Four Signs Your Team Is Just Pretending to Make Progress

On busyness, fake momentum, and the grounding truth to never lose.

I've been in rooms where everyone was working hard and the game was quietly falling apart.

So much activity. Not a spare half hour on any leader’s calendar. Jira analyzed and reported and with tickets constantly created and completed. Everyone seemingly focused and occupied every moment. Meanwhile the game, the thing all of it was supposed to be building toward, was in bad shape and getting worse.

What makes this so hard to catch is that it feels like progress. The team is busy, milestones are talked about and always upcoming. But when you get specific about whether the game is actually getting better, the answers get vague.

I call this fake progress. And I've seen it happen at small studios and large ones. It's not a sign that people aren't trying (despite how often senior leaders might make the claim). It's a sign that the team has lost the actual measure of whether what they're doing matters.

The Game Is the Truth

Before I get into the signals, here's the frame I wish we held more sacred: the game is the ultimate truth of whether your team is making progress.

Not velocity. Not milestone pass rate or bug counts. Not how player retention or whatever other metric appears. The game. Is it better than it was? Are players responding to it the way you hoped? Is the thing you're building actually working?

When teams lose the vision and reality of the game as their north star, they start optimizing for the wrong things. And because those wrong things can look like progress, they can keep going for a long time before anyone realizes what's happened.

Four signs I look for...

The Four Signs

1. Nobody can explain where the work is going.

Ask people on the team why they're working on what they're working on. If the answers are generic, things like "it was on the roadmap" or even "to make the game better," that's a sign. Sometimes, you’ll get an honest, “Not sure” or a shrug of the shoulders. When there's real alignment on where you're headed, people can be specific. When there isn't, you get vague answers dressed up in different ways. Again, everyone is still super busy. But busy doing what, toward what end? Is it really an improved player experience?

2. The metrics you're celebrating aren't about the game.

This one is sneaky because the metrics are real and often genuinely positive. Velocity is up. Employee retention is solid. Blocker bugs are down. That’s great! But if they're the things that get celebrated in all-hands and leadership updates, and no one has a metric (or better, a set of metrics) around whether the game is actually resonating with players, you've got a problem. You're measuring activity instead of outcome. That leads to more activity… and perhaps no outcomes.

3. Nobody is playtesting.

When teams are in “heads down” fake progress mode, they're almost always building from the backlog or plan without validating their work against reality. The plan tells them what to do next, so there's always something to work on. But nothing's ever tested. Nobody's watching real players interact with the thing. This is how you end up with a team that's been busy for six months and discovers far too late that the core loop doesn't work. The plan/roadmap felt like a map to success, rather than a common basis for change.

4. The game's not in a good state and nobody's talking about it.

This is the clearest signal of all, but also the one people most want to avoid acknowledging when it's true. I once saw a team spending time on new talent tree icons and arguing about mining. But they didn’t really know how either system would fit into the experience, nor did they have a core loop to speak of. That's a team that's disconnected from the actual state of the game they're building. When the foundation has real problems, and the team is arguing about the plan accuracy or secondary features or edge cases, something's wrong with how they're measuring what matters.

What to Do About It.

The root cause of fake progress is almost always the same: the game somehow drifted off center stage.

Somewhere along the way, the team started measuring itself against internal things: the plans, the metrics, the milestone, the stuff it’s easy to talk about. Those things became the standard of progress. And since they were all things the team had control over, they could always be made to look acceptable.

The fix is not complicated, but it requires some honesty. Start playing the game regularly. Get it in front of real players even when it's rough. Make "is this making the game better?" a key question in your reviews, not an assumption never discussed.

If your team doesn’t want to answer the question, "is the game better than it was a month ago?" you might just have a fake progress problem. And the sooner you name it, the easier it is to fix.

If any of this landed for you...

The Game Dev Leadership Accelerator is a 16-week program for leaders in game dev who were promoted for their craft and never trained to lead. It covers what actually drives whether a team works: leadership, culture, product vision, and process. In that order.

Leaders who go through it come out knowing where to actually point their attention, and with a clearer picture of why their team moves the way it does.

If you want to learn more, fill out the interest form and I'll be in touch: https://forms.gle/er6ew8DBKDnLLk319