Making audience feedback impossible to ignore
Global entertainment brand
Player sentiment existed everywhere and counted for nothing. The fix was less about tooling than about arriving in the room on the day a decision was live.
I spend my working life on the problems nobody owns yet.
I’m Sarah Kao. Fifteen years in games and entertainment, mostly spent in the gap between what an organisation believes about its audience and what’s actually true.
The interesting work is never the part somebody has already named.
What I do
I get called in at the point where the org chart runs out.
- How should we launch this?
- How do we explain this without losing the room?
- Could AI do this part?
- Nobody here has done this before.
The work is rarely the deliverable. It’s getting a room of people with different incentives to agree on what’s actually true, then leaving behind a way of working that survives my absence.
Fifteen years, mostly in games
- Fortis Games
- King
- SEGA
- Bethesda
- PlayStation
One example, in full
Games studio · pre-launch · function built from zero
I was hired to build a community team. The first three months, I mostly argued about definitions.
There was no team, no tooling and no shared idea of what success looked like. Marketing wanted reach. Product wanted feedback. Leadership wanted reassurance. Every one of those needs a different function, and hiring against all three would have produced a team that pleased nobody.
So I wrote the operating model before the job descriptions: what community would own, what it would deliberately not own, and how player feedback would reach the people making product decisions while those decisions were still open.
The lasting part wasn’t the headcount. It was that product and marketing ended up with the same vocabulary for the audience—which meant they could disagree about the right things, quickly, without me in the room.
Read the full accountHow I think
Organisations don’t have communication problems.
They have understanding problems.
Customers understand something different to leadership.
Leadership understands something different to engineering.
Engineering understands something different to marketing.
Most organisations try to solve this by communicating more.
I think they should start by understanding better.
Throughout my career I’ve worked between teams that don’t naturally speak the same language. Sometimes that’s players and developers. Sometimes it’s executives and technical teams. Sometimes it’s marketing, community and product.
I’ve realised that my job has never really been social media. It’s helping organisations understand the people they serve—and helping those people understand the organisation in return.
Sometimes that means building a community strategy. Sometimes it means helping an executive explain a complicated idea. Sometimes it means designing AI-powered workflows that remove busywork so people can spend more time thinking.
The tools change. The work doesn’t.
Launches where the story kept changing
Product and communications strategy
Writing the narrative that several teams could each say out loud without flinching, then holding it steady while the plan underneath it moved.
Giving senior people their week back
AI-assisted workflows
Started with the reporting, summarising and chasing. Unglamorous by design—that’s where the hours actually were.
Currently thinking about
Where AI stops being a tool and starts being a colleague
Mostly interested in the etiquette problem, not the capability one.
Why organisations forget things they already learned
Institutional memory is a design problem, not a documentation problem.
What communities know before the data does
The signal usually shows up in tone months before it shows up in numbers.