Being a Good Follower
Being a good follower is critical in any team dynamic. Even leaders need to be good followers to be effective. The way you behave as a follower will drastically impact the outcome of any project or team.
At Proletariat one of our core values is “Decide Fast and Iterate”. Good followership is incredibly important to making this possible. To decide fast means that true consensus is rare, so team members need to trust each other and the process.
Problem and Solution Alignment
This is important for all parts of culture inside a company. When constrained to a single problem, it is crucial for communicating effectively during a team discussion. Typically when team members cannot agree on a course of action there are usually two reasons: disagreement about the problem or disagreement about the solution. It is important to figure out where the disagreement lies to find alignment on potential solutions.
The Problem Direction
If a team member is not bought into the premise of a problem it can be impossible to find a solution. If everyone can agree or compromise on the following questions it means you have established the problem direction.
What is the problem?
Is the problem worth solving?
Who are we solving the problem for?
It may not be possible to compromise on a problem direction. If that is true, skip to the Effective Followership section and start there. Until a problem direction is solidified no solution space can be established.
The Solution Space
Once the problem direction has been established it is possible to explore the solution space. Finding agreement or compromise on these questions should lead to a potential solution.
What is the solution?
Does the solution solve the problem?
Is the ROI of the solution worth it?
Effective Followership
If the team is able to reach consensus or agree on the problem direction and solution space then followership should be easy. It is when teammates disagree with some parts of the problem or solution where the following tactics can be most useful.
What if I am wrong?
If you want to be a good follower you need to ask yourself this question every time you disagree with a team member. By simply considering this idea it means you become a more open and valuable team member in any discussion. If you find yourself vigorously fighting for a direction and simply cannot understand how anyone could disagree with you, that is the most important time to consider this. I have found it valuable to actually write out ways in which you could be wrong, as well as the outcomes, to see if it aligns with what other team members are thinking.
“Yes, if...” Instead of “No, because…”
We have all seen the value of using “Yes, and...” to improve brainstorming and team communication. If it seems impossible to riff off an existing idea it is important to consider possible ways to make the solution work. A common response is to simply say no, and sometimes a more helpful one is to give a reason as to why the answer is no. However, both of these responses stop the solution completely and don’t allow for exploration of the solution space.
A diverse team will have a variety of perspectives so it is worth considering that other members of the team simply do not share your point of view. Instead, it is worth considering that the solution must move forward, so what would make that solution work for you? That is where you answer with “Yes, if…” and add your perspective to the solution space. This can often lead to compromise that can work better for everyone.
Disagree and Commit
There is always a limit that teams reach where it is clear there is no compromise. This is simply a reality and these decisions are often the hardest to make. I hate when a decision gets to this step. However, that does not mean a compromise is the only solution or the best solution. A good follower will recognize when the disagreement has reached this point and will agree to commit to the direction anyway. This means wholeheartedly contributing to the solution and supporting the team even if that solution fails. Saying “I told you so” is a failure to commit even if it comes after the fact and it rarely helps the next iteration of a solution. The ultimate goal is to find the right solution in the fewest possible iterations and anything that distracts from that is not helpful.
Disagree Internally, Defend Externally
Disagreement is important. As mentioned above, having a diverse set of viewpoints will lead to disagreements. However, to provide confidence to external parties and to support the team internally, it is important to manage how those disagreements are displayed. A big part of disagreeing and committing is defending the direction of the team even when you do not agree.
It is important that every leader considers how best to establish a culture where team members can freely disagree internally. There should be ample opportunity to do this before a decision is made, but even if that is not possible, it is up to the good followers to defend the team direction externally.
If team members disagree both internally and externally it can lead to a toxic culture where there is a lack of trust and loyalty. If team members are required to defend internally and externally it can lead to a culture that stifles other viewpoints. It is up to the team leader to establish good follower practices that enable rigorous internal debates and consistent external stability.
This is a great opportunity to lead by example and ensure as the team leader you keep disagreements internal.
Conclusion
Team members will disagree. In my experience the natural friction caused by a variety of perspectives on a problem produce a better solution than a single monolithic voice. There is always a cost to managing this sort of challenge, but the potential upside is also incredibly valuable. Not only does being a good follower build trust between team members, it is also a good way for a leader to prove they care about the ideas from their team.
Good followers are good teammates. Everyone should be a good follower, especially the team’s leader.
Five Levels of High Functioning Teams
As Proletariat continues to grow, I have found success using this methodology to build effective teams. By analyzing the level of each team within the company it has allowed me to better support the leads and team members. Teams can look at their current level and focus on the important changes needed to move up.
This framework is also useful to become a high functioning member within a team.
Level 1 - React and Subsist
Everyone has worked on a team like this. A Level 1 Team is barely able to keep up, is struggling to execute, and has frequent communication problems. Many teams get stuck at Level 1 forever, unable to get ahead. The biggest blocker to improving is often a lack of resources, a lack of clear goals, poor process execution, or poor communication.
If you answer Yes to any of these questions you’re probably working on a Level 1 Team:
Does your team frequently miss deadlines without knowing why?
Do you often not know what other members of your team are working on?
Do you feel like you don’t know why you’re doing a task?
Is it often unclear where tasks come from or how you’re being assigned work?
Does your team change priorities often without clear reasoning?
Do team members often do overlapping work or does work often fall through the cracks?
Graduating out of Level 1 involves these steps:
Organize and track all current internal initiatives, ongoing work, and external tasks. It can be useful to audit where each team member is spending their time for a week or more to capture this.
Identify current team priorities and prioritize all current work accordingly.
Define clear roles and responsibilities for the team to cover all known work.
Create a process to capture incoming work and assign that work out to the proper team members.
Track the time required to complete tasks and build a process to properly scope and complete current work.
Not all of these are required to move out of Level 1. I consider any team that can plan, prioritize, track, and complete tasks as being ready to move on. Until the team is resourced and organized properly it is simply reacting and subsisting.
Disclaimer: if your team sometimes becomes reactionary due to shifts in strategy or other events, that is expected. If the team cannot pull itself out quickly, it is worth reevaluating the above steps.
Level 2 - Plan and Execute
Once a team able to keep up with current work the focus should shift to planning ahead, increasing predictability, and becoming more resilient. Level 2 Teams are able to proactively plan, predictably execute on a set schedule, and mitigate common challenges. For most teams this means creating protocols to manage surprise work, or other randomizing factors, while preserving parts of the team to continue to progress on ongoing projects.
Successful Level 2 Teams follow these steps:
Identify future goals.
Create a process to predict incoming work based on past work or future goals.
Build a support system to deal with common contingencies and single points of failure.
Utilize a retrospective process to objectively analyze issues and improve future decision making.
There is a trap that lies between Level 2 and Level 3 that can be easy to fall into. Level 2 is often about improving team efficiency and it can be exhilarating when successful. To paraphrase a good lesson from High Output Management: you can make the most efficient egg cooking factory in the world, but that won’t matter if your customer orders toast. There needs to be a shift from focusing on doing work the right way to ensuring the right work is being done.
I could (and maybe should) devote an entire blog post to efficiency vs. effectiveness.
Level 3 - Measure Impact
Building a team to Level 2 is no small task. Now that the team is able to efficiently get work done, it is time to prove that the team is doing the right work. Level 3 Teams are able to plan effectively, execute predictably, understand what makes them successful, and measure their impact. This means using goals to determine KPIs and creating ways to track and report those KPIs back to the team.
Successful Level 3 Teams follow these steps:
Determine the metrics used to measure success for the team.
Prove that current and future goals are aligned with success metrics.
Build a system to track success metrics and distribute that information to the team.
These steps alone should improve decision making for the entire team. In my experience if people are able to understand the metrics that drive their success it can allow more autonomy and satisfaction in the work.
Level 4 - Improve Effectiveness
Once a team has proved their doing the right work and can measure their impact, it is now time to improve those results. Level 4 Teams plan effectively, execute predictably, measure their impact, and have created processes to improve their effectiveness. This takes customer insight, competitive analysis, and general product magic. For Proletariat this often involves building a more concrete scientific method into the product pipeline.
Successful Level 4 Teams follow these steps:
Generate theories on how best to improve success metrics based historical metrics, competitive analysis or customer insight
Use those theories to create a pipeline of future work.
Produce expected outcomes for future work based historical metrics, competitive analysis or customer insight.
Develop an ROI based prioritization system that looks at the cost required to do future work along with the expected outcome.
Build and release the work.
Analyze the results and compare them to the expected outcomes and planned cost.
Create learnings and apply that to current theories.
Being part of a team that is able to do all these things is one of the most satisfying feelings I have ever had in my career. There is a sense of mastery and control that binds people together and the added side benefit that the team is almost certainly successfully hitting goals. Even if the team is not able to reach their goals the consistent improvement can be a magnifying factor in team health and motivation.
Level 5 - Amplify Others
If a team can manage to improve their own impact, the next step is improving the impact of other teams within the company. Level 5 Teams plan effectively, execute predictably, measure their impact, improve their effectiveness and amplify others. This takes an awareness of the goals of other teams and a deep understanding of the business. It means the team can put their work in context of the wider goals of the company and amplify the work of others. The best way I can describe this is that a Level 5 Team is able to make the lives of other teams easier.
Ideas to help achieve a Level 5 Team:
Learn how all teams contribute to company success and be included on the metrics information from other teams.
Understand all the factors of how your team interacts with other teams.
Create metrics for cross team interactions and share those with other teams.
Factor other team’s success metrics into goal setting.
There are many strategies for achieving these results and I have not found a single set of steps that works repeatedly. One idea that I have found useful is cultivating peer relationships across teams within the company. A powerful component of any relationship is knowing what makes the other person successful. Educating the entire team about this can greatly improve how they perceive their work and the interactions they have with other teams.
It is important to not lose focus and over emphasize helping other teams at the expense of your own team. This can be seductive and sometimes comes with strong incentives, but I have rarely seen a case where compromising one team’s success for another is healthy long term.
Conclusions
There are many ways to create high functioning teams. As a leader it is important to find/steal/cultivate a variety of tools to use to make teams better. I have found this approach is helpful for many types of teams, from product development to publishing and marketing. Much of this requires a foundation with a good degree of certainty that is difficult in early product phases. I have found this sort of structure can be overwhelming for prototyping tasks or instances where teams need extreme flexibility. Consider where your team, product, and company are before committing the time and effort needed to build this sort of team.
Proletariat's Remote Work Setup and Why You Should be Using Discord
Before the global pandemic I loathed working from home. I am one of those people that feeds off of the buzz of productivity in the office and it turns out studies show that boost is real. I hated not knowing when teammates were available. The increased friction on communication often frustrated me. It meant that I would punt work until I could get back into the office and simply tolerate the WFH state. Enduring remote work is not possible right now, so we have made it a priority to improve our process. This meant finding answers to a number of challenging questions.
How do you tell if the person you need to communicate with is currently available without interrupting them? How can we make the team feel like others are being productive around them? How can leaders have an "open door" policy while working remotely? These questions and more have forced us to iterate or change some of our cultural communication standards.
Slack
We use Slack for quick communication and avoid it for deep discussions and brainstorming. Every morning we run Slack standups and it is the first thing most people check every day.
Proletariat has three different types of Slack channels that have their own prefix:
Spellbreak - Any channel that is specific to Spellbreak, like for our development pods (sb-combat).
Proletariat - Official channels for the entire team, like for our artists (prol-art).
Unofficial - Channels for any other topic, like beer (uo-beer).
Very little has changed with how we use Slack. Some people previously used it for quick voice or video calls but now that is all handled in Google Meet or Discord. In Slack you can be a variety of channels all at the same time and it is high friction to set your status. We do not attempt to use Slack for presence.
At Proletariat we use Email for deeper discussions and when responses/actions are not required within a day. We adhere to a model similar to the one discussed in this article.
The most important features are categorizing the type of response required in the subject line and putting the bottom line up front with details like when a response is expected.
We have made no changes to our email process while being remote. Since we use Email for asynchronous communication it does not help solve our many of our new challenges.
Google Meet
Before moving the entire team to remote we ensured every meeting had a Google Meet video conference tied to it. This was important because we have some full-time remote employees and allow liberal WFH. We still use Google Meet because it is better at face-to-face meetings than Discord streaming. However, with Google Meet there is no easy way to see meetings in progress if you were not invited to them and no sense of presence.
Discord
The problem with all the above tools is that they lack a good way to understand presence for the whole team. It was not easy to tell when to "drop in" for a quick chat. There was no good way to get a sense of the entire team doing work around you. Discord helps us solve that.
We rebuilt our office in Discord with the goal of providing a sense of presence. We do not use Discord for text chat at all, that remains only in Slack. If Discord had the ability to thread discussions and better external integrations we would probably stop using Slack.
Everyone at Proletariat logs in when they start working and joins the proper voice chat. When people finish working for the day they log off.
Team Rooms - These are roughly set up to mimic the regions of our physical office. We try to seat people who work together a lot in the same area. Individuals can talk in these channels as they would in the physical office being mindful of other people in channel.
Meeting Rooms - Every meeting room is remade in Discord to match the physical office. This includes individual offices where meetings sometimes occurred. We tag all meetings in Google Calendar with the specific tool for the meeting like [Meet] or [Discord]. Discord can stream to up to 50 people and we have found it has better quality than Google Meet.
The Library - This room is auto-squelched so there can be no voice discussion. People use this area for heads-down uninterrupted work. This is the same as someone in the office having their headphones on. Message them via Slack if you need something urgent.
AFK - If someone is not available at the moment they us this channel. There is no expectation that the person will respond immediately to a Slack message while AFK.
Miscellaneous/Gaming Rooms - We're a gaming company so we have rooms for people to hangout and stream their gameplay to others. These are most often used during lunch and after normal hours. Even when I am not able to join these groups it feels more social because I know they’re getting together. I can drop in and just listen/watch.
Conclusions
Discord has been a major improvement for my quality of life working remotely. It has allowed for some amount of organic communication as people will drop into my Discord office during the day to chat. That alone has made this process worth it to me as I feel somewhat isolated because I no longer work directly on the game.
Many people at Proletariat also feels it has greatly improved their ability to communicate with their teammates. This has not been unanimous, some people feel this is yet one more thing that needs attention and updating. I personally feel it is worth the added attention tax for the benefits to the broader team.
Learning to Build a Games Company - Podcast Interview
A few weeks ago I had the chance to talk to Joakim Achrén on the Elite Game Developers Podcast. It was a wide ranging interview that covered nearly everything from my personal journey in the industry to the nitty gritty details of how we make decisions inside Proletariat.
Topics that we covered included:
What I think is the ideal company culture for a games company
Where a company can struggle in building a strong culture
The shift from mobile to PC/Console and how we think about pivots
Fundraising and the ideal amount of money to raise
The involvement of a CEO in creative and other decisions over time
Ways to balance innovation and proven ideas in game design
Hello (New) World
Why Now?
As I write this the world is in a strange place. COVID-19 is rapidly expanding around the world forcing millions of people to stay home and follow social distancing rules. In this turmoil, I wanted to spend some of the additional time at home doing something productive. I started working in the game industry over 10 years ago. The picture you see here was about 3 months into my first game job as a gameplay engineer. Since then I have been lucky enough to experience a number of roles including product manager, lead designer, executive producer, founder and CEO. Now seems like a great time to share some of the knowledge and lessons I have learned.
What is this blog?
Since founding Proletariat in late 2012 I have made dozens of notes, outlines and even full posts on a variety of topics. I want to finish those up and share them. These posts will mostly focus on product and leadership but may include some other things along the way.
What are these resources?
In my time as CEO of Proletariat I have had to constantly learn new skills. Starting all the way back at the founding of the company I knew I needed an education in startups, legal topics, fundraising details and more. The resources here are meant to list those out for anyone that wants to learn more. I will update them as often as I can.