I’m staring at the 13th comment on my 363-degree review, and my pulse is doing that weird, jittery thing that usually only happens when I’ve had 3 too many espressos before a board meeting. The screen is glowing with a clinical, white light that feels like a judgment. Anonymous Peer #3 says: “Nina is technically brilliant, but she needs to be more strategic and cultivate more executive presence.”

I tried to go to bed early tonight. I really did. At 21:03, I was under the duvet, eyes closed, manifesting a state of zen that lasted approximately 3 minutes before my brain started trying to solve the riddle of ‘Executive Presence.’ Is it the way I sit? Is it because I wore my ‘Boss Fight’ hoodie to the Q3 planning session instead of a blazer that smells like dry cleaning and desperation? This is the fundamental lie of modern feedback culture. We’ve professionalized the act of being vague. We’ve turned the annual review into a séance where we try to communicate with the ghosts of ‘leadership’ without ever providing a map for how to find them.

I’ve spent the last 13 years of my life balancing difficulty curves for some of the most frustrating games on the market. When a playtester says a level is ‘too hard,’ I don’t just agree with them and walk away. I look at the heat maps. I see that 43% of players are dying at the exact same jump because the lighting makes the ledge look 3 inches further away than it actually is. That is actionable. That is feedback. But in my 363-review, I’m being told to fix a lighting issue in my personality without being told where the lamp is located.

When a manager tells you to be ‘more strategic,’ they aren’t giving you a goal; they are giving you a mirror that reflects their own inability to articulate what they actually want from you. It teaches us to focus on managing perceptions rather than improving our actual skills. We spend $503 on books about ‘presence’ instead of spending 3 hours actually learning how to analyze a balance sheet or optimize a workflow.

The Cost of Fog

There’s a certain cruelty in this vagueness. It creates a ceiling that you can’t see, which means you can’t break it. You just keep bumping your head against it, wondering if you’re too short, too tall, or if the ceiling is even there at all. I see this in my work too. If I make a game level too obtuse, players don’t get ‘strategic’-they get angry. They quit. They leave 1-star reviews saying the game is broken. In the office, we don’t quit immediately; we just slowly erode. We become ‘quiet quitters’ or ‘engaged-but-cynical,’ which is a state of being I’ve inhabited for at least 103 days of this fiscal year.

That experience was more ‘strategic’ than any feedback I’ve received in my latest performance cycles. Why? Because the goal was clear: Don’t fall over. The metric was binary: Are you moving? The feedback was instantaneous: The tilt of the platform.

If my manager wanted me to be ‘more strategic,’ she could have said: ‘Nina, you spend 43% of your time on micro-adjustments for Level 3, but you haven’t looked at the player retention data for the end-game in 3 months. I need you to spend 3 hours a week on the long-term roadmap.’ See? I just fixed myself in one sentence. But instead, I’m left wondering if I need to speak 3% slower in meetings.

This culture of useless feedback creates a feedback loop of its own-a literal bug in the system. Managers give vague advice because they are afraid of being too prescriptive or, more likely, because they don’t actually know what the ‘next level’ looks like. So they use buzzwords like ‘synergy,’ ‘alignment,’ and ‘holistic thinking’ as placeholders. It’s the corporate equivalent of ‘lorem ipsum’ text. It looks like a paragraph, but it contains zero information.

I remember a specific instance where I was told I wasn’t ‘visible’ enough. I asked what that meant. Did I need to send more emails? Did I need to stand on my desk? The answer was: ‘You just need to lean in more.’ I am 5 feet 3 inches tall. If I lean in any further, I will literally face-plant into the conference table. That wasn’t feedback; it was a vibe check. And vibes are the enemy of excellence.

In game design, if we want a player to feel a certain way, we have to build the architecture for it. We don’t just hope they feel ‘scared’ in a horror game; we manipulate the field of view, we use binaural audio, and we ensure the 3rd enemy they encounter is always just out of sight. We build the experience through precision.

If the corporate world actually cared about ‘executive presence,’ they would define it. They would say: ‘Executive presence is the ability to summarize a 23-page report into 3 bullet points that a busy person can understand in 13 seconds.’ Now, that is something I can work with. I can practice that. I can balance that.

Tomorrow, I have my 1-on-1 with my manager to discuss the ‘strategic’ comment. I’ve decided I’m going to be a difficult player. I’m going to ask for the data. I’m going to ask for the specific frame-data of a strategic thinker. ‘When you say strategic, do you mean I should prioritize the 103-item backlog differently, or do you mean my 3-year vision for the difficulty curve is misaligned with the marketing spend?’ I suspect she won’t have an answer. She’ll probably tell me to ‘take some time to reflect’ on it.

But I’m done reflecting on ghosts. I’m going to go back to my hitboxes and my damage multipliers. At least there, when something is broken, I know exactly how many units of code I need to change to fix it. I’ll leave the ‘presence’ to the people who have time to chase shadows. I have a boss fight to balance, and the player only has 3 lives left.

“

If they fail, it won’t be because they weren’t ‘strategic’ enough; it will be because I didn’t give them the tools to win. It’s time our managers realized the same thing about us. Are we building a game that people can actually win, or are we just watching them wobble until they fall?