship — coordinating design, programming, and QA stakeholders, and overseeing implementation across all features. Managed a multinational UI team across multiple studios, introduced structured retroplanning processes, ran hiring for UI Art positions across the Eastern European hub, and drove team wellbeing and motivation alongside delivery.

2021 – 2022

Associate Producer — Ghost Recon Frontline

First full production role. Led gameplay feature development for this AAA multiplayer title — owning the roadmap, milestone planning, and day-to-day alignment across design, engineering, and art disciplines.

2022 – 2023

Associate Producer — Star Wars Outlaws™

Drove the development of key game components for Ubisoft's first open-world Star Wars game, in close collaboration with Disney and Lucasfilm Games. Coordinated cross-studio teams and managed high-profile stakeholder relationships.

Impact & Measurable Outcomes

The producer role is fundamentally about delivery — but delivery that is measurable, repeatable, and improving. Across Ghost Recon Frontline and Star Wars Outlaws, here is what I can point to.

50+ team members

Cross-discipline team coordinated

  • Gameplay & online programmers, game designers, UI/UX, audio, dev testers
  • Distributed across multiple studios and time zones
  • Day-to-day alignment owned end-to-end across all disciplines
Full game delivered pre-cancellation

Ghost Recon Frontline — delivered under uncertainty

  • Near-complete game delivered before HQ strategy change and budget cuts
  • Team maintained delivery discipline throughout — milestones hit despite external uncertainty
  • Cancellation was a business decision, not a production failure
PVP mode owned end-to-end

Star Wars Outlaws — full ownership of a major game mode

  • Owned gameplay features, 3Cs, and maps built specifically for the PVP mode
  • Coordinated design, engineering, art, and audio across studios
  • Delivered within the Lucasfilm approval framework — every asset reviewed and signed off
3 initiatives process improvements

Production efficiency — introduced across both titles

  • Paired programming — reduced code review bottlenecks, increased senior-to-junior knowledge transfer
  • Feature decomposition — broke large game design features into smaller chunks focused on the player's critical path, improving predictability and quality
  • NDA playtests with real players — regular structured sessions with registered players; feedback prioritised as a team and fed back into the sprint

How I Prioritise & Key Decisions

Production on a AAA title is a constant negotiation between ambition and reality. These are two of the decisions that shaped how I worked.

Vertical slice-first feature delivery

Introduced across both titles — feature scoping & delivery sequencing

Game designers naturally think in complete, final-game features — fully realised, fully connected, at full scale. The production challenge is that building everything at once creates invisible dependencies, late integration risk, and a team that never sees anything working end-to-end until it's almost too late to fix it.

My approach

  • Start with the vertical slice. Before anything else, I identified which part of the map, which missions, and which player-facing features needed to be complete, polished, and fully functional for the vertical slice milestone — a self-contained section of the game built to release quality.
  • Extract and sequence. From each large feature, I extracted only what was needed for the slice and broke it into clear, deliverable steps — across all disciplines: programming, UI/UX, map creation, audio, QA.
  • Protect the critical path. No team moved on to the broader feature until the vertical slice components were done. This kept the milestone clean and gave stakeholders something real to evaluate.
  • The outcome: features were integrated earlier, quality issues surfaced sooner, and the team always had a working, polished reference point — not a half-assembled one.

Structured playtest feedback prioritisation

Regular NDA sessions with real players — turning feedback into action

Playtests generate opinions fast — and without a clear process, that feedback either gets ignored or creates chaos. The goal was to make player insight a genuine input into production decisions, not a box-ticking exercise.

My approach

  • Real players, NDA-controlled. Sessions were run with registered external players — not internal testers — to get unfiltered reactions to specific features at different stages of development.
  • Impact vs effort framework. After each session, feedback was assessed as a team against impact on the player experience and effort to implement — ensuring the highest-value improvements made it into the next sprint.
  • Whole team in the room. Designers, engineers, and artists participated in the prioritisation discussion — not just producers. This created shared ownership of the decisions and reduced pushback during implementation.
  • The outcome: player feedback became a structured, respected input — not noise. Teams knew what was being acted on, and why, which kept morale and direction aligned.

Working with Disney & Lucasfilm Games

Star Wars Outlaws was developed by Massive Entertainment in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games — which meant that every creative and production decision existed within a larger approval framework. Disney and Lucasfilm held brand and story authority over the entire project: every UI element, every piece of in-game text, every visual design choice had to align with the established Star Wars canon and aesthetic identity before it could be shipped.

↳ Client Management in a High-Stakes Context

Working within this structure was, in many ways, a client-facing product management challenge at scale. It required translating internal production realities into clear communication for external stakeholders, building trust with a rights-holder who had both high expectations and deep IP investment, and ensuring that the development team's creative work was always framed and presented in a way that respected the Star Wars universe. Getting sign-off from Lucasfilm was not a formality — it was a critical gate that required preparation, relationship-building, and the ability to advocate for decisions while remaining genuinely open to feedback. This is the kind of stakeholder environment that sharpens a PM's instincts quickly.

From UI to Production — What the Transition Taught Me

The move from UI artist to producer wasn't just a change of title — it was a shift in how I thought about problems. As a designer, my job was to make things look and feel right for the player. As a producer, my job was to make the system that builds those things work reliably: the schedules, the dependencies, the conversations between disciplines that never happen unless someone makes them happen.

The UX background was an asset I didn't expect to lean on so heavily in production. Understanding how players experience a feature — what they notice, what they ignore, what breaks their immersion — gave me a different quality bar to argue from. When I pushed back on a scope cut or defended a design decision to a stakeholder, I could ground it in user impact, not just production preference. That same instinct is central to how I work as a Product Manager today.

Leading Teams Across Studios & Cultures

Ubisoft Bucharest was a genuinely multinational environment — with teams distributed across studios in France, Canada, Sweden, and Romania collaborating on the same title. Managing effectively in that context meant being precise in writing, deliberate in meeting structures, and consistently transparent about decisions and their rationale.

I was also a hiring manager for UI Art roles across the Eastern European hub — running interviews, designing and assessing ability tests, and making recommendations for roles across multiple studios. Recruiting well is a product decision: the team you build determines what you can ship, and at what quality.

Star Wars Outlaws Ghost Recon Series Disney & Lucasfilm AAA Production Roadmaps & Milestones UI / UX Leadership Multiplayer Games Cross-Studio Teams Stakeholder Management Hiring & Mentorship
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