I’ve been working in a high performance environment for many years now. I’m amazed about the output of our small team (6 FTE+1 Free Lancer). To give you an example, we’re currently working on a casual puzzle game with a huge focus on narrative and world building. We’re approaching our 2 week release cadence which includes six to seven new fully animated story chapters and 90+ new levels, while releasing big new features every 4 weeks, with small and big tweaks, SDK updates, data gathering and general improvements, bug fixes and localization in many languages, while making sure we keep analyzing incoming data.
The casual puzzle space in which we’re operating is very competitive with thousands of entries a year with only a handful being able to succeed and enter the top 100. To get there, large teams (50-500 members) and large investments (1M-5M) are our competitors. And even in those teams, pressure to succeed is high and nothing but top performance is expected.
I’ve been thinking how we as a team make sure we are coping with this pressure. I believe we each individually have found a way to cope and collectively as a team found a way to facilitate and support each other. A large contributing factor for our small team is working from home. Not only does it cut out commute every day, saving a lot of time for each member. Working from home also afforded the environment where flexibility can occur. This flexibility in terms of working hours for instance is where some of our team members thrive.
We roughly work between 9-5 with strict attention rules around meetings. At least half of our team enjoys the ability to work during the quiet evenings, or pursuit a particular thought in the night. Others are able to schedule kids pick-up or going to the gym. And all of us enjoy the ability to let life happen and attend any important activity during working hours. Our team treats work as the second most important thing, next to our life outside of work. We cover for each other when someone is ill or experiences life changing events, we plan our schedules and priorities around vacations and time off, we accommodate members traveling the world and working from different time zone and generally we all help each other make it work.
But I think all of this would not be possible without a shared goal, without a shared ambition, without our internal drive to want to succeed. This focus enables us to do all of the above and I’m sure will drive us towards success.