Just ask.

I got an e-mail from a friend today, and he’d mentioned someone we both know. Happens to be my old co-founder, who I … don’t have the fondest memories of.

Hearing his name is a pretty severe trigger. Particularly when mentioned casually, more particularly affably. It brings back nearly five years of abject misery – without question, the worst period in my life.

I have friends in common with him, still, and so his name periodically comes up. When it doesn’t, I’m fine. Good, even! Generally moved on with my life, blah blah blah. When it does? It’s still sort of a red mist experience.

But because most of these folks don’t know that this makes me incredibly, deeply, fundamentally angry, I try to keep those feelings tamped down, and just get on with things.

But I’d been talking to my therapist about this, and his advice seemed sensible. Just ask them to not mention him around you.

It’s not like it’s a huge ask. But it always felt like, “I don’t want to bring people in to my trauma, or make them feel like they need to walk on eggshells around me.” Or even, “I don’t want people to realize that I’m still deeply traumatized by something that happened a *decade* ago.” It feels like I’m being petty, or broken in some way.

Which may be true! But it’s advice I’m trying to take to heart. Because it’s not a big deal to ask. If someone thinks I’m weak or silly or whatever, that’s fine. They’re telling me something important about them. Everyone else? They’ll understand and be kind.

So yeah. Just ask. It won’t be easy. It might feel dumb. But if you get what you want, it’ll make your life better. Give it a shot.

Welp. Another one of those, “How did this realization take this long to come to?” moments.

Five years or so ago (pandemic warped time, but I think that’s still right), my neighbor passed away. Or rather, I think of the woman that passed as “my neighbors’ mother,” but it was her house. I just knew her kids (who are all significantly older than me) better than I knew her. They invited me to her funeral.

I appreciated the invite, but wasn’t sure I should go. I didn’t know her particularly well. And I felt like … maybe it wasn’t going to be a place I should be. They were black. The mom had been part of the diaspora from the south, and was a pillar of the black community in Oakland for decades. This was going to be a celebration of her life, and I wasn’t sure I’d fit in or necessarily be welcome, even though the family had invited me.

I went. It was amazing. I learned so much about this neighbor I barely knew. And about her family, which I thought I did. I was indeed welcomed, and was so glad to be able to have been a part of it, and show up for the family.

But that hesitance.

I knew most of the folks there wouldn’t look like me. Most folks didn’t share my mannerisms or history. The way I carried myself would be different. The way I talked would be different. The way I’d shake peoples’ hands, or greet them would be different. I wouldn’t know the customs. For the vast majority of folks there, I wouldn’t know how to approach them, and 100% vice versa. I didn’t know anyone else there (except a few other neighbors, who were also not black).

The thing that just hit me, and *holy cow* I feel dumb that it’s taken this long… I bet this is what every black person going to work at a company totally dominated by white people and Asians. Which is every single place I worked at in my career.

And more, while I was welcomed by the community at her funeral, and I left feeling like my fears were unfounded, that’s absolutely *not* how it turns out for a lot of black folks I know at work.

I try to be conscious of these things. I try to read and learn, and where possible, put those things into action. But making a really, really obvious connection like this took what, five years to finally realize?

So yeah. Probably a lot for me to unpack in my own mind. But I think the thing that stood out to me was that at the absolute bare minimum, you can be welcoming and excited to bring someone unlike you into your community. That went a long way for me, and I’m sure it’d go a long way for anyone in that situation. It’s not all of what you need to do, but it’s a good start.

What’s been going on? Built a kit guitar recently – a Les Paul-style kit from stewmac.com. It was a fun, slow, exercise in patience. That is, to where I am now, which is a finished-but-not-yet-polished body. It needs between a week and a month for the clearcoat to cure before I can final sand it.

Other than that, been mentoring some folks and a few companies, which has been fun & rewarding. I feel like this is something I could make a career out of, though it’d take a while to build. No worries, though, we’re still doing just fine.

Kids are good – J&K are 12 and 9, respectively, and chugging along re: school. They seem to be happy & well-adjusted. They’re both super creative but in slightly different ways. K’s got a huge aptitude and passion for making art. J’s starting into his school’s Animation Club this week, so hopefully that’ll be a nice creative outlet for him (and get him spending a bit more time with some of his classmates). I couldn’t be prouder of the pair of ’em.

I post infrequently about my thoughts on work, right? But it’s now been about 2.5 years since my last job. And I’ve always hated when people muse about work culture when they’re not *doing the work*. The cadre of TEDx speakers who talk about culture culture culture without actually doing the work of managing a team and creating a culture and striving to maintain it.

So I find that I have less and less to say. Which is fine.

But maybe to cap things off – one of the things I’m most proud of in my career is that turnover on my teams was incredibly low. And I like to think (though it’s not my place to say, because I didn’t *experience* what I tried to put into action) that it’s because the work was meaningful, people had opportunities to learn and grow, that they felt listened to (even if holy crap, I was far, far, far from perfect), and that even if something wasn’t right, that it was clear we were constantly striving to improve the team culture.

And the thing that’s baffling to me is that in both jobs I got ousted from, the teams immediately started to churn. And it wasn’t that *I* was suddenly gone. (I’m not *that* egotistical!) It’s that the culture changed. People didn’t feel listened to. They didn’t feel like they had opportunies to grow. I’ve talked to dozens of people who’ve left teams I previously led, and it’s always some variation of the same theme.

And it’s always because the folks who took over the team had the same goal – I heard it directly from them in some form or another, that it was time for the “people with big boy pants” to come in and take over and do things “right”. That my approach was too chaotic or unpredictable. But the thing is, when you’re working in a world where you’re trying to get to product-market fit, things are chaotic and unpredictable. You can’t form long-term schedules. You can’t predict growth or revenue. You can’t be deterministic. And if you’re trying to make things predictable, you’re lying. To you, to your team.

The “big boy pants” folks always wanted things to be deterministic. To be understandable. To tell their bosses that they had plans, and that those plans would work. And they’d be just as wrong as I would have been if I’d actually *tried* to make predictions, and they were much worse off because they’d try to stick with their plans long after it was clear they weren’t working.

The right way to work when building something new is to minimize inertia. To change whenever change needs to happen. As Bruce Lee says, to “be like water”. It’s a whole skill that you have to learn that has nothing to do with planning and predictability, and the best way to do it is by empowering as many people as possible to understand the thing you’ve trying to build, and to give them authority to make decisions and pull the team in different directions.

I feel like that was my career superpower – that I could recruit everyone on a team to *think* like a product leader, and to have a team where everyone could yank the team in a new direction – but with enough structure that it wasn’t total chaos – it was a managed kind of swirl of chaotic energy, directed toward a unified goal.

I could get a team of people together, we could not know where we were going, but we could share a vision of where we wanted to go. Each individual would have a machete, and we’d all be hacking through the jungle, and it was ordered enough that we were all moving in the same direction, but flexible enough that every single person could make progress toward that goal and *own* something in the process.

My job as the team lead wasn’t to be 1st in line with the machete and have everyone fall in behind me. It was to keep everyone’s knives sharp, and to make sure that even when someone saw something interesting, to remember where we were trying to go so that we all kept pointed in the right direction. To give credit to those who hacked through the jungle and made progress. To celebrate everyone’s achievements and elevate them. To try to evolve how the team worked as it grew (this was often the hardest and most difficult part of my job) without destroying that sense of ownership and exploration.

I feel like I learned a lot of tools. Creative sprints where we’d change up the teams and focus on a single task for a short time. Highly iterative “continuous deployment” development. Summarizing your goals in a single sentence. They’re things that sound easy but are incredibly difficult to do well, and in some cases, are almost completely counterintuitive to what people think of as “good” development.

But I think my track record speaks to that – over 20 years, the teams I worked with forged a lot of new territory, both in mobile games (where we were 1st (or very, very early) in cross-platform development on iOS, HTML5 development, continuous deployment, location-aware stuff, performance marketing and more), VR, healthcare, and even developing some really effective prototyping practices for traditional console development.

Some of those became massively successful. Some of those things were really interesting very early explorations into things that didn’t work out, but later because hugely successful for others. Some of them were total duds. 😀

But I can look back on my career with a lot of pride, knowing that we built a lot of new stuff. And again – it’s not because *I* was smart. It’s because I developed ways to make the teams effective. To wield everyone’s full potential to exploring something new.

I think that’s why there was relatively little turnover. Because we were all in it together. We all had a role to play. We were all part of the creative firepower of the team.

I think that’s the thing I’m most proud of.

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…and no, there’s not really a point to this. It’s just a bit of reflection. As much as “team culture” can sometimes feel organic, it’s not. It’s something that is crafted from the top. It has to be, because culture is how a team spends time and money, and that’s something that unfortunately doesn’t happen bottom-up.

It took years to figure out what I was doing in the working world. What unique perspective I brought to things. I hope that over the course of your career (whoever you are) you find that thing that you do better than anyone else you know. The thing that makes *you* special (at work).

For me, as a generalist, I often struggled with that. I was never going to be as great at anything as any of my specialized friends. So it turned out that my superpower was essentially process management. I thought of it as “game design” for a long time, but it was more about knowing enough about enough stuff that I could see how the pieces all fit together and wield *all* of it more effectively then a specialist could.

It’s funny, because in the end, it feels ephemeral. It feels like nothing, because there’s almost nothing to point to other than “this works”. And maybe that’s why I take some pride in low churn – and that that changed when I left – because it’s a practical outcome of that ephemeral process.

What do I bring to a team? Sometimes it feels like there’s nothing tangible. But being able to look back on things and realize that no, the teams I led were really, really good at building new things. Forging new territory into unknown spaces, and we did it while keeping the team happy and engaged – and were effective at it *because* the team was happy and engaged.

I feel good about that. (Of course I would – I’m looking back on my own thoughts about work and constructing a narrative I feel good about!) But more, if that’s the narrative I have about looking back on my career, I’m happy. And content.

I hope over the next handful of years, I can pass on some of that mentoring others, so that other people can build teams and processes like that, and embrace their own version of the chaos of discovering new things.

I assume a relatively small number of people reading this follow hashtag#f1, but hey, whatever.

Daniel Ricciardo and Mclaren parted ways officially today. It’s been a long time coming, as Ricciardo’s results for the team have paled in comparison to his teammate Lando Norris. I’m a big fan of both drivers, and it’s been heartbreaking to see Ricciardo struggle over the last two years. Why does this matter to you?

F1’s an interesting sport. It’s half technical hardcore team engineering challenge, and half individual driver challenge. Maybe not half-half, maybe more like 70-30. Put a great driver in a bad car these days, and they cannot make up the deficit. Put a bad driver in a great car and they’ll likely end up somewhere in the top half of the grid.

But even still, defining “great driver” and “great car” is still the 101 way of thinking about the problem. Ricciardo is a great driver. He’s won 9 races, and makes the kinds of ambitious overtakes that are necessary to win. His racecraft has historically been great. Mclaren has a good car. Norris has landed it in the top end of the grid regularly *and consistently* this year.

What’s the problem, then? The problem is that different drivers like different qualities in a car. Some need stable front end grip. Some need traction on corner exit. Some drivers are adaptable, and can squeeze performance out of a lot of types of cars, while some may have higher peak performance but need a very specific style of car to get there.

If you look at Ricciardo’s performance recently, it’s hard to not say he’s a “bad” driver by his results. But if you look at his career, it’s also impossible to say he’s a bad driver by almost any metric. The problem is compatibility.

I hope it’s already obvious, but if you’re looking at someone on your team as a “bad” employee, one thing you need to look at first is the context they’re operating in, and if you’ve given them what they need to be successful.

Sometimes your endeavor together is a bad fit, and the only way forward is to part ways. But I’ve had employees who were performing *terribly* turn it around completely with what seemed like small changes. Sometimes it’s incompatibility between people. Sometimes it’s confidence. Sometimes it’s creating the safe space for them to open up.

But before you judge someone as “bad”, take a look at the car you’re providing for them, and make sure you’re giving them the things they, specifically, need to succeed. A great manager treats their charges as individuals, and gives each individual the car they need to succeed. A one-size fits all approach is easier, and sometimes *feels* more fair, but that’s a lazy and largely ineffective way to manage people.

You won’t always find that fit where the performance finally clicks. But you’d be surprised how often a small change can make a huge difference.

It’s odd to think that it’s taken 15+ years of “running the show” at various teams to finally figure out what my perspective on my process is. But I think I finally have a label for it: “Inertialess Development”.

Which, sure, isn’t the most elegant phrase. But almost everything in my process has to do with minimizing the impact of change. Whether it’s stuff like describing your high level goals in a single sentence (EA’s “The X” + Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why”) or pushing as much decision-making authority down the hierarchy as possible (David Marquet’s “Turn This Ship Around” along with Daniel Pink’s “Drive”), to prototyping and testing with real users as quickly as possible (Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup”), everything has to do with being able to adjust your course as you learn.

Most of what I’ve done over the last 15 years has been essentially exploring novel spaces. Medical VR, the early days of App Stores – in both those situations, no one really knew “what worked”, and a lot of elements of development were quite different from the logically adjacent things. App Stores and mobile gamers didn’t behave like console stores or console gamers. Medical VR required different things that traditional VR games.

In both those situations, the most important thing you could do was learn fast. And the best way to learn fast was to try a lot of things, and release as quickly as possible. The best way to do that was to engage everyone on the team – not just in their assigned roles, but to get everyone recruited to think about the product and the users.

We did a lot of testing and data collection. We worked directly with end-users. But we also exerted tremendous experience and judgment, based on those “adjacent” fields that we had expertise in. But I think the most critical thing was that we weren’t bound to a plan.

We had high-level goals. We had a fairly clear understanding of our operating circumstances ($$). But we didn’t have a Profit & Loss to manage. We didn’t have a strict development budget. We didn’t have a timeline to adhere to. Our only goal was to make progress as quickly as possible.

If anyone asked me for a plan, or a prediction, I was clear that I couldn’t and *wouldn’t* provide one. That doing so would be a significant drag on our process, and would create expectations that we explicitly *would not* work to fulfill, because doing so would be explicitly counterproductive to the development process.

My job was to make sure we understood the high level goals. That we pushed our tests to users as fast and cheaply as possible. That we threw away minimal work to minimize negative morale impact.

For building things in novel spaces, I’m totally convinced that if the only skill you & your team has is that you learn faster than anyone else, you will be utterly unbeatable. And the best way to do that is to minimize inertia. Everywhere in the process.

Just saw a post from someone on LinkedIn that said “Nothing is permanent, don’t stress too much about it.” On one hand, it’s nice-sounding advice. Situations change. But it’s also such a privileged statement, and comes from a place where someone doesn’t feel any actual existential threat to their lives that they can just ignore whatever.

Stress out. It’s fine. Sometimes shit is stressful, and it’s correct to stress out about it. And no amount of platitudes will reduce that stress because it’s real and potentially fatal if you ignore it.

Sometimes the only way out is through.

But yeah – the idea that “Nothing is permanent” and therefore okay assumes that your situation doesn’t end in permanent negative consequences, which would be lovely *if true*, but for most people it isn’t.

The reason this bugs me is that like a lot of platitudes, it doesn’t take people who don’t come from privileged backgrounds into account, and allows people to say things like, “Just relax, it’s not permanent,” to dismiss peoples’ real struggles.

I know it’s not the intent, but it is the consequence.

At a previous job, we were building a platform. One of the teams that we were working with was creating a Beat Saber clone and intended to release it on the platform. It was a shameless clone with no meaningful differences, but it would run on our platform, and I guess the idea was that Beat Games, now owned by Facebook, wouldn’t likely ever release Beat Saber on the platform. Still, it would be fun, and the audience for our platform would not just enjoy it, but it would help them.

I talked the higher-ups into killing the project.

Why? Because releasing a clone of an existing game doesn’t just populate our platform with a game that isn’t original, it devalues the entire platform. Yes, Beat Saber is fun. Yes, the clone of Beat Saber was also fun. Yes, there were some minor changes that made it work better with our intended audience. But there were *zero* gameplay changes. There were *zero* significant mechanical changes of any kind.

And if you tolerate this kind of creatively bankrupt project on your platform, you’re saying to creative folks that you don’t care about the integrity of their work, that you don’t have internal creative or ethical standards that define how you work. You tell the creative teams you’re trying to attract that you have no compunction about stealing their creative work and creating something entirely derivative, likely also cannibalizing the market for their original work.

Legal, yes, but ethically bankrupt.

If we believed Beat Saber was the right kind of experience for our platform, it’s *impossible* that Beat Saber, as it existed, with no changes, would be the best possible experience for that audience. Aesthetically, it wasn’t ideal. Mechanically, it was good, but wasn’t ideal, because it wasn’t *designed with the correct goal in mind*. There’s no question that you could make a *better* Beat Saber for the intended audience, but you couldn’t do it by shamelessly ripping off Beat Saber wholesale.

I often tell new game developers to explicitly clone an existing, very simple game that they love, and then change one meaningful part of it and see how that works. It’s a great way to learn the ropes. But that’s a learning exercise – you learn to build by repeating what someone has built. Then you learn to be creative by adding things and changing them. But that’s an *exercise*, and not a cynical cash-grab.

Yes, cloned games are easy and successful. But they come with a cost, and that cost is that people who genuinely value creativity and innovation will be repulsed by that work. If that’s something you’re willing to do, I suppose it’s entirely legal to do so. But you’re telling the world who you are, and the world is listening.

Build original things. Games are too damn hard to make. Life is too damn short. Don’t waste it on derivative bullshit.

Company: How dare you talk about money.
Also Company: Everything we do is 100% driven by money.

If a company doesn’t understand that money is a big part of why people work, then they don’t understand people, and you shouldn’t be working for them.

A company should be paying you what you’re worth. They should be proactive about making sure you’re getting paid fairly if you’re making too little (and not exploiting your lack of aggression and/or awareness). They should be giving you fair raises that outpace inflation.

If you’re an employer, you *need* to be paying people enough that at a minimum, they aren’t worried about money. That is, they shouldn’t worry they’re underpaid. They shouldn’t be under constant pressure to pay the bills. The best amount you can pay them is the amount when they just don’t think about money anymore.

But money is intrinsically a part of work. It is a critical motivating factor – often THE motivating factor for a lot of people, and that’s just reality. It’s not an indictment of their passion for the job or their personal integrity or whatever to talk about money. It’s a necessity.

If your company doesn’t like people talking about money, the thing you should be asking yourself is why? Because you’re worried there’s unfairness in the system? Because you can’t justify the CEO’s 100x multiple on an IC’s salary? Because there’s a huge gender pay disparity? Because some n00b is making 2x what your 10 year vet is making due to circumstance?

Just fix your problems, and let people talk about money if they feel the need to. If you feel a need to enforce secrecy, that should be a big honking red flag to all your employees. And is probably something they should talk to each other about.

But yeah – money’s part of work. Talking about money is part of work. Needing to get paid doesn’t make you a bad employee. If you could work purely out of altruism and love, that’d be great. It also wouldn’t be a *job*.

There are many reasons to stay at a job. But there are also many reasons not to.

I feel like some of them are obvious – your manager’s a jerk, your career path is limited, the work isn’t something you enjoy, etc. But one thing that I think a lot of people miss, because it’s not obvious at all unless you’re doing it, is that if you stay at a job for a long time, you’re going to progress, both in terms of titles and money, very, very slowly.

A friend of mine stayed at their job for something like 8 years. We started at roughly the same experience level. After 8 years, I’d changed jobs 4 times, and gone from an entry level designer to running my own team. My pay had gone up roughly 5x. Theirs had gone up between 1-3% per year, and they’d had a title change maybe once every 3-4 years, going from “entry level” to “senior”.

I’m not being self-aggrandizing or trying to brag, here. The fact is that if I’d stayed at that job, I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near where I got. Each jump, I got a 20%+ salary increase at minimum, and a title jump + increase in responsibilities.

Yeah, it’s scary. Yeah, it’s sometimes frustrating. Yeah, you need to essentially re-establish your credibility at every job you go to. You need to interview. You need to keep your resume up to date.

Sometimes you leave a job because it’s a dead end. Sometimes it’s a bad fit. Sometimes you get laid off or the company goes under. But sometimes you leave because you can move a hell of a lot faster by doing so.

No manager will ever look out for you the way you will look out for you. And I’m not suggesting you have to be mercenary and self-serving above all else. Far from it. If you change jobs frequently, one of the best tools in your arsenal is for everyone who’s worked with you to LOVE working with you, and want to work with you again.

But one of the biggest reasons I hear people don’t change jobs is that it’s “scary” or it’s “a pain”. But would you do it for a 20% raise? That title change you’ve been wanting for years? I imagine that investment would be worth it. Companies don’t have any loyalty to you. They’ll lay you off in an instant without any regrets if they have to. They aren’t your family.

Treat them like a team. Kill it while you’re there. Watch out for better opportunities. Take them when you can.