Writing a Thing

Last year, when Eric Nehrlich was writing his (excellent) book You Have a Choice, we buddied up to be “accountability partners”. I started out wanting to write about my perspective on product development and team leadership, but I beat my head against it for a month before giving up. There was too much, it was too interconnected, and I couldn’t figure out how to make it all sensible. I ended up writing my little resume booklet.

I thought this year, I’d revise that booklet into something better – but I bounced off of that, too, because while it’s not perfect, it actually says everything I need it to say. I’m sure parts of it could be clearer, it could use a real example resume that goes from being bad to good, etc. But all the knowledge I wanted to get into it? It’s in there already. So I keep rewriting little bits of it, but I go back and re-read them, and they’re maybe marginally punchier, but there’s no new knowledge in there. So it got to feeling like I was running on a treadmill for no reason.

Tonight, my subconscious finally solved the first problem, after a year of working on it. I always feel like these answers emerge like a submarine breaking through the water’s surface or something. But it hit me:

For how to communicate ideas to a team well, read Simon Sinek’s Start With Why. Or better yet, just watch his YouTube video about The Golden Circle. It’s everything great in the book without the fluff.

For how to incentivize and structure a team & peoples’ responsibility, and how to think about motivation, read Daniel Pink’s Drive. There’s an RSA Animate thing about that book, but I found it worth actually reading the whole thing.

For how to lead a team in a really interesting way, and to harness everyone’s complete potential, read L. David Marquet’s Turn This Ship Around. The entire book is essential reading for anyone in a position of power, and it will totally discombobulate your concept of what a leader’s real role is.

Those books are not exactly my worldview, but much like the current version of my resume book, they’re also “close enough”, and the things I’d have to add to that are mostly practical examples of how to put this stuff into practice in reality.

So now that I’ve completely buried the lede, the point is this:

Those books exist. They describe most of my perspective on team leadership and product development. But there is something that I’ve found that isn’t in those books, that was spawned by my specific experience, and is deeply fundamental to how I now think about product development and communication. And I think if you’ve followed my posts on LinkedIn for a bit, this next section will be really obvious.

The book I’m gonna start working on now I think will be called Anima. The subtitle will be something like “How to solve every single problem with your product in one sentence.”

Maybe that’s too hoity-toity. I dunno. But that was the submarine that emerged from the deep. I can offload all the team leadership & most of the communication stuff onto those other books. They’re “good enough”, and unless I can contribute something substantial and worthwhile, you should just read those. The thing that I can contribute is this.

One sentence.

It’s a way to think deeply about every single bit of your product. It’s your North Star. It’s the sword you use to hack away the unnecessary parts. It’s how you empower everyone on your team.

And yeah, I know – grandiose claims. Sounds delusional. But the number of times over the years that it’s helped – and the number of times I’ve resisted doing it and failed, only to realize that not doing this process is *why* it failed – I think this is something that is uncommon in product development. And it’s uncommon in team leadership. And most important of all, I think when people think about giving a team responsibility and autonomy, this is the missing link – you can’t give people responsibility and autonomy without *understanding*, and *so frequently* when I talk to folks who are having team leadership/communication/product problems, it all comes back to this issue. That most people, most of the time, hand wave away a lot of uncertainty and lack of clarity, but that uncertainty/lack of clarity causes communication problems, prevents people from acting with autonomy, creates bottlenecks, etc. etc. etc.

So yeah. The one thing I want to communicate, it turns out, is the concept of “one thing”, and how you can totally supercharge everything you do in a startup or product development process by figuring out how to communicate what you’re doing to your customers and your team in one sentence.

Why I Can’t Be a Fractional Product Person

Over the years, the idea of a part time product-person role has come up. A fractional CPO, or something of that ilk. I have friends (and family) doing fractional CTO work, and that’s always seemed sensible to me. I *want* a fractional CPO position to work, because that’s the kind of work I’d love to be looking for.

But I’d never, ever hire a fractional CPO, and I’d recommend that you don’t, either.

I get why you’d want someone in that role. There’s some sort of limited-domain or limited-size product knowledge that you don’t have, and an injection of experience could make a huge difference. Your company is otherwise good, and the person leading the product charge currently can do *most* of the job, they just can’t quite do all of it.

But here’s the problem: The product is the business.

Yeah, you can make similar arguments that the tech stack/process is the business, or marketing is the business, or whatever. But I’m a product guy, so for me, the product is the thing. And it’s not just my bias. I think that your product is so central that the decisions you make around product will bleed out into everything else, and everything else about your company will similarly bleed into your product.

The problem with a fractional CPO is simple: They will never endure the full pain of their decisions.

Product pain comes in many forms. A consultant can be very good at solving short-term pain. But the problem is that many solutions to short-term pain cause long-term pain. And if your consultant isn’t around for the long term, they don’t consider that pain to the degree that they should.

That’s it. That’s the whole problem. But it’s unsolvable. Because no amount of intellectualizing or rationalizing how you’re anticipating that long term pain is the same as knowing that it will one day punch you in the face at the worst possible moment. Even full-time folks often make this mistake. But fractional product people are heavily incentivized *to make this exact mistake*, and because of that, they will – consciously or otherwise.

This is the central bit of your business, and an absolutely critical thing to get right. If you are having product problems, you need *full time*, heavily invested people who can fix those problems. If you can’t afford to hire a full-spectrum product person with the expertise you need, you are failing to hire one of the single most critical roles for your business, and your chances of failure will skyrocket.

I know it seems like a fractional CPO can be that boost of product knowledge you need. It means you don’t have to expand at a time when expansion is scary and expensive. But it is a bad investment. It will always be a bad investment, and the problem is that it will seem good until it catastrophically fails. Please don’t do it. You need a full-time product-focused person with the necessary expertise as a central role in your company.

Loyalty

Stopped by GDC for a few minutes this year, and one thing that was a stark contrast to when I regularly attended a few years ago was that the amount of company swag that people were wearing was 10% or less of what it was in the past.

Teams used to wear their company stuff loud & proud. I’m curious if the change is because everyone’s now unemployed, or they realize that companies aren’t their friends no matter how positively they feel about them in the moment, or both.

Probably a mix of all three. It’s a hard lesson to learn. Be loyal to people who treat you with respect. Never spend your loyalty on a company – it’ll never, ever be returned in kind.

VC & Games

I have friends who are VCs. VCs in games, even. So writing this, please understand that I’m not like “F all VCs under all circumstances.” There are some incredibly smart people who are motivated by the right things that are in the field doing the work, trying to give people opportunities.

But one thing that I really don’t think people think about enough is what the whole game really is. VCs are funding things with the expectation of *astonishing* returns or failure, because that’s essentially how the market works. You make a lot of money on massive successes. You lose money on everything else (even moderate successes).

So taking money from VCs sets you on a specific trajectory to either be a massive success or die. This then informs *literally everything you do*. It may not start out that way, but it will evolve into that over time. This has huge follow-on effects. It dictates what kinds of games are made. How games are marketed. Who they’re targeted at. How mechanics work. What monetization is like.

It’s not “Here’s money make your dream game.” And I worry that a lot of folks who are thinking about building companies are turning to VCs believing they can raise cash to build their dream. The moment you take VC money, you’re not building your dream. You’re building a product to maximize potential to make as much money as possible to return to their fund.

Some VCs will have a process for this that realizes that in games, the biggest successes are unlikely and weird and very personal that then explode in unexpected ways, and they will help you build something very close to your dream. 

So there’s a huge difference in aligning yourself with VCs that have deep, deep, deeeeeeep personal experience building games – leaders – the folks that build the business models, the core mechanics, the plans. They can be value-adds.

But I’d suggest this is not *most* VCs in games. It’s certainly not *most* VCs. And the best way to distinguish the two is to ask folks you know who have been funded by these orgs. And second best, ask folks who have experience building the plans and business models and who have achieved some sort of success, and have them look at the VC to see if the folks behind them know their shit.

This is your dream. This is probably one of the most important decisions you can make, because if you go with a team that doesn’t align with your values and experiences, it won’t be your dream anymore. 

It’ll be an unending nightmare.

How Not to Introduce Yourself

“I am looking for work and am a [role].”

I can’t begin to tell you what a bad approach this is to looking for work.

Let’s say you have an enormous network of folks who know you and your work, and would love to work with you again. Does this appeal to them? No – it puts the *work* on them of trying to figure out the details of what you want, or how to convince someone they know that you’d be interesting to work with.

Let’s say you don’t have a huge network of folks who have experience with you – what does this tell them? Almost nothing, other than “Yeah, you’re looking for a role that we’re hiring for. So?”

When you’re looking for a job, you have to make a case for why someone would want to work with you, and make it a no-effort, no-brainer, as much as you can.

“Hello! I’m a game designer who loves to build combat systems with a focus on strategic depth and visceral, immediate feedback. I recently worked on [game] that [had some particular thing that people who like combat systems will love], which [achieved some sort of critical/commercial success/accolade]. If you’re looking for someone who can make your game’s combat distinctive, memorable, and something players will love, [link to resume].”

The things you want to do are to be able to show you have a perspective on your job that comes from experience, that you’re a good fit for something that people are specifically looking for (even if it makes you *less* broadly appealing), and that you sound like a real human with unique skills.

Yes, this is more effort, and requires some introspection. But it also shows that you understand your job is to do the work, to make it easy for others to understand your value, and that not only can you solve the problem they’re looking to solve, you’re going to make the person looking to fill the position’s life easy.

DO NOT throw out random, generic, quick “I’m out of a job & looking for work – hire me!” statements. Doing so is putting your worst foot forward, and it makes a terrible first impression. Take a few moments and craft a statement that reflects who you are and what you’re looking for.

layoffs jobsearch resume

Recent Stuffs

Got a new bike for the first time in a long while. Decided to finally pull the trigger on an electric cargo bike, and got the Specialized Globe Haul ST with two front panniers and the passenger kit, which lets someone sit on the back. It’s great! I’ve been using my old Cannondale Super-V outfitted with a Superpedestrian Copenhagen wheel, but that’s been discontinued (so who knows about any support), and because everything is contained in the wheel, it’s both short on power and range.

While the Haul is still limited by “class 3 ebike” regulations (28mph pedal assist, 20mph throttle), the extra torque makes a HUGE difference going up hills.

I’ve been picking up and dropping off the kids at school, and getting to either school is trivial. I can make it take effort, I can make it take almost no effort. It’s great. So trading a car ride + no exercise for a bike ride + some exercise is a win. It’s also been weighing on me more that even though the Tesla doesn’t take any gas, it *does* take a lot of energy, since it’s a big heavy car, and an eBike is going to be monstrously more efficient. And in the week and some that I’ve had the bike, every time I’ve taken it out it’s replaced a car ride. So that’s been more than half of the excursions out of the house. It’s basically, “Am I going to be carrying something I absolutely cannot carry on the eBike? Then I’ll take the car.” So winging, picking up large foamboards for J’s presentation at school – stuff like that.

But yeah. Good stuff.

Been playing Halo Infinite and Fortnite almost exclusively these days – Halo’s gameplay is great, but holy cats the progression system sucks. They’ve made big improvements since launch, but it’s kind of unbelievable that their live ops team is moving this slowly. I can only imagine the announcement of a move to Unreal must be brought on by how outdated their internal engine must be, and how hard it is to keep pace with stuff like Fortnite.

Fortnite, on the other hand, has a genuinely amazing progression system, but the gameplay’s starting to get a little boring. I assume that’s one of the drives that Epic’s making for Unreal Engine for Fortnite – being able to take advantage of the player base and tech to build something different is pretty tempting, and knowing that they’re going to pay folks who make content… I’m looking into it.

Otherwise, mostly smaller games – Citizen Sleeper is excellent, Pizza Tower is insane. Picked up a handful of 3DS games before the eShop shut down – Metroid: Samus Returns (which feels surprisingly like Dread, though I shouldn’t be surprised – same dev), Phoenix Wright: Spirit of Justice (the only one we didn’t have AFAIK), the “other content” for Fire Emblem: Fates, and Mario & Luigi: Dream Team – a series I’ve always liked but never gotten particularly deep into.

The 3DS is an odd duck. The 3D is really quite good, and it makes games on the platform feel really unique. I probably wouldn’t have picked up rando games at the closing of most other shops, because remakes will eventually make most good games accessible again. But the 3DS… it’s so reliant on the hardware that once those games are gone, they’re never going to feel the same again.

So yeah. We’ve got a couple trips coming up that I’m super excited about. Heading back to Maui in a bit, and then this summer, finally going back to Korea & Japan for the first time in 20+ years. Been learning both Korean & refreshing Japanese via Duolingo, which is pretty damn good. Progress is slow, but it’ll be way better than nothing. 😀

Friends Are Terrible Co-Founders

With all the layoffs, there are going to be a lot of folks who decide that this is their chance to take a swing at being an #entrepreneur and forming a #startup. If that’s you, fantastic. Here’s the single most important piece of advice I can give you:

When you look for a #cofounder (and you should), you want to find someone whose skills *complement* yours that you HAVE WORKED WITH in STRESSFUL SITUATIONS before.

It’s tempting to start a company with people you like. I get it. But here’s the catch: if you haven’t worked with your friend & potential co-founder before, you don’t actually know what they’re like when stuff goes crazy at work. And in startups, things will be crazy all the time.

I founded a company with someone I’d lived with for a few years before. I knew them as someone who was smart, considerate, gentle, empathic, and reliable. What I discovered was instead that they were self-centered, egotistic, a terrible, borderline abusive manager, and so catastrophically flaky they any time something exploded and got genuinely difficult, the only thing I could rely on them for was to not be there when we should have been working on things together.

Starting a company with someone isn’t like being friends. It’s like being the ne plus ultra of coworkers – a comparison I like a lot more than the common “it’s like being married”. It’s not like being married. It’s like being tied together hanging off a bridge with anvils around both of your ankles. You need to work together under intense and constant pressure or you’re both screwed.

So look around. That person who was there with you when you had an impossible deadline to meet? The one who you always turn to when you have problems? The quiet person that folks often overlook who does all the actual hard shit? These are the kinds of people you want to be thinking about, not the office entertainer/fun person that everyone thinks is hilarious.

Your co-founders should come from the strongest, most effective of your work relationships. Most startups fail. And they fail for all kinds of reasons. But the most common reason I’ve seen is that co-founder relationships fall apart. Friends become bitter enemies. It’s happened to me, and it’s happened to a lot of people I know. The co-founder relationships that are most likely to succeed are the ones forged under the shared pressure of having worked together in difficult circumstances.

One Great Idea, Steal Everything Else

There’s gonna be a lot of #startups in the wake of all the recent #layoffs. The most valuable advice I can give is around really understanding that people want what you are trying to build. And that’s a long, complicated discussion. The tl;dr there is you need to validate with real users that there is actual demand for your product. Nothing else you do is more important than that, and everything you do is meaningless if you get that wrong.

BUT. That’s a long discussion. Here’s a shorter one, and it’s the 2nd-most valuable piece of advice I have.

Keep your product focused around one simple idea, and rip off everything else you can directly from other products.

Yeah, I know – this sounds like I’m telling you to just blatantly copy everything other than your core idea from other folks.

I am.

No, I’m not telling you to *ship* something that’s ripped off entirely from other sources.

Here’s the thing – you want to minimize the number of variables that you’re working with. Everything you don’t know explodes your risk exponentially. So there’s some part of your product that you can’t know – that’s the brand new thing you’re doing. Almost everything else you can likely crib from something that’s already established. And rather than innovate on it, I’m telling you to just ape it directly.

Why?

Because it minimizes risk. Let’s say you want to have a character in a side-scrolling platformer jump. Make them jump exactly like Mario. Same height, same timing, same forward distance, same air control, etc. etc. etc. Because that becomes 20 variables that you don’t need to worry about, and more importantly, you know it will feel right to your audience, because it is familiar.

Now, as you focus on your one really new idea, you’ll find that it naturally bleeds out into other things. Maybe your “new idea” is to have a game where a character can dash. That dash will affect the jump. When can it happen? How far does it travel? How does it change animations? Level layouts?

Because it interacts with jumping, it will change jumping. And as you tweak the new thing, you’ll find that you will likely also tweak the “stolen” bits. And you’ll do that enough that the starting point (Mario) will be totally unrecognizable by the end.

But if you had to tweak all the elements of dashing with all the elements of jumping and it was all unknown, you’d have a problem with hundreds of variables, none of which were set in stone when you started. This huge complexity with no constraints leads to chaos.

So start by eliminating all the variables you can by taking things that already exist and doing exactly that. Then as your new stuff comes online, experiment and evolve all the systems that you ripped off, and they’ll evolve into something new, but starting from a point where the results are known, and feel good to the end user.

By the end, you’ll have spent all your time focusing on the new thing, and by limiting complexity, you’ll actually be able to finish & ship.

Arrival

Arrival – Films sur Google Play

How it’s taken me this long to finally watch Arrival I’ll never know. I’m a huge fan of Ted Chiang’s writing, and Denis Villeneuve’s work (Dune 1&2 + BR2049).

I thought the movie was brilliant. Took a really neat story, and for me, many of the decisions they made improved things. Not that they’re necessarily better than the OG, just that they’re better for the medium than a more literal translation of the book. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. I don’t want to write much more just because I don’t want to spoil it – but man, the end (even though I recalled it from the story a while before the revelation) was just one of those things that sat with me for hours afterwards.

Two Steps to Building Better Products

Had a fun conversation with a friend this morning, and it was sort of weirdly illuminating for me. My #productdevelopment process basically breaks down into two pretty simple concepts that are *incredibly* difficult to actually execute:

1.) Know what you’re trying to do. That is, you have to be super specific and use very precise language to articulate the one big idea that you’re building your product around. Every entrepreneur can describe their product *generally*, but I find very, very few who can do it with exacting precision. Who is your market? What problem is this solving? What is the benefit to the user? If you can do this in one crisp sentence, you’re way, way ahead of the game. But the funny thing? It’s actually less about knowing what you’re doing – most people can understand that. It’s almost entirely so you can understand what you are *not* doing, which is a boundary that a lot of entrepreneurs actually never quite figure out. Which leads to scope creep, bloat, and eventual death.

2.) In traditional product development, you might do some testing, but basically, you’re going to bundle up a bunch of stuff, release it at some point, and then either succeed or fail. For me, the goal of everything I do is “How do I disassemble that one giant ball of risk, and try to mitigate every individual piece of it as early and cheaply as possible?”

That’s it. If you want to reverse engineer almost anything I’d say about product development, it’s “Do you understand what you are trying to do, and how to make good decisions about whether or not to do something?” and “How do I make this less risky and learn earlier?”

Now, while they’re simple concepts, doing them in effective, meaningful ways is an incredibly complicated, nuanced, and product/context-specific challenge that’s new and difficult and surprising every single time.