Agenda
Negotiation and Trust: Getting Teams on the Same Page
Tereza Roller-Sabella (Head of Studio, Plan A Collective)
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Track:
Production & Team Leadership, Business Strategy
Audience Level:
All
Format:
Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: All
Negotiation in game development is rarely just about budgets and scope; it is about how people behave under pressure. Most negotiations fail not on strategy but because someone in the room feels threatened. In this session, Roller-Sabella gives developers a practical behavioral model for high-stakes conversations, from publisher deals and scope cuts to the negotiations inside a team. She introduces two tools: emotional consent, an explicit agreement on how a team handles disagreement, and present listening, a three-layer framework for hearing what is said, what is protected, and what identity feels threatened. Drawing on negotiation research and a decade of real deals, she covers threat response, conflict styles, BATNA, and power imbalance, then closes with a before, during, and after checklist attendees can use immediately.
Takeaway
Attendees gain a method for setting emotional consent inside a team, a way to recognize and choose their conflict style under pressure, a three-layer present-listening framework for high-stakes conversations, and a concrete before, during, and after checklist they can apply to their next negotiation.
Intended Audience
This session targets producers, studio and business leads, developers who deal with publishers or clients, and anyone who negotiates or manages conflict inside a team. It assumes no prior negotiation training and is most useful for people who own outcomes shaped by high-stakes conversations.