Work Diaries: YouTube Gaming's Steve Norman preps for DrLupo's charity live stream
Dec 13, 2022 – [[read-time]] minute read
We’re peeling back the curtains with our series, Work Diaries, where you can experience the inner workings of YouTube. How do decisions get made? What goes into a product, feature or policy? We’re asking YouTube employees to give us the low-down during a five-day period.
Featured today: Steve Norman is the Senior Product Marketing Manager for YouTube Gaming. Specially, he focuses on Gaming Creator success — whether it’s building programs with Creators, helping lend YouTube support for Creator led initiatives, or helping get the word out about YouTube initiatives to Gaming Creators.
Monday
It’s week 11 of development around a big December moment we’re working towards and there’s a lot to catch up on. Let me explain:
9:30 AM: Time for a meeting with my fellow Gaming Marketing leads, Alex and Magali. Alex focuses on anything Viewer, Mags owns all things Gaming Industry and I focus on marketing to and with Creators. We’re the three musketeers, and are a well-oiled machine — which is good because we work on everything together and collaborate dozens of times each day.
12 PM: We met with YouTube Gaming’s partnerships team to discuss gaming publishers for possible integration with DrLupo’s live stream. Everything we discuss will need to be run by Lupo’s team — it’s his live stream after all — but we’re all really excited about it and the good that the stream is going to do this year.
3 PM: I would love to share what I just had a meeting on, but it’s a secret. All will be revealed during the live stream on December 17th!
Today’s highlight: We’ve been working on this project for so long, it feels so cool to see a lot of this come together, and I’m really excited for the live stream DrLupo is building.
Tuesday
10 AM: In the office today! In a regular YouTube Marketing meeting I was able to share the campaign and pointed everyone in the direction of the official website for Build Against Cancer where shirts for the stream are on sale with all proceeds from the sale of the shirts going directly to St. Jude. I bought a couple of them — one to wear, and one to keep as a memento of this campaign.
12 PM: Time to chat with my YouTube buddy Jeffrey, who is DrLupo’s Partnership Manager, to discuss how we can get as many eyeballs on the December stream as possible. Jeffrey and I meet regularly, as getting the word out about anything Gaming Creators are working on is the highest priority. It is my job after all!
3 PM: I was able to join a roundtable discussion with about a dozen of our Gaming Creators to discuss Live Gaming’s benefits and best practices. It was inspiring to hear Creators sharing their success stories on YouTube with their fellow streamers and was certainly a highlight of just how much we care about our Creators.
Today’s highlight: So much of today was spent discussing Creator success with both internal teams, and Creators themselves. What’s interesting is that every meeting I was in was filled with smiling people all working together towards a common goal.
Wednesday
9 AM: Like so many other teams at YouTube, the Gaming team is focused on making 2023 as awesome as possible for YouTube’s Viewers and Creators. I’ve just left a meeting with a large number of YouTubers from all over the world to discuss a very specific program we’re launching in early 2023 that’ll make the lives of smaller Creators much, much easier!
12 PM: Today I was able to participate in a g2g (Googlers to Googlers) discussion. This is one of my absolute favorite things about this company. These meetings are when people who have worked at YouTube / Google for long periods of time meet with newer members of the team to chat about anything they might be wondering about, interested in or afraid to ask during their first few months at the company. I love being able to meet and interact with new team members who I might otherwise never run into.
3:30 PM: Mags and I had an amazing meeting with the Xbox team this afternoon to discuss Mojang Studios / Minecraft's contribution to the DrLupo moment that will help us make this donation moment even bigger. We’re discussing big surprises that I won’t spoil here!
Today’s highlight: I snuck away from my desk for a few minutes with the Gaming Marketing team to visit our micro kitchen which does Boba Tea on Wednesdays. After doing hard work, everyone deserves a treat, right?
Thursday
8 AM: Circling the wagons with our support teams to make sure that if anything should go wrong with DrLupo’s stream, he and his team has someone to reach out to in order to get it back up and running as soon as possible. It’s so cool to see what a well-oiled machine YouTube is, and how much goes on behind the scenes for every live stream. Huge kudos to the team that runs the Team YouTube social channels, they really are best in the business!
12 PM: Had an opportunity to grab lunch with the YouTube Support Escalation team, they’re the ones on the other end of the Bat Phone that we can use in the event of emergencies during our marketing programs. I had imagined that finding partners for an event that takes place over 24 hours on a weekend in December would be a daunting task, but over turkey and swiss sandwiches we not only built a triage plan together but also decided to get together and watch the stream in one of our local offices!
Even though I’ve been at YouTube for a while now, I’m still learning just how much goes on behind the scenes of each piece of content that our Creators make.
3 PM: One of our favorite pages on YouTube is what we refer to as the Gaming Destination page, or youtube.com/gaming. A lot goes into the operation of that page, and there’s a small army that is working tirelessly to make it the best possible experience for Gaming Viewers and Creators. We met today to discuss how we can make tweaks and improvements to the page so that we can incorporate user feedback, but also bring more Gaming related content front and center in 2023.
Today’s highlight: Even though I’ve been at YouTube for a while now, I’m still learning just how much goes on behind the scenes of each piece of content that our Creators make. Not sure what I’m talking about? That actually means the system is working!
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Friday
Out of the Office: It’s the Friday before Thanksgiving and the office is starting to clear out a bit. That means it’s time to making sure everything is set for the first few days of next week so that I can make the most of the shortened week and spend time with my family during the holiday. I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving, but if I’m being honest I’m looking forward to the 28th when we’re back in the office as it means that we’re just a few short weeks away from DrLupo’s charity stream. I’ve been working on this for months now with my partners across multiple teams at YouTube, and I can’t wait to see it all come together and to help Lupo raise as much money as possible.
Today’s highlight: More of a highlight for the week, and this entire program. I’ve met with a lot of teams, companies, and YouTubers so that we can help DrLupo raise as much money as possible for St. Jude. What’s inspiring to me is that no matter who I was speaking with, the response to hearing about DrLupo’s live stream was always the same: “How can I help?”