A lire sur: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/project-management/an-agile-management-success-story-interview-with-glu-mobiles-ceo/4718?tag=nl.e053
Niccolo joined Glu as its President and CEO in January 2010 and brings to Glu a strong background of senior management and executive experience in the mobile gaming and content sectors. Prior to joining Glu, Niccolo was the CEO and President of Hands-On Mobile, a mobile technology company and developer and publisher of mobile entertainment, and previously served as the President of Hands-On Mobile from March 2008 to October 2009. He has also worked as a physicist with Siemens Solar and within the Strategic Planning and Development divisions of Technicolor.
TechRepublic: Do you think of Glu Mobile as an agile enterprise?
Niccolo: Glu is one of the best examples of a company that is nimble, entrepreneurial. You can call it agile - I think all of these things go in tandem and from top to bottom. I’ve been through two platform transitions in the mobile entertainment space, both in the mobile music space and now at Glu in the past nine quarters in the mobile gaming space. I think we have an unprecedented perspective on what you have to do to be nimble and agile enough to get through these.
First of all you have to make sure the company survives and thrives. It helps that at Glu everybody here is a professional manager - I think that’s an interesting strength because everyone is rowing for the same reason. No-one here owns half the company with the rest in a master-slave relationship. Everyone is here because we want to be. Glu had its IPO in 2007, I’m the second CEO since then, and there are no founders left. Everyone here is incented the same way in a bottoms-up bonus and options scheme. We’re all here because we believe we can make Glu successful and we have no-one to blame but ourselves if we don’t do that. We’ve been going for 10 years; I’ve been here since 2010.
We’ve been migrating the business from being a mobile business that was providing a service to carriers. We were focused on making games work on Java through hundreds if not thousands of different handset types, and being a good partner for the carrier. As we have changed the business model, and I changed it as soon as I arrived, we changed the focus from feature-phones to smartphones, we changed the culture of the company to being about Business to Consumer, and looking out for customers directly as opposed to looking after the carriers. We stopped licensing other people’s brands, and focused on building our own. The first six or nine months of that were tough. We have ultimately had to replace approximately 50% of the staff I started with. That’s what you have to do to change your culture as well as upgrade skills. We restructured the company’s entire aura to be a kind of agile, bottom-up environment; rather than being a place where Niccolo, in an ivory tower, writes down what we’re doing with the roadmap, we have 25 development teams, about 600 people, we have a process that’s very different than most other companies I’ve run into.
TechRepublic: So tell me a bit about your roadmap and product development process.
We do a complete bottoms-up roadmap. Yes, we make sure that teams don’t make the same game, but other than a total portfolio conflict, we have a greenlight process that’s multi-stage and allows the teams to work with headquarters and say “here are 2 or 3 concepts we’re passionate about, here are the 3 concepts we have the skills and experience to build,” and we greenlight the concepts and they go and build the prototypes of their favorite one. They come back with the prototype in a month, and if we’re all happy and they’ve hit the quality level we expect, they go forward to the next milestone. If we don’t like it, we go back to one of the other concepts and try that. If they haven’t hit the quality level, the completeness level, the execution level we’re expecting, we tend to kill things there. What this has done for Glu is to provide a compelling culture. We’re the only place where you can build console-quality, free-to-play games for mobile devices but where you have an almost Pixar-level of creative control of your projects. You’re in the framework of a company that has resources, distribution, etc.
It’s exciting for me because I think this is scalable. We pay people bonuses based on revenue delivery every year; we hand the decision to our teams whether or not they want to continue supporting the current project or move on to another, new title. They’re incented the same way I am, to show shareholders quarterly revenue growth. Within the teams we run technically good agile processes, but what matters more for the company is this; making a game is like making an animated film, so it’s not just an engineering project, you have to meld the creative vision with the art, with the engineering, with the QA, with the project management, with the production and design, all this stuff has to come together. We focus much more on the whole process being agile than just the engineering, because you’re not successful unless every piece of this is in lockstep at every milestone.
TechRepublic: You mentioned that you had to change out about 50% of your team to evolve to a more agile environment. Talk to our readers about the human elements of migrating to an agile enterprise.
Niccolo: Well, Glu’s board had run through a six month process before they hired me. They went through a range of different individuals with different visions for the company. They spent a lot of time with big company people, who’d been at places like Disney and Activision. I’ve run two companies before this, but they were sub-billion dollar revenue, and sub thousand employees. After they spent more time with me, they were compelled by the idea that, while Glu has been public, it really was a late-stage startup. It needed to reinvent the entire business. When you look at our results you’ll find that we’ve been replacing feature-phone revenues with smartphone revenues every quarter for the past six or seven quarters. We’ve been replacing it incrementally and over the course of this year you’ll see almost all of it get replaced, and then the company can start growing total top line much faster.
What I’ve learned from other companies is that you have to make sure when you arrive that you have a plan, that your board has hired you to execute upon. The CEO has to carry not just the overall strategy but the product strategy, and carry it in sufficient depth so he can provide boundaries to where people are iterating. You can’t arrive and say, we’re going to make games; that doesn’t work. You have to arrive and say we’re going to develop original IP freemium games that will be action-adventure with console quality graphics, and we’re going to be a leader in this even though nobody is doing it now. We’re going to start investing in this in early 2010 because in 2011 this is where the market will be.
The ‘people style’ that I think works best in this environment is that you must have people who are action oriented. You have to have an action bias and you need people who will iterate by action and work with optionality. Those who have made it through the trough to stick around at Glu are willing to work with the management style that says ‘give me the options for how we’re going to work around x situation, show me what options you’ve thought about, let’s pick the best one and try that…if it doesn’t work, let’s go and try the second option or reevaluate the options.’
We don’t try things in series, that just wastes too much time. If you don’t know what your options are you shouldn’t be trying any of them because the easiest and cheapest thing to do is to think about all the options rather than enacting them. I think a lot of companies waste a lot of time trying and failing at A, then moving on to try and fail at B and C. The best way of guiding the company’s actions in an agile way is making sure you have people who act as much as they think. You can’t have too much mental procrastination. In a lot of markets, the difference between winners and failures comes down to, who acts when, and who is willing to iterate faster, because no-one gets it right on the first shot. There are people who just can’t deal with change. I frequently hear, “oh, Niccolo always changes his mind.” I respond that you should really worry if your CEO never changes his mind, because he’s most likely to plow the company into the ground. My constancy of purpose is to make Glu a great bottoms-up machine for making profitable games sustainably, predictably, and reliably. How we do that is a constant work in progress.
Takeaway: Glu Mobile CEO Niccolo De Masi opens up about the challenges of running an agile enterprise in the mobile gaming space.
Glu Mobile
bills itself as “the leader in 3D Freemium mobile gaming,” but every
element of that description has evolved over the company’s life. With
hits like the Deer Hunter franchise and Gun Bros, and a portfolio of familiar names like Contract Killer and Frontline Commando,
Glu’s current level of success is the result of an agile management
approach and a keen eye towards “reading the tea leaves,” as CEO Niccolo De Masi
likes to describe his view of the future. The mobile gaming space is
the very essence of an evolving, dynamic industry with demanding
customers and mutating platforms. I chatted with Niccolo about the
challenges of running an agile enterprise in this competitive and fickle
marketplace.Niccolo joined Glu as its President and CEO in January 2010 and brings to Glu a strong background of senior management and executive experience in the mobile gaming and content sectors. Prior to joining Glu, Niccolo was the CEO and President of Hands-On Mobile, a mobile technology company and developer and publisher of mobile entertainment, and previously served as the President of Hands-On Mobile from March 2008 to October 2009. He has also worked as a physicist with Siemens Solar and within the Strategic Planning and Development divisions of Technicolor.
TechRepublic: Do you think of Glu Mobile as an agile enterprise?
Niccolo: Glu is one of the best examples of a company that is nimble, entrepreneurial. You can call it agile - I think all of these things go in tandem and from top to bottom. I’ve been through two platform transitions in the mobile entertainment space, both in the mobile music space and now at Glu in the past nine quarters in the mobile gaming space. I think we have an unprecedented perspective on what you have to do to be nimble and agile enough to get through these.
First of all you have to make sure the company survives and thrives. It helps that at Glu everybody here is a professional manager - I think that’s an interesting strength because everyone is rowing for the same reason. No-one here owns half the company with the rest in a master-slave relationship. Everyone is here because we want to be. Glu had its IPO in 2007, I’m the second CEO since then, and there are no founders left. Everyone here is incented the same way in a bottoms-up bonus and options scheme. We’re all here because we believe we can make Glu successful and we have no-one to blame but ourselves if we don’t do that. We’ve been going for 10 years; I’ve been here since 2010.
We’ve been migrating the business from being a mobile business that was providing a service to carriers. We were focused on making games work on Java through hundreds if not thousands of different handset types, and being a good partner for the carrier. As we have changed the business model, and I changed it as soon as I arrived, we changed the focus from feature-phones to smartphones, we changed the culture of the company to being about Business to Consumer, and looking out for customers directly as opposed to looking after the carriers. We stopped licensing other people’s brands, and focused on building our own. The first six or nine months of that were tough. We have ultimately had to replace approximately 50% of the staff I started with. That’s what you have to do to change your culture as well as upgrade skills. We restructured the company’s entire aura to be a kind of agile, bottom-up environment; rather than being a place where Niccolo, in an ivory tower, writes down what we’re doing with the roadmap, we have 25 development teams, about 600 people, we have a process that’s very different than most other companies I’ve run into.
TechRepublic: So tell me a bit about your roadmap and product development process.
We do a complete bottoms-up roadmap. Yes, we make sure that teams don’t make the same game, but other than a total portfolio conflict, we have a greenlight process that’s multi-stage and allows the teams to work with headquarters and say “here are 2 or 3 concepts we’re passionate about, here are the 3 concepts we have the skills and experience to build,” and we greenlight the concepts and they go and build the prototypes of their favorite one. They come back with the prototype in a month, and if we’re all happy and they’ve hit the quality level we expect, they go forward to the next milestone. If we don’t like it, we go back to one of the other concepts and try that. If they haven’t hit the quality level, the completeness level, the execution level we’re expecting, we tend to kill things there. What this has done for Glu is to provide a compelling culture. We’re the only place where you can build console-quality, free-to-play games for mobile devices but where you have an almost Pixar-level of creative control of your projects. You’re in the framework of a company that has resources, distribution, etc.
It’s exciting for me because I think this is scalable. We pay people bonuses based on revenue delivery every year; we hand the decision to our teams whether or not they want to continue supporting the current project or move on to another, new title. They’re incented the same way I am, to show shareholders quarterly revenue growth. Within the teams we run technically good agile processes, but what matters more for the company is this; making a game is like making an animated film, so it’s not just an engineering project, you have to meld the creative vision with the art, with the engineering, with the QA, with the project management, with the production and design, all this stuff has to come together. We focus much more on the whole process being agile than just the engineering, because you’re not successful unless every piece of this is in lockstep at every milestone.
TechRepublic: You mentioned that you had to change out about 50% of your team to evolve to a more agile environment. Talk to our readers about the human elements of migrating to an agile enterprise.
Niccolo: Well, Glu’s board had run through a six month process before they hired me. They went through a range of different individuals with different visions for the company. They spent a lot of time with big company people, who’d been at places like Disney and Activision. I’ve run two companies before this, but they were sub-billion dollar revenue, and sub thousand employees. After they spent more time with me, they were compelled by the idea that, while Glu has been public, it really was a late-stage startup. It needed to reinvent the entire business. When you look at our results you’ll find that we’ve been replacing feature-phone revenues with smartphone revenues every quarter for the past six or seven quarters. We’ve been replacing it incrementally and over the course of this year you’ll see almost all of it get replaced, and then the company can start growing total top line much faster.
What I’ve learned from other companies is that you have to make sure when you arrive that you have a plan, that your board has hired you to execute upon. The CEO has to carry not just the overall strategy but the product strategy, and carry it in sufficient depth so he can provide boundaries to where people are iterating. You can’t arrive and say, we’re going to make games; that doesn’t work. You have to arrive and say we’re going to develop original IP freemium games that will be action-adventure with console quality graphics, and we’re going to be a leader in this even though nobody is doing it now. We’re going to start investing in this in early 2010 because in 2011 this is where the market will be.
The ‘people style’ that I think works best in this environment is that you must have people who are action oriented. You have to have an action bias and you need people who will iterate by action and work with optionality. Those who have made it through the trough to stick around at Glu are willing to work with the management style that says ‘give me the options for how we’re going to work around x situation, show me what options you’ve thought about, let’s pick the best one and try that…if it doesn’t work, let’s go and try the second option or reevaluate the options.’
We don’t try things in series, that just wastes too much time. If you don’t know what your options are you shouldn’t be trying any of them because the easiest and cheapest thing to do is to think about all the options rather than enacting them. I think a lot of companies waste a lot of time trying and failing at A, then moving on to try and fail at B and C. The best way of guiding the company’s actions in an agile way is making sure you have people who act as much as they think. You can’t have too much mental procrastination. In a lot of markets, the difference between winners and failures comes down to, who acts when, and who is willing to iterate faster, because no-one gets it right on the first shot. There are people who just can’t deal with change. I frequently hear, “oh, Niccolo always changes his mind.” I respond that you should really worry if your CEO never changes his mind, because he’s most likely to plow the company into the ground. My constancy of purpose is to make Glu a great bottoms-up machine for making profitable games sustainably, predictably, and reliably. How we do that is a constant work in progress.
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