Starting a New Studio? Dream Team is All You Need!
This post is written by Sophie Vo who’s building a kick-ass game team at Voodoo Berlin.
Hi! I am Sophie, a creative Game Lead working at Voodoo. In my professional journey, I have led multiple teams all over the world - remote teams in South America, Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe at Gameloft, international teams in Berlin at Wooga and Nordic cultural teams in Finland at Rovio. With each experience, I perfected my approach to building highly creative and effective teams.
Building teams is like cooking to me, my other passion. Both are a mix of art and science. They require patience, practice and the skill to navigate variables you don’t control (and there are many)! But when all those things come together with mastery, both provide great joy and a sense of fulfilment.
With all the knowledge I have accumulated over a decade, I am now building a new team in Berlin at Voodoo - my Dream Team.
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Starting a New Studio - Where to Start?
I was lucky enough at the beginning of my career to have worked within existing frameworks in great studios: working on a live game with an existing player base, starting a new game as a sequel of another one or taking over an existing team. So I never had to think too hard about where to start.
I joined Voodoo in Berlin with the goal to open a new studio that would develop new types of games (i.e. non-hypercasual), with a newly formed team, in a culture and environment new to me.
I had lots of questions - common dilemmas when it comes to starting up a new studio:
Where to start?
What games to make?
Who should I hire? How many people do I need?
How do I deliver the results expected from the stakeholders?
Answering all these questions at once would have been impossible, so I focused on just one thing: hiring and building a great team.
Looking closely at the most successful companies in the industry (i.e. Supercell, Voodoo, King, Small Giant), they all had one thing in common. They put their focus on their people and culture. Because, as we know, there are no great games without great teams.
While it took me almost six months to build my core Dream Team, it was well worth the significant effort and investment.
I want to share my journey of building my team. I will describe how I hired, who I hired and how I defined our mission. I believe that the framework I employed will greatly help others in similar situations.
Starting With ‘Why’
Understanding the challenge of starting a fresh new studio with a lot of freedom, I deliberately took some time off between jobs to think about how I would start.
At first, I tried to solve the ‘What’, ‘Who’ and ‘How,’ but the most fundamental question turned out to be ‘Why’: “Why am I doing this?”
The Golden Circle and ‘Start With Why’, by Simon Sinek, teaches us that “...the Why reveals your purpose, cause or belief. It’s the very reason why your organisation exists”.
As the Team Lead, “why?” is the most important question you can ask yourself. It is connected to everything you do and how you do it: the people you hire, the culture you foster and the games you make.
The ‘Why’ sets the first pillar required to build a team and connect them around a common mission.
After a decade in the industry and with several of my important goals achieved, I wasn’t fully clear about my drive to continue in games. I am very attached to my personal values in all the things I pursue. And games haven't been the most value-driven industry in my opinion (referring to the abuse of addictive mechanics in games for profit, massive company layoffs to meet financial targets and the pressure on teams to deliver, leading to crunch and toxic behaviours, etc.). There is still a lot of work to do here.
Before I joined Voodoo last year, I spent a lot of introspective time asking myself questions like, “Why am I in games?” “Do I just want to make another hit game?” “Where is it that I can have the biggest impact?” Using the thought framework of Ikigai, I managed to crystallize my ‘reasons for being’ in games - my ‘Why’.
What made me the happiest and most fulfilled throughout my career in games was the opportunity to create new and exciting game experiences, entertain millions of players and bring value to their lives through exploring new capabilities of technology and creativity.
And perhaps, above all, to achieve all of this with an amazing team, inspired by the same cause, in a fun and respectful environment.
This has been my mission in games. There is no other industry I would want to be in. And I invite others to join me in that cause.
Thinking of your ‘Why’ when working in games may seem like a trivial task. We tend to believe that games are only made to generate fun. But games are a powerful platform that can convey emotions, learning and meaning.
What impact do you want to make with your team and why?
It is essential that your team mission supports the company or founder’s mission. I specifically joined Voodoo because I feel very much aligned with their mission to bring value to our players and explore new territories, with a strong focus on teams and culture.
‘Who’ - then ‘What’
With a clear mission in mind, I was ready to start recruiting a new team in Berlin.
Industry peers asked me: “What games will you make?” “Do you have a concept in mind?” “Will you make another puzzle game?”
Some of the puzzle games I’ve worked on
These are valid questions. Puzzles are one of the biggest market categories and it continues to grow each year. But focusing on the ‘What’ from the start can be limiting.
Example: Imagine I have a solid concept for a “Match-3 with a social metagame”. I have experience in that genre and I know the audience well. Therefore, it would be logical for me to start in that direction. In this example, I would hire people who have experience working on match-3 type games and who are motivated to work in this genre.
By the time I build the team, which can take from 6 to 12 months (including the hiring and forming of the team), there’s a high chance the market has moved on. The puzzle market is at a saturation point where it is hard to compete head-to-head with companies with a solid track record like Playrix, King and Peak Games.
What if we realize that there’s another genre that’s now much more viable (who knows, maybe drawing games, perhaps)? But now I have a team of specialists making puzzles. What do I do with them? Should I spend time training them for the new genre or let them go and start recruiting from scratch again?
Unfortunately, this example is not an isolated case and it happens every day in our industry. Hiring a team based on the current trends is a big risk unless you’re ready and willing to make a huge investment in a red ocean.
As James Collins says in his book, Good to Great, “Once you fill your bus with the right people in the right seats, it becomes less a question of where you’re headed - and instead, how far you can go.”
The task Voodoo gave me was to build a team to explore a blue ocean in an increasingly uncertain future. Building a team based on market predictions - the ‘What’ - is a foolish risk. The market is so complex and it is unpredictable.
People are unpredictable too, but a bit less so. Starting a new venture, I chose to focus on the most reliable and durable factor for success: the people - the ‘Who’.
Focusing on the ‘Who’, these were the three main questions I looked into when casting my Dream Team:
Mission, Vision and Motivation: “Why do they want to join? Are they aligned with the mission and vision of the studio? Do they want to join for the right reasons?”
Values: “Who are they? How do they see life, how do they make decisions and how do they interact with others?”
Technical Ability: “Are they qualified? Do they have the skills and experience required to do the job? In my case, building a lean team, do they have versatile skills?”
I believe these are the most important questions to get the right people on the bus. All the rest (background, similarity, proximity) is secondary.
Three Steps to Cast a Dream Team
I knew my view wouldn’t be objective and neutral when selecting candidates. It never is. So I approached the hiring in an analytical and methodical way to assess the candidates accurately against the three criteria I have defined.
Here are the recruitment steps I followed:
#1 Check motivation: Why do they want to join? How do they relate to our mission?
It is pretty straightforward to check the motivation of a candidate in a screening interview (30 minutes). As the Lead, I recommend you are already involved at this stage. It may cost more of your time upfront, but it will save you a bigger hassle in the long term. You know better than anyone else what may work for your team and yourself.
In 30 minutes, we should have a sense of the motivation of the person who wants to join, but it is not enough to really know the person. The next part is the critical step to understand the real motivation of the candidate further and if they’re the right fit for the team.
#2 Check values: Are they the right people for our team and culture?
It is more tricky to test values. Everybody has values and principles. The point here is not to hire people based on values you like, but instead, values which you believe will help you best execute your mission - your ‘Why’. I was inspired by Ray Dalio’s Principle book, in which he framed explicitly the values at the heart of his company.
Through the exercise he lays out, these were the four values I framed for the culture I wanted in my team:
Growth mindset: The ability to learn and adapt and be comfortable in new situations. In a context where the market often changes, I need people who can adapt quickly to new challenges and who love it!
Team player: Someone who wants to work with a team and believes that the greatest impact is achieved through collaboration and helping others grow.
Intellectual humility: The ability to recognize and respect that individuals have different ways of thinking (influenced by cognitive thinking types, culture and background). Someone who can make these differences a strength for the team, rather than a threat.
Player-centric: A person who is passionate about creating value for others and will do what it takes to understand the audience and deliver the best game experience for them.
A good process to identify your key values is to first eliminate the values you don’t want in your team. This reverse way of thinking about a problem is called ‘inversion’.
For example, I didn’t want people in the team who can’t admit when they don’t know something or made a mistake (fixed mindset), people who believe in one truth - their truth (close-minded), people who joined the company to advance their status (solo players) or people who want to make games for themselves (egocentric).
Beyond the team values, it is important that the person also fits the company culture and values. Our values at Voodoo are Ownership, Excellence, Think Big, Helpfulness, Deliver and Uniqueness. Casting the right people is a long and tedious process.
Framing values is one thing, but identifying them in others is another. It takes a lifetime to understand our own values, so how do we expect to identify them in strangers in just a few months?
Framing values is one thing, but identifying them in others is another. It takes a lifetime to understand our own values, so how do we expect to identify them in strangers in just a few months? Illustration from Mindwise
There is no way to 100 percent know this - that’s how life is. But there are ways to decrease the risk of making a wrong decision.
Instead of finding the right candidates, it is much more effective to focus on discarding the wrong ones (here again - inversion). Hiring the wrong person can cost more in the long term than delaying the hire by an unknown time.
With a wrong hire, you invest time, money and energy, until the decision comes to part ways. The energy you expend dealing with this wrong hire is now taken away from nurturing your team and keeping it great, or finding the right person who will better contribute greatly to your team. It is not worth it. Hiring is the last place you want to cut corners to ‘save time’.
Here are a few frameworks I used to screen candidates on values and motivation:
Screening interview: I use a consistent list of 10 behavioural and interview questions, going through the same process for all candidates. Among the questions I ask is why candidates have moved from one job to another, why they chose to be in games, where they think they need to develop and why. These questions allow me to observe what they answer and, more importantly, how they answer.
Interview with peers: I am helped further in the process by other interviewers who interview the candidate individually, focusing on different themes, to get their observations from different perspectives. For example, the Talent Acquisition Manager looks closely at the motivation and career aspirations of the candidate. A peer from the same discipline checks the skills, while another peer (from a non-game team) focuses on values and culture. At the end of the process, I collect the notes from peers to get a fuller picture of the candidate.
Develop trust and relationship: Similar to dating, when I want to get to know someone, there is no other better way than to spend more time together. I invest the time to meet the candidates out of the office environment, on several occasions, just to get to know them better (and for them to get to know me) in a more natural setting. I meet candidates for coffee or lunch. There is a lot you can learn just by listening to people.
#3 Check of skills: Are they qualified for the job?
To check the technical ability for a role, I recommend giving a test. Craft the test as if you already work with the person and have assigned them a task. The point is not just to assess the candidate’s one-time result, but how they think and solve problems. This test is like a platform for the candidate to show off their skills and it’s also another way for you to get to know them better. Don’t only focus on what is delivered, but ‘how’ it is delivered.
It is tempting to get overconfident about candidates and skip some steps because you like them or have a good feeling about them, but it is not how you should hire. I used to hire people based on intuition, convinced that I was doing it in an analytical way. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t and those mistakes cost our team a lot, financially and emotionally. Hiring with intuition is like a lottery. You don’t want the well-being and success of your team to depend on luck.
Learning from past mistakes, I strongly believe that the hiring process should be more of a rigorous analytical process rather than an intuitive one. If you are not sure of your own recruiting process, I recommend checking out the book, “Who”, by Geoff Smart. I took a few exercises from this book, such as defining scorecards for each role to select A-players and design technical tests, the Do’s and Don'ts of interview questions and how to source A-players.
Sourcing talent is a full-time activity. It takes effort, even when you’re not on the lookout. I used to think it was HR’s responsibility, but the most effective way to recruit is when the task is fully owned by the Team Lead. 70 percent of the A-players I hired came from my own network and referrals. Nurturing your network is the best way to source talent, so invest time in it.
Team composition: don’t look for harmony, but cognitive diversity
After I recruited the first key people, I could have repeated the same approach to select and build the whole team, but…
… a team is like an organism. It is made of individual parts and with each new part, the organism develops its shape in a certain way. When building an effective team, you want to focus on the performance of the entire team - the whole organism - and not just the individuals.
If the team is comprised of too much of the same kind of people, they will conform, not challenge each other and ultimately they will underperform. In creative industries, this leads to the death of innovation. If people are too different, they will spend too much time clashing, becoming unproductive and ultimately dividing.
In the book, “Dream Team”, the author Shane Snow illustrates a concept called the Zone of Tension. Similar to the ‘Flow’ Channel, this is the zone where you want your team to be - energized and effective.
Carefully building and maintaining cognitive diversity in a team can help make sure you stay in this zone. I want to illustrate what happens in a diverse team, using the reference from Dream Team:
Here, you have a group of analytical thinkers in a team who are working on solving a problem and finding the best solution. The height of the mountain represents the quality of the solution - this is how far that group can go:
An intuitive thinker joins the discussion and suggests a new idea on how to solve the problem. From her higher and different perspective, she suggests a better solution to the problem. The analytical thinkers admit she has a superior solution and decide to explore the solutions further with her:
After debating on what is the best solution, the group now stands from the highest peak. They found the best solution together - they are amazed!
I often step back to check the composition of my team in terms of this cognitive diversity. Again, I don’t mean diversity by gender or culture, but diversity in terms of cognitive thinking and skills. Gender and culture can contribute to diversity in thinking, but it’s not the only parameter.
The examples cited in the Six Thinking Hats or Big Five Personality Traits are other examples of diverse thinking. Hence, there is much more to see here beyond gender and culture.
Six thinking hats. Illustration from Lucidchart
This means that sometimes you may find really great people, but they’re not the right ones for the current team, or not who you need to make your team better. You’re not looking for duplicates or ‘culture fit’, but for ‘culture add’.
Do you have diversity in thinking in your team? Does your team agree a little too much or too quickly?
For constructive debates to happen smoothly in a team, there should be an environment of trust in which everyone feels safe to express their diverging thoughts without the fear of being judged. This is what we call Psychological Safety.
Creating psychological safety in the context of a multicultural team can be challenging where individuals have learned to decide, disagree or even develop trust based on different cultural codes.
Erin Meyer in her book, The Culture Map, gives the example that French and Germans tend to be more confrontational and direct in disagreements, which can intimidate other team members. While in Asian cultures, people tend to avoid confrontations in public to preserve the harmony of the group, even if they deeply disagree with the decision.
So how do you make sure everyone in the team feels engaged in a discussion?
This is where I come back to the three important values I previously framed for the culture of the team. To create an environment of trust, openness and respect, you must consider:
Growth mindset: The right team members understand why disagreements happen. There is no right or wrong, but only what is the best solution in a particular context.
Team player: A healthy team environment includes people that truly care for each other and want to help each other improve. (This value is reinforced in one of our core values at Voodoo - Helpfulness).
Intellectual humility: A good team is formed of people who believe that everyone in the team has a valuable say - wherever they come from - and they are open to revisiting their viewpoints during disagreements.
Trust is not a feeling you can engineer. It takes time, common values and a shared history (success and failures) to happen. As the Team Lead, your responsibility is to create that environment of trust.
Building the Team is a Non-Stop Process
A lot of the practices I share with you here are more the result of an iterative process, rather than a rule. We do iterations in game development all the time, why not use the same type of thinking for team building?
I used this iterative approach to design parts of my recruiting process, such as the questions for interviews, technical tests or the mapping of the team.
The most important thing is to start with the right problem statement and questions.
As an example, I used the following process to design the technical test for the artist position:
Problem statement: “How can I check that the candidate has the versatile skills for the role (can define a strong art direction, can do hands-on work, understand game design)?”
Questions and assumptions: “I can get a better understanding of a candidate’s skills through a test. But will I be able to design the right test to check the skills I need? How will I measure the results?”
Define the success criteria: I created a thorough scorecard for the artist position defining the mission and the outcomes expected for the role. The scorecard helped me gain clarity on what I expected from the candidate for that particular role and mission.
Design: I aligned the test with the artist scorecard and outcomes expected for the role. For example, I was looking for someone who was able to both define an art direction and produce game assets, so the test included these two parts.
Iterate: After I created a draft of the test, I shared it with artist peers for feedback and iterations.
Test and evaluate: I tested the first version of the test with a small sample of candidates and measured how satisfied I was with the result:
“Were my peers and I happy with the quality of the tests delivered? Did we get the answers we needed to assess the skills of the candidate?”
“If not, was it because of the lack of skills of the candidate (assumption A), because the test wasn’t focused enough (assumption B) or because it was not clear enough (assumption C)?”
New problem statement: “How can I collect more data to verify or discard these new assumptions?”
Iterate and roll-out: I collected feedback from the candidates after they passed the test and tested a new version with a new sample. I collected and analyzed the results and went through the same iteration steps until I was happy with the final version of the test.
There is a lot of writing on how to produce a good game, but very little on how to build a great team in the gaming industry. Human collaboration is a complex system - there’s no real magic formula for it. You have to constantly try and refine your approach. A team is a constant balance to maintain.
Building and leading a dream team is a balancing act (Illustration source)
What I shared here has worked for who I am and what I value. That’s not to say this should be the guide on how you build your team. You should keep your own situational context in mind. However, I hope my framework is a starting point to help you reflect further on your team:
‘Why’ am I building this team?
‘Who’ do I need in the team?
‘How’ do I hire the right people? How should I structure my recruiting process for it?
What team composition do I need? Do I need more unity or cognitive diversity?
I am at the beginning of the journey of forming my Dream Team. I expect to learn more that I will be happy to share in future posts. My main responsibility is not to create amazing games, but to build an environment for amazing teams to create amazing games.
Building a team is a never-ending journey, but one I have been most passionate about. There is no other place I would rather be.
I hope that my journey will inspire you to take the leap, too!
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Special thanks to the DoF team and editors who helped make this article happen!
Here are the links of the references I used in this post:
Start with Why, by Simon Sinek
Good To Great, by James C. Collins
Who, by Geoff Smart
Dream Teams, by Shane Snow
Intellectual Humility, by Shane Snow
Principles, by Ray Dalio
Six Thinking Hats, by Edward de Bono
O.C.E.A.N and the Big Five Personality Traits, by J.M. Digman
The Culture Map, by Erin Meyer
Illustration from Mindwise, by Nicholas Epley
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