Farnoud Fathi

Producer

Games, immersive media, and the tools that keep teams shipping. Based in Vancouver.

Shipped on Steam

14-person team

1,200+ attendees · 3 countries

Producing since 2014

Selected work

Game · Steam · 2024

Spray N' Pray

Project Manager · UE5 · Team of 14 · 18 weeks

Shipped 30% ahead of schedule · Best Final Project

High-fidelity FPS built by a 14-person interdisciplinary team and released on Steam.

Production tool · 2026

ProdKit

Designer & builder · Python, Discord, Jira Cloud

Ran unattended for a 6-person team · writes directly to Jira

Async standup bot that catches handoffs that never happened — work stalled behind a ticket the board says is finished.

Studio · VR & AR · 2018–2024

APED

Founder & Producer · 3 shipped works · teams of 2–9

1,200+ attendees across 3 countries · zero downtime

Immersive studio founded in Tehran. A VR narrative and two LiDAR installations built with NYU Tisch.

Film · in production

ISY

Producer · Virtual production · Team of 6

8 high-fidelity shots on fixed schedule and budget

Shot-level scheduling, dependency mapping and budget tracking on a small-crew short film.

Game · iOS · 2025–present

S.T.O.P.

Producer · UE5 · Team of 3 · two time zones

Average playthrough time up 20%

Mobile title shipping through TestFlight, from pre-production to live builds.

Client work · 2014–2018

Vortex Effects

AP → Producer · Samsung, Nestlé, Unilever

4+ concurrent productions · zero client escalations in 4 years

Advertising and campaign production, pre through post, against client deadlines with no slack.

← All work

01 — Production tool

ProdKit

Designer & builder · Python, Discord, Jira Cloud · 2026 · Live in team testing

Small teams stop opening the tracker, so the board goes stale and every report built on it inherits that. ProdKit inverts the trade — answering the standup is the board update, so the team does less than before and the board finally reflects reality.

What I did

Built handoff verification — when a blocking ticket is marked Done, the bot asks the waiting person whether they actually received the work, catching stalled tasks that look healthy on the board

Implemented Jira write-back on button tap: transitions, blocked labels and comments post straight to the board, so nobody opens Jira to update it

Derived cycle time and staleness from Jira's changelog against each person's own working calendar and timezone, requiring zero time tracking from the team

Wrote a producer digest ordered by urgency — idle people first, then handoff failures, then blockers — with escalation counting how long each failure has run

Deployed to a persistent host with per-person scheduled prompts, nudge, cutoff and end-of-day check-in

Ran unattended for a week with a six-person team against a live Jira board. The run surfaced eleven bugs across scheduling, storage and state handling — each documented with its cause and fixed. Deployment metrics to follow.

GitHub repo Process document · 9pp

← All work

02 — Game

S.T.O.P.

Producer · Secondary: Game Designer · UE5 · iOS TestFlight · Team of 3 · 2025–present

A mobile title built by a three-person team across two timezones, currently in TestFlight ahead of App Store release.

What I did

Own the end-to-end production roadmap and milestone schedule from pre-production through live TestFlight deployment

Run weekly risk assessments against the schedule, reallocating work before slippage compounds on a team where one blocked person stops a third of the project

Manage the iOS release pipeline — provisioning, build submission, TestFlight distribution and mobile-specific constraints

Design wave-based progression and difficulty curves, iterating layouts and pacing from playtest data

Average playthrough time up ~20% across build iterations.

← All work

03 — Studio

APED

Founder & Producer · Immersive studio · Tehran · 2018–2024

Founded a studio in a region with no active game industry and shipped three works: a VR narrative exhibited across three countries, and two LiDAR-based interactive installations built with NYU Tisch.

Immanuel

Meta Quest & PC VR · Team of 8 · 1,200+ attendees · 3 countries

Managed full technical production and player-experience quality for a live VR title exhibited across three countries

Built and maintained the exhibition schedule across international venues, coordinating hardware logistics, crew and load-in against fixed public dates

Ran build stability and hardware checks before each exhibition window, treating uptime as the delivery metric rather than feature count

Iterated interaction design and environmental cues between exhibitions from direct observation of attendee behaviour

Zero downtime across all public exhibitions. Average engagement tripled, from under 5 minutes to over 15.

reFrame

Azure LiDAR · Custom AR HUD platform · Remote R&D with NYU Tisch

Coordinated cross-continental R&D between Tehran and New York, aligning hardware testing across a nine-and-a-half-hour timezone gap

Led material and medium research for mesh-based AR projection

Managed remote hardware testing cycles where neither team could physically access the other's rig

reActive

Azure LiDAR · Interactive installation · Remote R&D with NYU Tisch

Coordinated testing and implementation of head-tracking as a touchless alternative to touchscreen and hand-tracking interaction

Scoped a low-latency movement-based interaction model for non-traditional UX environments

← All work

04 — Game

Spray N' Pray

Project Manager · Secondary: Game Designer · UE5 · Shipped on Steam · Team of 14 · 18 weeks · Vancouver Film School

A high-fidelity FPS prototype built by a 14-person interdisciplinary team and released on Steam. Awarded Best Final Project.

What I did

Implemented Jira and Scrum from scratch for a team that had never used either, onboarding artists, engineers and designers onto a shared backlog

Maintained the sprint board and project documentation across 200+ tasks, keeping status accurate enough for leadership to plan against

Ran daily stand-ups and tracked blockers to resolution, resolving 95% the same day

Rebuilt the art-to-engineering handoff after identifying it as the main throughput constraint

Managed scope against an 18-week fixed deadline, cutting and resequencing work to protect the Steam release date

Organised bi-weekly playtests with 100+ unique testers and triaged findings into the backlog

Shipped on Steam 30% ahead of the production schedule. Feature throughput up 15%. Awarded Best Final Project.

Secondary — Game Design

Designed enemy types and wave composition; balanced health, damage and ammo drop rates across difficulty tiers, reducing mid-play abandonment by roughly 35%

Steam page

← All work

05 — Film · in production

ISY

Producer — scheduling and production management · Virtual production · Team of 6 · 2026

A six-person team producing a 7–8 shot short film, built to demonstrate that a small crew can hit high-fidelity quality on a tight schedule and budget.

What I do

Build and maintain the shot-level schedule, tracking each shot through the pipeline with owners, dependencies and delivery dates

Maintain a dependency map so blocked work surfaces before someone is sitting idle rather than after

Run budget tracking against a fixed ceiling, flagging overruns early enough to rescope rather than overspend

Manage schedule recovery when shots slip, resequencing downstream work rather than absorbing delay at the end

In production. Results on delivery.

← All work

06 — Client work

Vortex Effects

Assistant Producer → Producer · Advertising & marketing production · Tehran · 2014–2018

Four years producing video and campaign work for Samsung, Nestlé and Unilever, running multiple concurrent productions through pre, production and post.

What I did

Ran 4+ concurrent production schedules, acting as the point of contact between client stakeholders and internal crews

Managed creative and technical milestones against client-facing deadlines with no room to slip

Coordinated vendor dependencies and crew scheduling across overlapping productions

Delivered flagship product launch campaigns for global brands across international markets

All milestones delivered on time. Zero client escalations across four years.

How I work

Three artifacts from live production. Annotated, not decorative.

Sprint board mid-sprint with blocked items annotated

The board mid-sprint. Work moves left to right, but nothing closes without a second pair of eyes — review is a gate, not a formality.

Dependency map showing which deliverables block which

Every hard handoff in the sprint, upstream to downstream. One chain slipped four days — caught on day three, not at sprint review.

Schedule showing a milestone that slipped and the recovery plan

The producer digest at end of day: overdue work first, then who hasn't answered, then what the bot wrote back to Jira. It goes out before anyone has to ask.

Decisions argued and locked before architecture, architecture before build, each step signed off before advancing. The reasoning behind ProdKit is documented end to end, including the reversals.

About

I'm a producer based in Vancouver. I've been producing since 2014 — advertising campaigns for global brands in Tehran, then immersive work through APED, a studio I founded in a region with no game industry, and now games.

My job is clearing the path: knowing what's blocked before someone tells me, keeping schedules honest, and making the mechanics of a project invisible to the people doing the work. When the tools don't do that, I build them.

Production

Agile (Scrum/Kanban) · Jira · Confluence · Milestone Scheduling · Risk Management · Dependency Tracking · Scope Management · Sprint Planning

Technical

Unreal Engine 5 · Perforce · Python · Git · Figma · ShotGrid (actively learning) · TestFlight

Résumé (PDF)

Contact

Let's talk production.

Open to Producer, Assistant Producer and Production Coordinator roles in Vancouver or remote.

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