Bonfire Book Club — Ilkka Paananen‘s BAFTA Talk
Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen talks about champagne toasts, small teams, culture, and philosophy in a BAFTA talk. We are inspired by the philosophy of staying small, and how turning the traditional org chart upside-down gives teams the power to serve the players.
Small is Beautiful
Ilkka reveals the power and fun of operating with small teams. When everyone can work closely, there is virtually no communication overhead, which saves a lot of time. It also means that everyone on the team can have a big impact on the game.
Minimize Procedure
As companies scale, they tend to add more policy, procedure, and oversight. This is well-intentioned, but over time it slows things down and prevents teams from doing the right thing for themselves and their players. You want your lead designer working on combat, not justifying the game’s existence by forecasting how the game will deliver year over year growth for the next 3+ years.
Celebrating Failure
Supercell has an excellence based culture, and throughout their history they have killed far more games than they’ve shipped. Most companies pop a bottle of champagne when they ship a game, but Supercell does it when they kill one. They use it as an opportunity for the whole studio to learn, so everyone can grow.
Iteration is key to game design, and it’s key to everything Bonfire does. We can’t expect to be successful unless we are brave and take risks — and no one is going to take risks if they are punished for failure.
Flipping the Script
Supercell has taken the traditional org chart, which looks like a pyramid, and flipped it upside down. As much decision making as possible has been pushed to the game teams, because they are the ones closest to the players.
He illustrates this with the story of Smash Land, a game that was in regional release. There was a big decision point coming up — the team had to decide whether to launch it globally or kill it.
In the end, the team decided not to release the game, and they sent their explanation to everyone in the studio. Ilkka wasn’t even the first person to find out, he was told as a passing FYI while on an international trip. He says this is a great example of their culture working.
You can listen to the audio of the talk below, or follow the second link to read the transcript.
Read more from Bonfire’s Book Club
Beyond Entrepreneurship
We used this book as a guide during our first offsite, where we created our mission, our purpose, our vision, and our values. Beyond Entrepreneurship has specific definitions for each term and a detailed framework for how to define them.
Radical Candor
The cold, hard, scary truth is actually a good thing, as long as it is delivered with genuine care and kindness. While it might be easier to sugar coat everything — in the long run it doesn’t help anyone grow and improve.
