So far in this series, we’ve looked at how to define what your studio is and what it stands for, and how to set goals that give your studio direction on both a long-term and short-term horizon. This week, we’re getting into something a little less exciting, but just as important: the problems.
Plenty of issues in a game studio are straightforward enough. Anything related to the development process itself can usually be flagged and solved by the people responsible for that part of the process.
But studios also accumulate a different kind of problem, of the kind that doesn’t fit neatly into a Jira ticket. Think, for example, of team tension that’s starting to affect the work, of a publishing deal that’s stalling and nobody’s sure who should be driving it, of a nagging feeling that your game’s core loop isn’t landing but there’s no consensus on why. These are the kind of issues that tend to linger, because they don’t have a clear-cut solution, they don’t belong to any one obvious person on the team, and there’s no obvious moment where you sit down and deal with them.
Left unaddressed, these are the issues that can quietly derail studios – and today we’ll look at ways to fix that.
The studio backlog
The first bottleneck to getting issues out in the open is to get them out of people’s heads. When there’s no obvious place to dump issues, people tend to hold onto them. So it helps to create that obvious place, and the simplest way to do this is to make a list where everyone on the team can dump issues that pertain to the studio.
Think of it as a backlog for your studio instead of for your game. One shared, visible list of everything that’s currently an open issue for the team. This list should contain all the things that are getting in the way of your studio performing at its best. Everyone on the team – whether that’s the leadership team, marketing team, or any other team – is trusted to put any issue they can’t solve themselves on the list. If everyone does this, you will never have to wonder about the issues that need attention, because they all live on this list.
If you’re starting from scratch, an easy way to populate your list is to do a SWOT analysis. Work through your studio’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as a team, and pull out everything that is both relevant and actionable. Your weaknesses and opportunities will give you the bulk of your issues list, and your threats might surface a few more. Strengths are good to know, but don’t generally require active attention. After adding these, you’ll have a good starting point to work from, which you can add to over time as issues pop up.
Of course, just listing your issues won’t help you, you’ll need to actually address them. To do so, you’ll have to dedicate time and attention to them.
Making time to solve things
I recommend reserving time in each of your regular team meetings specifically for working through studio issues. Not as an afterthought at the end, when everyone’s tired and half-checking their phones, but as a standing agenda item with real time allocated to it. The mere act of scheduling it sends a signal: these issues matter, and we deal with them together.
But even then, we want to stay away from endless debates that don’t resolve anything. So how we discuss these issues matters just as much.
IDS: Identify, discuss, solve
Because these issues typically span multiple disciplines and don’t have a typical owner, discussions also tend to be trickier than for more straightforward issues. Here’s a pattern I’ve seen in many different studios: an issue is brought up, and immediately those most affected start to share opinions and preferred solutions. The discussion quickly becomes a cycle of opinions, supporting arguments, and suggested solutions, and some people start to tune out. The meeting ends without a clear resolution, and most people leave feeling frustrated – because once again, nothing got solved. To break this pattern, we have to be more mindful of the way we approach these kinds of discussions.
In the book Traction, Gino Wickman prescribes a simple tool for more constructive discussions called IDS, which stands for identify, discuss, solve. It’s a simple structure, but it’s effective precisely because it imposes order on a conversation that would otherwise meander.
Before you discuss anything, spend time making sure you’re actually solving the right problem
The most important step – and the one most teams skip – is the first one: identify. Before you discuss anything, spend time making sure you’re actually solving the right problem. Most issues that surface in a studio are symptoms of something deeper, and if you jump straight to solutions, you end up treating the symptom and leaving the real problem intact. So before anything else, ask: what is the problem underneath the problem? Keep asking until the room agrees you’ve found it.
Only once you’ve correctly identified the real issue do you move to discuss, where you bring all the relevant context to the table. What do people know about this issue? What’s been tried before? How are different parts of the studio affected? This is the part of the conversation where you want to go broad. Make sure you hear the perspective of everyone involved, and resist the urge to skip to solutions.
When everyone has been heard and you’re sure you’ve got a complete picture, you can move to solve. With the real problem identified and the relevant context on the table, it becomes much easier to discuss possible solutions and their potential impact. Whether you are able to find a full solution or only a partial one, agree on a concrete next step, assign it to someone, and move on.
The beauty of committing to this format is that you can all help each other stay on track, keeping the amount of discussions that go completely off rails and end in disappointment to a minimum.
Building the habit
While the tools above are deceptively simple, their real value is in helping you build powerful team habits: collecting critical studio issues, scheduling time to deal with them, and working through them in a way that improves contextual problem solving and decision making. And through these habits, you’ll be able to solve almost any problem that lands on your path.
Your purpose is the “why” at the centre of your studio; your BHAG and yearly goals tell you where you’re going; and your issue-solving habits keep you from getting stuck halfway there.
Next week, we get into the fourth pillar of the FIRM framework, and look at how quarterly rocks help the most important work get done.
This week’s homework
Together with your team, work through the following:
- Build your issues list. Run a SWOT analysis together and pull out everything that is relevant and actionable. Add it all to one shared list that everyone on the team can see.
- Block time in your next meeting. Set aside dedicated time in your next team meeting to work through issues from the list. Pick the most pressing one and run it through IDS: spend time identifying the problem underneath the problem, discuss the relevant context, and only then move towards a solution.
Next week, we get into the fourth pillar of the FIRM framework, and look at how quarterly rocks help the most important work get done.
Want the full FIRM framework with step-by-step implementation instructions? Visit martijnvanzwieten.com/firm to download the free template.
Martijn van Zwieten is a business and leadership coach, and the creator of the FIRM and LoGOS studio management methods. He has coached over 150 CEOs, founders, and leaders to build better studios, ranging from indie darlings like Rusty Lake and Twirlbound to AAA powerhouses like Bethesda Game Studios and MachineGames.