MARCUS P.

Work life balance is a myth as balancing creates stress for you and those around you. I chose work life seperation, where when I'm working I'm working, and when I'm not working, I'm not working. I don't check messages, emails or try and do work unless I'm working. This way I'm not on my phone when with others, or when I've given myself downtime. Luckily I love working on games and so I do work a lot, yet my family and friends will rarely experience me working as when I'm with them I'm actually with them. This way I've not experienced burnout, even when working long hours, as it's not the length of time that creates burnout, it's usually the stress of balancing work and other activities at the same time that causes it.

Eliminating waste is a big driver of success when managing deadlines for several projects. Unfortunately, many teams generate waste by being inflexible with process like Scrum. A good example is having fixed sprints of 2 weeks and expecting teams to produce and demo after that time..2 weeks is usually not long enough in game development, and it ends up with teams focusing a large percentage of time preparing with sprint planning, getting demo's ready etc. Scrum and Kanban are excellent if used suitably, so assessing what a good length of time for sprints might be is key (I've found 4/6 weeks is a sweet spot), along with sharing roles across team members, instead of adding people who only do 1 thing, like product owner or scrum master.

I would focus on building alignment over consensus. Creative and technical needs to align in order to create a reality. Consensus is rarely achievable and usually means someone loses.

I used to think anyone who isn't super passionate about gaming isn't a fit, and I actively didn't hire people based on that. Then, by chance a person was given to me to lead who was hired by someone else. They had no gaming background and hardly played games. Yet they were very skilled at what they did and excelled in many areas. Since then I've made sure to hire a much more diverse set of people. I have found many that are not 'gamers' or from the industry, turn out to be top 5% performers with huge impact.

You stay strong by being a master of your craft. Intrinsic motivation is a key part of life, and very important for any work you carry out, if you have intrinsic motivation and are not looking for rewards, the rewards will come naturally from producing great work. Read Robert Greene's book Mastery: https://fourminutebooks.com/mastery-summary/ Good luck!

Having core hours where everyone on a particular team agrees to be available across calls and messages can be a very effective way to maintain that quick and fast decision making that's often needed for many roles in a game team. If it's fully remote then meeting team members at least once a quarter usually keeps trust and relationships alive and well. If not fully remote then at least 2 days a week working locally can be tremendous in creating that magic for making games.