Impact & Flow are at the Root of Your Development Woes

Read Time: 6 Minutes

Game companies are still slamming their heads against the wall regarding logistics, efficiency, and moving “fast” enough.

I talk to studio heads, producers, and leaders all the time. The same problems come up.

1. I don’t know how to allocate my people effectively or if I have the right people.

2. I feel like we’re always moving too slowly.

3. My leaders aren’t solving the correct problems or don’t know what to do.

4. We need to ship this big deliverable, but the path to get there isn’t clear.

In summary - we have a lot to do with little time and resources to do it. Knowing what good looks like is hard, and we’re stressed out.

Game development is complicated. Even under the best circumstances, we can still fail. Worse yet, this industry must focus on systems to manage everything, which obfuscates what matters even more.

Many a leader has told me, “The thing we need is an airtight process.”

No, that is not what you need. In fact, after working with dozens of studios, I cannot think of a single one that failed to deliver because its process wasn’t buttoned up enough.

I can think of many who failed because

1. They chased their tails on what and how to deliver for months or even years, leading to wasted work, focus on the wrong things, or redundancy.

2. They had such a vague vision that the teams could never connect it to their work.

3. People don’t understand their roles, how to interface with other team members, or have difficult conversations that lead to higher levels of responsibility.

The process is only a tiny piece of the puzzle. It’s also incorrectly viewed as a panacea to the difficulties of making games or running bigger game studios.

Everything we do in game development can be boiled down to two fundamental concepts: impact and flow. I will explain them to you, and we’ll also discuss some of the misconceptions and failure points in our approach.

Impact

Building an engaging product that excites players and stands out from the competition is still a fortuitous event, even under the best circumstances.

At the end of the day, though, everything boils down to Impact & Flow.

The impact is what matters. Small games by tiny studios (Think Stardew Valley or Manor Lords) have had an incredibly outsized effect on the landscape and their players, with budgets (and sometimes timelines) a fraction of what their AAA counterparts can manage.

There are many reasons behind this, but one of the biggest ones is that many of these smaller, agile teams are more preoccupied with and focus more on the impact of their game. These gamers often took a shot at developing something they love. It’s ironic to me that more and more success stories are coming from groups of people who don’t have any of the supposedly critical skills to make games.

When we talk to the people on the ground in studios, particularly those who have scaled past 10-15 people, the most common concerns are related to what we call “the vision.” This includes:

1. What is the game we’re making?

2. Who is it for?

3. What are our game's most significant exciters/selling points to those players?

4. What’s the most important thing we can focus on right now?

These are all impact questions. For a team to understand the impact (what’s important), they need answers to these. Leaders need to provide them.

Impact is the single most important part of any product at any company. If we don’t understand it clearly at every level, we should stop what we’re doing and resolve it today.

Many studio leaders assume that if they slap together a 4-slide PowerPoint deck with diagrams and screenshots, people will “get it.” Other times, we have the designers build a 50-page document outlining the game's features.

This might solve the problem of distributing work or identifying a general direction, but more is needed to understand the impact within the team.

That understanding takes time, exposure, and lots of conversation to develop. Leaders within teams need to actively reinforce it daily. No process can create it, and no document can ensure it. Building that understanding requires continuous investment by leaders in your studio who view it as their primary role.

If you want to know what this feels like when it’s clear, imagine a team you’ve worked on where the focus seemed like a laser on the goal. Everyone deeply understood what outcome we were trying to create. Perfect alignment. What led to that? How did the people on the team engage with the goal?

Also, consider a favorite game you’ve played. One that you know all the rules to, have played many times over, and deeply enjoy. The nuance of that game, what makes it great, why it’s so appealing, which mechanics you love, and which ones you find annoying, you probably understand deeply. You could engage in a conversation about why this system works or why it impacts players who love this game.

This is what I’m talking about. You need that same intuitive understanding built within your team.

We spend so much time bellyaching about things that have minimal impact on the outcome. A lot of it is to feel more in control of that complex, uncertain system.

Action:

1. Always prioritize relentlessly. Prioritize work, prioritize goals, and prioritize at every level. The impact is relative, which means that we want everyone, to the extent possible, to be focused on the most important thing we know to do now. This needs to be an active process. Not once per month or quarter, but happening all the time. It can be as simple as a list that’s kept in the right order, but it needs to be something the team actively engages in conversation. Remember, impact requires understanding. Understanding requires dialogue.

2. Make it someone’s primary job to manage prioritization. Prioritization is the single most important thing on any project, and it’s worth whatever gets put aside in its place.

3. Since it’s tough to have one global priority list for 80 or 100 people (it infringes on flexibility), it’s enough to take “100%” (the sum of all studio resources/effort) and distribute it across those strategic buckets. In the best-case scenario, those buckets are high-level impact goals (“build a stable network infrastructure for players worldwide” or “Build a first playable loop of our progression system”). But even if it’s just “areas” like “core tech” or “gameplay,” it still helps a ton to broadcast to the studio what’s being invested in and why. You want to beg questions about why we’re putting ten people here instead of there. That’s the ticket.

Remember that nothing is more important than impact. Impact is more important than process, organization, techniques, and technical skills.

If you are worried that leaders spend too much time explaining and talking about the goals or the impact we want to have on players, you’re probably wrong. If the team truly & deeply understands the outcomes you’re driving toward, then great. But if they don’t, you must keep working on this until they do. This is the sword that most studios die on, truthfully.

Flow

I’m a process expert. I’ve built many processes for organizations: big teams, small teams, complex distributed projects, critical path emergencies, and more.

Furthermore, I’ve spent much time working with large teams to fix busted systems. I’ve seen the patterns around why systems break down, where the breaking points occur, and the role of leaders within them.

We discussed impact, an essential part of a successful game project or studio.

Assuming we don’t have an impact problem, meaning we know the most valuable things and focus on them, then the last remaining element is flow.

Whether we know it or not, when we talk about process & operations, we mean one thing: 

Flow.

Most managers still believe that having a robust process is a value unto itself. Everyone is 100% utilized and knows what to do, when to do it, and where to go. Obvious win, right?

It focuses on the wrong things. I’ve spoken to many managers who spend much time fretting about an underutilized group of people. I get it. You’re paying talented people, they’re bored, and you don’t know what to do about them. It’s stressful.

But when I ask about the highest priority projects and what’s going on, they tell me those teams are broken and unable to produce.

So why are you running around to ensure every “machine” on your floor is cranking at 100% when even the machines that ARE at 100% aren’t producing what you need???

The manager in this example needs to understand the value of process.

Process is about reinforcing impact & flow.

It’s not about making sure everyone is working.

It’s not about making sure stuff is getting done.

It’s not about tracking data or metrics.

The highest flow system might have one or two machines completely switched off during an operation. Managers don’t understand that.

Another way of saying that is that if you have the perfect process: JIRA tickets perfectly broken down, nested layers of epics & stories, everyone comes in, takes their ticket, moves their ticket, marks it complete, and it all plugs beautifully into a giant data dashboard so that directors can see progress on a crystalline roadmap…

But you’re not making stuff players will love.

Or when something feeds into your team, it gets stuck, blocks everyone else, or never turns into anything useful…

You’re failing. Period.

Just because you have all of that buttoned up doesn’t mean you’ll get those two things, either. Most studios have more process than flow.

What ARE the things that matter in achieving flow?

• When people get blocked, how long do they spend blocked?

• How many dependencies do we have across teams, and how long does it take to resolve them? What are we doing to reduce dependencies?

• When a decision needs to be made, is it clear to everyone who’s supposed to make it? How quickly do we make them?

• How much red tape/approval does a decision need to go through?

• When should someone stop working to relieve a traffic jam on someone else that’s overloaded?

• Would it be better to train our people in new skills to clear a clogged part of the system?

• Do team members help each other when shit breaks down or focus on their own tasks?

These flow questions require leaders to manage the organization and systems actively. If you spend all your time jockeying JIRA dashboards, you’re not on the floor resolving these systemic conflicts.

You are not building flow.

Operationally, everything comes back to flow.

Action:

1. Ask the (flow) questions above about your systems, processes, & teams. If you don’t have answers or feel like the answers are unsatisfying, you have flow problems. Solve them first, and build a process only if it helps resolve a flow issue.

2. Remember that process only helps flow if it helps people make decisions faster. If it’s slowing down decision-making, it’s working against you.

3. Measure only the amount of value that’s coming out of the system. Avoid the trap of getting 100 things done and making no progress. 

4. Measure how long it generally takes to get “all the way done.” Ensure what is done is meaningful for the company and players, not just a checkbox that matters only within your process.

Flow is counterintuitive for leaders. The things it requires you to focus on are often not things we’re taught to look at. Additionally, there are weird truths like “it’s better to let someone take a vacation rather than burden an already clogged-up part of the system” or “the best way to manage dependencies is to have less of them.”

But trust me, it will change everything for you.

Roles & Responsibilities

Right up there with “we don’t understand our game” is “we don’t know who’s responsible/accountable for what”.

Some studios end up doing RACIs, and some just have conversations. I wrote a newsletter with our model for breaking down roles and responsibilities within a leadership team.

It doesn’t matter how you do it, but resolving this is the primary way to achieve a higher impact and better flow.

Clear leadership roles, especially regarding the “product” side, will help ensure your team is always focused on the most valuable things. Many studios balk at the idea of someone's full-time job being to prioritize, but it becomes apparent when you break it down.

Imagine that you could create twice the value in half the time through better selection (impact) and better focus (flow). That’s four times the productivity for your studio just by removing some blockers and actively prioritizing. That is an insane return on investment.

This can all be done by identifying leaders to sit in key roles, letting them make decisions independently, and creating clarity and accountability around who’s doing what.

I cannot emphasize this enough. This is the solution to the majority of development problems. It’s also where all of the “juice” is.

Closing

Everything boils down to impact & flow. I have yet to run into a single problem at a game studio that wasn’t related to one or the other. Use this framework to help you think through how to solve the biggest challenges in making your game.

Remember that the key to success is focusing effort and being more selective about your priorities, enabling the system to flow properly, and making sure you have key leaders in place who know how to serve that system concretely.

Whenever you’re ready, there are three ways we can help you…

—>Courses built by game devs for game devs - check out “Succeeding in Game Production” HERE.

—>Regular deep dives on critical game development topics on the BBG podcast

—>If you’re stuck with leadership problems or complex development issues at your studio, we can coach you 1:1 to solve those problems and get clear results.  Email [email protected], and we’ll set you up with a discovery call.