Author: helava

Writing Structure?

One of the things I’ve just been beating my head against with this writing project is how to elegantly tie a bunch of things together. Product design is about a lot of things – but a lot of it is centered around finding a “focus” – some clearly defined problem you’re trying to solve. That focus enables two critical things: testing and collaboration.

Testing, because if you know what you’re trying to build, you can ask people whether you’re making progress in the right direction or not. Most product development processes I’ve seen are vague enough that any result can be interpreted as a good result. Which is useless.

Focus also enables everyone to know what they’re supposed to be doing, which is *the* foundation of collaboration. It allows you to distribute authority to people with expertise, rather than keeping all the decision-making in your own head, which inevitably turns you into a bottleneck and a huge point of failure. After all, you’re not an expert on everything.

But then, distributing authority requires a lot of team culture issues to be front of mind. Psychological safety first among them. Ability to communicate clearly. To communicate *intent* in addition to tasks, so that everyone can help reinforce that what you’re doing is aligned with that focus.

It’s kind of a ouroboros in a Gordian knot – everything is interwoven, and trying to explain it in some sort of linear order breaks my head, because I can’t find a way to explain one thing without a bunch of prerequisites, and untangling the web of prerequisites… well, I haven’t found the right sword yet.

I think perhaps one way will be to separate things more, rather than trying to integrate them more. Focus, Team Culture, Leadership (thanks to Eric Nehrlich for reversing my initial order) each being different sections – sort of a progression from the outside in – starting with the customer & what they need, structuring your team in a way that maximizes the experience and strength of the team, and then what your responsibilities are to your team and why your leadership can have a massive impact on all of that jazz.

Which provides some structure to the process. I think even with those things “separated”, I’m going to have some tendrils that tie concepts together across sections (maybe an explicit “prerequisites” block where necessary, or maybe a Jason Shiga-style “choose your own adventure” path through things if you want to follow that concept down a bit deeper. I dunno.

But at least it provides a reasonable starting point.

Musk & Software

Videogames are software. And as critical as engineers are to videogames, if a game team fired most of its designers and artists and said that engineers would constitute the majority of the development team and that all other disciplines were secondary… you’d end up with some terrible videogames.

No disrespect to engineers at all. But just because software is code, software is a creative collaborative multi-disciplinary effort that requires top-level work from ALL disciplines involved working *together* toward a shared vision.

Creating a world where designers, artists, audio folks, producers, project managers, etc. are “second-class” citizens relative to engineers is not how to create great software. I say that with a 20 year history, and at least a few significant successes that illustrate that I know what I’m talking about.

Musk may be smart in some fields, but it’s clear he’s got a 101-level approach to building consumer software, and if I was a Twitter employee, I’d take the severance and GTFO. This is the wrong approach, and since it’s worth calling your shots, it *will not succeed*.

Done?

I loved being a game designer & developer. I loved working with artists, engineers, producers, animators, musicians and SFX designers, testers, the works. Sitting in the middle of this disparate set of skills and helping us all try to build something genuinely new that stood on the shoulders of the giants that came before us? It was always a pleasure.

But at the same time, now that that part of my career is almost certainly definitively over, I’m *so* glad it’s over. Whether it was the constant stress and drive, the fact that so many managers seem to think their random opinions are worth as much as my expertise, the ridiculous unrealistic expectations, and the overall disposability of the work and its continuous devaluation in the market…

I don’t need that.

I used to have these really poofy eye bags under my eyes. I assumed that’s just “how my face was”. But I sleep better now. Not great, but better. And some days? Those eye bags are *gone*. It’s like waking up and finding out my NOSE is missing. Something that I assumed was just part of “me” isn’t – it was a manifestation of the constant stress.

So yeah. I’m grateful for my career. I was luckier and more fortunate than almost anyone I know, and was blessed to work with wonderful, creative, and brilliant people. I’ll miss that a lot.

The rest? Not even for a minute.

COVID

Caught COVID a few weeks ago.

I’d gotten all the vaccines & boosters. I’ve worn masks indoors and at public gatherings well after most people stopped. My kids are masked up at school almost the entire time. We weren’t perfect by any stretch, though, and our luck finally ran out.

Do I regret all the precautions having gotten it anyway? No, not for a second. My experience was relatively mild. One of my kids got it, and had similarly mild symptoms, and the other didn’t get it at all. Certainly a far cry from if we’d gotten it in 2020.

Here’s the thing – in business, sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you get unlucky. You can’t always control the outcome, and sometimes some small bit of bad luck will be fatal, and sometimes everything will go wrong and you’ll miraculously be fine.

The only thing you can do is to try to be prepared for things. To take smart precautions. To try to mitigate risk as much as possible. And sometimes stuff just goes cattywumpus anyway. You can’t control everything. All you can do is mitigate risk and try to be prepared.

For me, having gotten vaccinated, having worked to minimize whatever exposure we *did* get – the result was that it was a mild experience, and I’m grateful for that. This is the same approach I did my best to take when at work – to anticipate the things that were coming at us, to try to prepare, to minimize risk, and maximize our flexibility and reactivity, so that we could change plans on a dime when needed.

And yeah – that may be COVID, that may be business. But it’s also almost everything. Be prepared, but also be flexible. Mitigate risk where possible. Assume disasters are inevitable. Work to prevent them where possible, but build in the resiliency and flexibility to deal with them when they happen.

If you think you can prevent or avoid all disaster… you’re in for a bad time. Which probably leads to a future post about ostrich optimism, and how much I hate working with people who believe “it’ll all work itself out”. 😐

Inclusivity

Every society that becomes more inclusive becomes better at stuff.

It’s not rocket science. The more people you empower, the more likely you are to find brilliance. If you exclude women, you cut 50%+ of the population, lowering your odds to find brilliance. If you make your workplace hostile to people of color, queer folks, etc., you dramatically lower your odds to find brilliance.

It doesn’t even really matter *how* you define brilliance, unless to you, brilliance is literally homogeneity. Your odds get way worse. If you’re a company trying to live on the cutting edge of anything, where the number of people who can make outsized impacts is already relatively limited? You’re *dead*.

Globally, look at all the repressive regimes across the world that exclude huge swaths of their populations. How many are leaders in innovation? None.

So if your company isn’t providing opportunities at ALL levels for everyone to be engaged and contribute and lead, you’re trashing your opportunity to be the best organization you can be.

There are tons of *other* reasons that building a representative/diverse/welcoming/inclusive organization matters. But if you want a simple argument? It’s just a numbers game.

Every person you exclude is an advantage you’re handing your competition.

Team Culture

I had an absolutely marvelous conversation with Kim Nordstrom yesterday about team culture, re: a book he’s been writing for a while. I’m SUPER jazzed about it, and I’m really glad someone’s doing what he’s doing.

In the course of the conversation yesterday, he mentioned that in the interviews he’s done, he’s found that for team culture, it’s often better to have values that are “brutal”. And I thought “that’s a strange word to use,” but as the conversation went on, it was clear that part of the meaning was that the stated values were specific, black and white, and controversial.

And I think he’s totally right. But if you know me, that’s obvious, right? Because I often state things hyperbolically, and sometimes it bites me in the ass, but I’ve found in general, that more extreme way of framing things pays more than it costs.

Not in everything – but in what a team should be, and the kind of culture that you need. You want to exclude people who don’t believe what you believe. You want people to question whether they believe it or not. You want people to stop and say, “Wait, what?”

And I think one of the reasons is that in the “middle”, once you come away from some extremes, there’s a huge grey area that can be read in so many different ways that it can be anything to anyone. If your team cares about “honesty” and “quality” and other generic pablum, then people can interpret that in a dozen different ways. And if you have a dozen different interpretations, then you have… nothing.

If, on the other hand, you say, “No crunch, ever,” then you need to really think about what that means. What happens when you’re butting up against a deadline? What happens when your team has more work than they can handle? All your experience says, “work more, work harder.” But if your team’s culture says, “No crunch, ever,” what do you do?

Plenty of people *say* that they believe in sustainability. But you only *actually* believe in sustainability when you push the date, or start hiring early enough and with enough advance prep that the new folks will make a positive difference. Or you build an infrastructure that can push at any time. Or you commit to never promising release dates, no matter what a publisher wants.

All those things *cost* something. Culture, to me, is how you spend money and time. Until you pay the price, your beliefs are just words.

But it makes me feel better on reflection a bit – sometimes I worry that my way of phrasing things is a negative, and my perceptions of its benefits are illusory. I fluctuate between seeing it as a superpower and a fatal flaw. And you know what? It’s both. Which, if you know me, you’ve seen both sides of that equation echoing through the last 20 years again and again.

It’s great, it sucks, and you know what? I’ve come to peace with it.

Learning Through Play

One thing that I’ve learned over the years is that the best way to learn is through playing.

And I don’t mean “how we learn X”. I mean “how we learn.”

To me, “play” is when you are trying to do something in a safe environment with rich feedback and encouragement. That describes most video games, but it describes lion cubs wrestling with and gently chomping their siblings.

It also describes school.

But only in the most abstract possible way. At least in the US. And even then, only sort of.

Standardized testing makes the stakes too high. Consequences are permanent WAY too early. You can’t play if failure is an *actual* fail state. You can’t adapt to feedback if you don’t get a chance to iterate. You can’t process criticism if you don’t feel safe.

Students have little room for experimentation or exploration. The actual mechanics of the game are often incredibly uninteresting. It’s all cerebral and abstract, and there’s little physical engagement in subjects that aren’t explicitly physical.

It’s weird that “school” is how we’ve standardized “learning”, and that we smash kids into rows of chairs so early throughout their most formative years and that most of the feedback they get is *punishment* or *failure* for trying new things.

It’d be interesting to contemplate a more play-oriented learning process. I know some other countries do a much better job of this. And as someone who did well in the “traditional” schooling methods, it’s taken me a really long time to realize how *weird* it is that this is how we do it.

Balancing Exploitation & Aggro

I am firmly in favor of workers not being exploited or treated poorly. As a leader, I’ve made it one of my primary focuses. Am I perfect? Of course not. But it’s not just that I do my best at it. It’s that I consider it one of my primary responsibilities, and that it’s as important as literally anything else I do.

I believe that if you are an employee, you should not settle for a place that treats you badly. Places that call you “family” when they need you, but lay you off when you need them. Places that “work hard play hard” and expect you there 60-80 hours a week by default. Places that ask you to miss important life events, or come in on the weekends because the boss needs butts-in-seats (even though I’d finished every task I had) so that he looks good for the C-level folks who are gonna be walking around on Saturday (yes, that has literally happened to me at EA/Maxis. You know who you are.)

BUT…

I struggle with this a lot, because a lot of the best memories of my career are from those torture chamber moments. The 46th day straight of working 11 hour days, the 3am trying-to-get-this-thing-to-build before a huge demo the next day… those things are memories. And a lot of the people I made those memories with became friends that lasted beyond any single job.

Those moments were also where I smashed peoples’ expectations, and built the reputation that was the foundation for the whole rest of my career.

So the advice I have for young people is twofold. Don’t settle for a place that treats you badly. But also, kill it. Overdeliver. Do insane things, sometimes at the cost of other parts of your life. But do it because *you* choose to do it, not because it’s the baseline expectation of an exploitative company.

But if you’ve *got* to choose between the two, and you have the ability and privilege to do it, choose yourself. Choose sanity. Choose life. You’ll eventually be able to get another job, and no matter how good or rare this one seems, you’ll always always always be able to find something better in time.

You’ve only got one life.

Do Less

If you want to maximize your team’s ability to be creative and innovate, the most important thing you can do is less.

This is something I think people understand easily. Take an example:

You’re on fire, and being chased by a bear.
Now learn this new concept OR DIE.

You can’t. It’s impossible. When your brain is in survival mode, it’s not taking in information & synthesizing it into new things. All you can do is survive.

When you’re working at maximum capacity on a tight deadline, you’re constantly in survival mode. And in pursuit of what folks believe is “resource efficiency”, they want every individual working at max capacity all the time.

Literally every single revelatory creative moment for me has come from walking the dog, lying in the bathtub, sitting on the beach. The critical thing is that during that time, I am not doing anything. I’m not *trying* to solve problems. If anything, I’m trying to do nothing (and failing).

I’ve solved challenges under the gun. I’ve made things work at 3am, scrambling to get a build done before a big demo the next day. These things are satisfying, sure, but they’re not the places where I’ve been able to make step-function changes to the success of a product. All of those – every single one – has appeared spontaneously in my head while I was doing nothing.

And when I say that, what I mean is, “These ideas have been set in motion through hard work and conscious analysis. They’ve baked for wildly unpredictable times in my unconscious mind, and a bit of downtime allowed them to pop back from my unconscious mind to my conscious one.”

If you want your team to be maximally creative, you need to do less. You need to be inefficient. You need to have space where employees do not have pressing tasks. You need to have time when they are at work, but are not cranking out widgets, or code, or anything visible. You need to have time where their mind can wander, where they can experiment, and where they wield the entire depth of their knowledge, conscious and unconscious.

It will look like nothing is happening, and make you feel uncomfortable.

You will want to give them tasks and fill their time with stuff.
That would be a mistake.

If you’ve hired smart, creative, hard-working, well-intentioned folks who want to make awesome things… sometimes a bit of nothing may be the best thing you can do.

Refining

The last few months have been interesting. I’ve been helping folks with their resumes for cheap and/or free, mentoring a bunch of randos – individuals and companies – also for free or cheap. And it’s taught me something: I don’t like it.

I want to like it. But I don’t. And it’s worth acknowledging that. I don’t need the money, so it’s not that. Well, it’s not *strictly* that. There’s a few things:

* It’s too slow. 1:1 mentoring is great, because you can get to really understand the person and help them specifically. But it’s a huge investment to transfer some experience/knowledge, and it feels extremely inefficient.

* Doing this for free devalues my experience. Not just to me, but to them as well. I think there’s some balance to be had with “pay me for my experience,” because then you’ll actually *act* on it, rather than getting it for free and maybe deciding to do some of what I’m suggesting.

In a way, money is sort of a guarantee that they’ll take you seriously. Charge $1,000/hr, and no one’s going to ignore your advice. And they won’t question your credentials, either, because theoretically they’ve validated that before paying you.

Devoting a week of time to help a small startup out, only to have them say, “Well, we trust our judgment so we’re going to do X,” when you know their current course of action is suicide is just frustrating. Particularly when “our judgment” consists of exactly zero relevant experience. It’s wild.

But this has happened a few times, now. I’ll invest an hour or two helping someone with their resume, then they come back with a revision having done *literally nothing* I told them to, and want feedback. The feedback is, “Yeah, the text is different, but all the problems are the same. My suggestions are the same. Glad to see you’ve found a direction that you’re happy with, but I can’t (and won’t) help you anymore.”

My time’s too valuable for this kind of shit. If you need help, I’m more than happy to help. But the caveat is that either you do what I suggest, or we *talk about* why you’re hesitant to do so, because sometimes circumstances can be subtle. But if you’re just rejecting my advice outright, then no, I’m not spending any more time with you, and I regret spending any with you at all.

So yeah – I dunno. This year, I’m hoping to find a way to have a “second phase” career either doing some mentoring or advising for $. If the rate is reasonable, and the people are good to work with and willing to take input, then that’d be super satisfying. Ideally, I’d like a one-to-many arrangement – something where I can impact more people at a time, because a lot of the advice I give is applicable to fairly broad ranges of folks. But the 1:1 stuff and the volunteer stuff? I’m winding that down in 2023, barring a few minor exceptions.

But, glad I gave it a go. It’s interesting to feel parts of it work, and parts of it grate, and realize what the problems are. This isn’t so much a failure as it is a refinement and discovery of what does and doesn’t work for me, and the kind of impact I want to have.