Role:
General Manager
Contribution:
As the GM of The Sims Mobile, I took over the team and project which had been on a very long and tumultuous development path. My responsibilities included solving major leadership changes, get the project on track to soft launch, redefine the vision for the game to be successful in the marketplace, and to transition the team to operate as a live service. In short, the whole project soup to nuts.
Design Challenge:
This was one of the most challenging projects I have taken on in my career, but also one of my proudest in terms of turning a tough situation into a success. The issues we faced:
Abrupt leadership change. The previous Creative Director was removed and at the same time, the GM resigned.
Personally, I had zero experience with The Sims intellectual property. I simply never played any of The Sims previously.
Massively bloated team and long dev cycle. When I joined, the team was ~100 people and the game had been in development for more than five years.
Deeply unhappy and stressed out team. The Sims Mobile team had some of the worst team health scores in EA (and that is saying something).
"Focus on people first”
On this particular project, the biggest challenge was in shifting the team away from being told what to do all the time, and instead, working with them to harness their unique expertise. A team of this size, working on a project as complex as this, needed to operate as a series of semi-autonomous units, all working towards the same goal and vision. The first step was teaching by example how to do this. Specific actions included giving out clear ownership, along with expected results and full accountability. Another focus was on calibration. The objective was to move the implicit into the explicit, such that any future questions related to the subject matter would not need escalation or inquiry because the team was fully calibrated. These changes had the greatest impact on turning the project around.
"Make the subjective as objective as possible”
Games are inherently subjective; what is fun? What is cool? Challenging? Etc. My next goal was to get the project into limited soft launch to switch all debates from subjective theory to objective discussions on what is true and knowable. Previously the team spent years debating about what was going to be important and successful about the project, but my focus was on taking what we had, optimizing the team to react to change, and then iterate as our hypothesis and assumption became concrete realities with real-world data.
"Define an achievable vision of success”
After taking over the project I asked multiple people on the team, from key leaders to individual contributors to strategic partners, “what do they believe the vision for this product is?” As it turned out, I got myriad different answers that often had little coherence and none contained objectively achievable states of success. I would later run a two-day workshop with a cross-section of the team to define a new vision and mission that the full team could understand, believe in and work to actually achieve.
"Improve the process to improve the product”
The dichotomy with this project is that you can go out into the wild too soon and end up testing an inferior product in the market without the ability to adapt. The team had a long history of not hitting dates, so I focused efforts on cutting up the work into small prototypes that would give us the ability to test our designs with the least cost in time and development resources to maximize iteration speed. The process was, build, measure, learn, to improve the product by improving the process.