The Greatest Product Managers, No. 10: Shigeru Miyamoto — He Handed Over Mario's Day-to-Day and Kept Exactly One Thing: He Plays the First 30 Minutes of Every Game Himself

Shigeru Miyamoto is 72. His title at Nintendo is Executive Fellow and Representative Director.

He has formally stepped back from day-to-day development on the Super Mario series and handed it to a younger generation of developers.

But he kept one action: he personally plays roughly the first 30 minutes of every game.

And after playing it, there is only one thing he is judging — whether it feels like Mario.

Those 30 minutes are what the word “taste” actually looks like

In this profession, talk about taste usually ends up empty. Some people call it aesthetics, some call it detail, some say it’s the thing you can’t articulate but know when you see. None of those can be handed over, and none of them can be checked.

Miyamoto’s 30 minutes are different, because they are executable: a specific duration, a specific action, a specific test.

And the position is well chosen. The opening 30 minutes is the only stretch of a game that every single player experiences — however low the completion rate, first-half-hour reach is close to 100%. It is also the hardest part to get right: tutorial, pacing, the feel of the first jump, the timing of the first enemy, all crammed into the same window.

Someone who hands off everything else and keeps only this segment knows exactly where his judgment is worth the most.

Ranked 10th: taste 99 and originality 99 are top of the board, business 88 is the lowest in the top ten

I had Claude score “the 100 product managers who changed the world”. Miyamoto comes 10th, OVR 95, across six dimensions:

Only three people on the entire board score 99 on taste: Jobs, Allen Zhang, Miyamoto. Originality 99 is also top of the scale.

On the other side, business 88 and scale 92 are the two lowest numbers in the entire top ten.

Yesterday’s piece was Gates — business 99, scale 99, with originality 94 the lowest in the top ten. Today’s man is the exact inverse. They sit 8th and 10th on the same board, both at OVR 95, and the things that add up to that 95 are almost perfectly opposed.

That is not a coincidence. It is the two poles of this profession: one man put other people’s inventions on every device; the other invented new things and never chased getting them onto every device.

Business 88 isn’t a knock — it’s the fights Nintendo chose not to have

Nintendo has sat out round after round of competition. It didn’t chase raw performance. It didn’t chase the graphics arms race. It didn’t chase open-world technical benchmarks. It moved into mobile slowly and warily, and third-party ecosystems have never been its strength.

Those are real commercial costs. Sony and Microsoft left it several generations behind on hardware specs, and its console volumes, revenue base and platform take-rate are not in the same weight class.

Miyamoto has said in interviews that this is no longer an era where customers chase specs alone.

You can hear that as self-consolation, or you can hear it as a choice that has held for forty years. What he and Nintendo keep picking is the same thing — between “how powerful is this machine” and “is this half hour fun,” always bet on the second. Business 88 is the invoice for that choice. Originality 99 and taste 99 are what it bought.

What he’s doing in 2026: taking the characters off the console

Since stepping back from daily development, his centre of gravity has visibly moved.

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie arrives in April 2026 with him as producer, in the final stage of production with Illumination. The live-action Legend of Zelda film, directed by Wes Ball, also has him as producer. In July this year he said publicly that he wants to keep taking Nintendo’s IP beyond games, and that he wants to “bring new characters to the world.”

In a Famitsu interview he talked about Nintendo planning for a future where one household owns multiple consoles, so developers can build for Switch and Switch 2 at the same time.

A man who at 72 handed over the day-to-day of the series he created, then poured his energy into cinemas, theme parks and new characters — he is still doing the same job: putting a feeling in front of more people. Only the carrier changed, from cartridge to screen.

Worth noting: in the top ten of this board, Gates is the only one still writing on his own personal website, Page and Brin’s homepages froze in 1998, and Miyamoto has no personal site at all. He doesn’t write. He makes things.

The thing you keep when you hand over is the judgment you believe can’t be delegated

Read the last two days together and a useful comparison appears.

Gates handed over Microsoft’s day-to-day and kept fixing a 2045 closing date for the foundation — what he considers undelegatable is endgame design and distribution.

Miyamoto handed over Mario’s day-to-day and kept the first 30 minutes of every game — what he considers undelegatable is whether the thing tastes right.

Both let go. And the one item each of them held back says more accurately who they are than any single decision across forty years.

For an ordinary product manager that turns into a directly usable question: if you had to hand over what you’re holding tomorrow, which one action would you keep for yourself? That action is your actual job. Everything else can be hired.

I can’t name an action like that

I thought about my own answer and found I don’t have one.

If I handed over what I build tomorrow, I could not name a kept action as specific as “the first 30 minutes.” Everything I can think of comes out as “steer the direction” or “hold the quality bar” — phrases that cannot be handed over. And the reason they’re empty is that they can neither be executed nor checked.

Miyamoto’s 30 minutes hold up because they can be put on a calendar, because other people can see him doing it, and because at the end he can give a yes or a no.

A 72-year-old, stepped back from the day-to-day of the series he created, keeps playing the first half hour of every game himself. One test only: does it feel like Mario.

(All scores and rankings in this piece were produced by Claude, an AI; methodology is on the rankings page.)