Community Connection

For my Community Connection Assignment I interviewed Miroslav Stojanovic. Miroslav is a development director at EA Sports who just moved to the Frostbite team. I picked him because he worked on the FIFA team for 4 years. FIFA is my favourite videogame and I am interested in working for EA Sports. I like coding and am thinking about working for EA Sports. My mom works with Miroslav’s wife. I connected to Miroslav through email. This interview opened opportunities for me to have a connection at EA sports. Having connections at EA sports will help me later in the future. Connections will give me good references, which can help me get a job there.  

Miroslav works in an team to support gamers playing FIFA around the world. The FC Live team does this to keep the game new and running.

• Launching different campaigns and promotions giving our gamers opportunities to accomplish different challenges
• Updating team rosters ensuring that changes in the real world are being properly reflected inside the game,
• Taking care of any production issues that our gamers could experience,
• Making many small improvements and tunings to further improve features that came up with FC24 or previous titles.

There are 4 categories of roles to do all the work listed above. The Production Team is responsible to identify new features, incremental improvements, and the overall understanding of what gamers would like to experience in the game. The Technical Team is identifying how those features should be implemented in the code and making the required changes. The Art Team is a group of creative people who are designing and implementing the required visual or audio changes to the game. Miroslav is in the Develop Management team. The Develop Management team takes care of who and when will be working on the selected features.

 

Miroslav’s responsibilities are

• Manage a development team which generally consists of Software Engineers, Animators, Artists, Designers, and Testers.
• Work with feature development teams to lock down requirements and specifications.
• Anticipate bottlenecks, provide management escalation, project prioritization, make trade-offs, and balance the needs versus technical constraints.
• Identify task-related processes to improve efficiency.
• Focus on the immediate team and identify team issues and suggest solutions related to execution goals.
• Provide regular status reporting and capacity plan updates.
• Track and implement project improvement plans to promote team efficiency.
• Ensure all workflows are clearly defined, processes are documented, and staff trained in expectations of the workflow.
• Coach and mentor development managers and individual contributors within the FC Live team.
• Ensure all team members have professional development plans and conduct regular one-on-ones with my direct reports.

Miroslav’s career spans over 25 years. The hardest challenges he has faced were finding his first job in Canada, staying on top of new software because it is constantly evolving, and having to leave organizations because of his professional growth reaching limits.  Advice he would pass on to someone interested in his job is;

“If you like to play games, try to spend some time to think what do you really like about them. What are the things that you don’t like? How would you make it better? That should give you a new perspective and help you to choose the right path forward.”

Miroslav is passionate about his job because he likes to solve complex challenges and finding new and better ways to do things. To update the new features every year of FIFA, EA goes through a process called Game Development Framework. In Game Developmental Framework there are 6 stages. The first one is planning out the game and new features. The next one is Pre-production. This is when they plan out how to create and add their new ideas. Production is building the game from code. The fourth one is testing. This is when they look for errors in the game. The next stage is the launch of the game. EA launches the new FIFA game every fall. The last step is post launch. This is where they solve issues that gamers may have and add new content.

When Miroslav’s team faces a challenge, like a bug in the game that somebody posts. His team finds the issue and the severity of it. Based on the severity of it, they prioritize it compared to their ongoing work. Then they update the game to fix the issue.

If you want to learn more about EAFC 24, click the link below.

EA SPORTS™ FC 24 – Official Site

I learned a lot about FIFA and EA sports during this interview. I learned how many people work very hard everyday to try and fix issues me and fellow gamers have about the game. I also learned how much effort goes into creating the new game and changing the players teams. This interview was meaningful to me because I learned what was going on behind the scenes and this furthered my interest in working for EA Sports.