Why the best things your team will ever build are the things you didn't ask them to build.
I've been a producer for twenty years. My job, in the most reductive sense, is to make sure things get done — on time, on budget, at quality. I've run teams in Japan and the US, shipped AAA games and live services, introduced agile to organizations that had never heard the word. I have deep respect for process. In fact, I think I love the process of creation more than the creations themselves.
And I'm here to tell you that some of the most important things I've ever shipped happened because someone on the team ignored the process.
Not abandoned it. Not sabotaged it. Ignored it just enough — and in just the right way — to build something nobody was asking for but everybody needed. I've come to believe that one of the most important things a leader can do is learn to recognize when someone on their team is burning to chase an idea, and then get out of their way. Strategically. With a handshake and a deal.
This is what I mean by going rogue. And if you're not making room for it, you're leaving your team's best work on the table.
Spotting the Spark
Every team has at least one person who lights up about something that is buried on the roadmap, or maybe isn't even on the roadmap. It shows up in the way they talk about a feature that doesn't exist yet — not as a complaint, but with energy, with specifics, with a vision that extends beyond their immediate responsibilities. They've already thought about how it would work. They might have already started sketching it in their downtime.
Most production environments treat this as noise. The roadmap is the roadmap. The sprint is the sprint. That energy gets acknowledged with a "that's interesting, let's put it in the backlog" — which, in practice, means it dies. The person learns to stop bringing it up. Their energy doesn't disappear, but it redirects — sometimes into cynicism, sometimes into disengagement, sometimes into a resume update.
Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan spent decades developing Self-Determination Theory, which identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as the three fundamental drivers of human motivation. Their research consistently shows that when people have autonomy over their work — genuine control over what they pursue and how they pursue it — intrinsic motivation and creative output increase measurably. Not incrementally. Measurably. Daniel Pink's work in Drive builds on this, documenting how traditional carrot-and-stick incentives actually reduce performance on complex creative tasks. What drives creative breakthroughs isn't the promise of reward. It's the freedom to follow what matters to you.
As a producer, when I see someone with that spark, I don't hear noise. I hear signal. That energy is the most valuable resource on any development team, and it costs nothing to produce. Your only job is not to waste it.
The Deal
Here's the important part, and the part that separates "going rogue" from "going off the rails": it has to come with a deal.
The deal is simple and explicit. You keep doing the work we need — your sprint commitments, your deliverables, your responsibilities to the team. You maintain your end of the social contract. And in return, I will make space for you to chase the thing you're burning to build. I'll protect that time. I'll defend it to stakeholders. I'll make sure nobody fills it with meetings.
This isn't charity. It's an exchange built on trust. The team member gets autonomy to pursue something meaningful. The team gets a motivated contributor who's fully engaged with both their obligations and their passion. And the organization gets something it can't buy through normal channels: work driven by genuine conviction rather than assignment.
3M understood this as early as 1948 when they introduced the "15% rule" — engineers could spend 15% of their time on projects of their own choosing. The Post-It Note came out of that policy. Google famously scaled the idea to "20% time," producing Gmail, Google News, and AdSense — products that now generate billions in annual revenue from work that was never formally budgeted. The lesson isn't that every passion project produces a Post-It Note. It's that the organizational cost of making room for exploration is trivial compared to the value of the breakthroughs it occasionally produces.
The Prototype That Changes the Conversation
Here's the practical reason going rogue matters, beyond the morale and motivation benefits: passion-driven prototypes de-risk ideas that the normal planning process can't touch.
Every development team has ideas in the backlog that are intriguing but carry too much opportunity cost to formally pursue. The idea might be good, but the risk of pulling people off the critical path to explore it is too high. So it sits. Quarter after quarter, the idea stays in the "interesting but not now" pile, gradually accumulating a kind of organizational inertia that makes it harder to ever greenlight.
Now imagine someone on your team is passionate about that idea. They build a prototype on their own time — a rough, ugly, barely-functional proof of concept. It takes them a few weeks of stolen hours. It cost the project nothing in formal allocation. And suddenly, the conversation changes completely.
A prototype transforms an abstract debate into a concrete evaluation. Instead of arguing about whether an idea might work, you're looking at something that demonstrably does or doesn't. The opportunity cost of a go/no-go decision drops from "weeks of engineering time to find out" to "it's already sitting on this person's machine." You can kill it quickly if it doesn't hold up. And if it does hold up, you've just de-risked a bet that nobody was willing to make through normal channels.
Every game team I've run has had moments where a rogue prototype — built by someone who just couldn't let an idea go — fundamentally changed the direction of the project. From Bayonetta's Dodge Off-Set to Fortnite Festival's Pro Drums. Features that became the thing players loved most, born not from a planning session but from someone staying late because they had to see if it would work.
Why the Wins Feel Different
There's something that happens on a team when a passion-driven idea ships, and it's different from the feeling of hitting a milestone on the roadmap. The roadmap win is satisfying. You did what you said you'd do. Professional pride. Box checked.
The passion-driven win is electric. The person who championed it walks taller. The team that supported them feels a shared ownership that transcends the usual dynamics of assignment and completion. There's a sense of collective surprise — we did something nobody expected, and it worked — that bonds a team in ways that hitting a target date never can. This sentiment even survives disaster — just look on social media to see the comments from all of the passion-driven developers who worked on Mic Vocals and Pro Drums for Fortnite Festival championing the feature and their work, despite being laid off by Epic Games weeks before release.
Aristotle had a word for this: eudaimonia. Usually translated as "flourishing" or "living well," eudaimonia isn't about pleasure or comfort. It's about living in accordance with your fullest capacities — doing the thing you were built to do, in the way only you can do it. When a team member chases a passion project and produces something remarkable, they're experiencing eudaimonia in the most practical, workaday sense. They're flourishing. And that energy is contagious. Other team members see it and start looking for their own version. The culture shifts from "do what you're told" to "do what you're told, and then do what you believe in." That's a fundamentally different kind of team.
The Producer's Role
I want to be honest about the tension here, because it's real. As a producer, my job is to ship. I'm accountable for timelines, for scope, for the overall health of the project. Every hour someone spends on a passion project is an hour they're not spending on the critical path. I can't pretend that trade-off doesn't exist.
But I've learned that the trade-off is almost always worth it, because the alternative is worse. The alternative is a team that does exactly what's asked and nothing more. A team that's compliant but not inspired. A team that ships on time but never surprises you — and never surprises the player. In my experience, the marginal cost of making room for passion is small, and the upside is asymmetric. You lose a few hours on the sprint. You potentially gain a feature, a prototype, a creative direction that transforms the project.
A great producer's job isn't to prevent going rogue. It's to create the conditions where going rogue is productive — where it has guardrails, where it operates on a foundation of trust and mutual accountability, where the person chasing their idea knows that the deal runs both ways. Keep your commitments, and I'll keep mine. Build the thing we need, and I'll protect your space to build the thing you believe in.
The best things your team will ever build are the things they chose to build. Your job is to make the choice possible.
JP Kellams is the founder of Synaesthesia, a consultancy focused on the convergence of gaming and music. Previously, he was Lead Producer on Fortnite Festival at Epic Games. He has spoken at GDC, CEDEC, and the Amsterdam Dance Event on topics ranging from team leadership to the future of live music in interactive spaces.