Theron James

“Indulge me in a metaphor. Imagine that the sum of all Agile knowledge is a vast mountain. Most people relax at base camp, contenting themselves with having learned the basics. A few hearty mountaineers brave the elements and ascend ever higher. Well, if any of them were to make it up to the summit - that's where Theron would be. And he'd definitely be running some sort of Zen monastery up there where worthy disciplines can learn from his accumulated wisdom. In all seriousness, Theron is someone who deeply understands the principles behind how humans work together. When I came to the Skins team 2.5 years ago, it was a disorganized "cloud" of 40 artists where the method for making skins was a bunch of project managers running around trying to figure out who had free cycles. Skins were released haphazardly and with little thematic affinity (i.e. a robotic skin would come out with a cute skin and a scary skin). Through his mentorship and guidance, we were able to get the basics into place. We created a unified backlog and split the team into autonomous pods, so that we were finally able to release multiple skins in the same thematic at the same time to create a big moment for players. That was base camp, but he kept going. His next big push was towards self-organization, or teaching the team to "play the game of game development." Just as you wouldn't want the coach on the basketball court insisting his players pass to them first, he reasoned, we wouldn't want artists waiting around for production to tell them how a meeting should run, to unblock them, or to make a nuanced creative decision. For the first time in my career, I began to see my role as unlocking the inherent brilliance in my team rather than simply making sure we shipped. Maybe that would be a good stopping point for some, but Theron saw further. At the beginning of this year, we did something I've never seen any team at any company I've worked for do before. We asked the PMs to come up with a set of six outcomes they wanted to see happen this year. We defined some light staffing parameters around how much we were willing to invest in each outcome. And then one day, we asked the team to consider what was best for Riot and organize into squads that would best be able to tackle those outcomes. As leaders, we think we know what's best for our people - what types of projects motivate them, who they want to work with (and who they don't). This exercise taught me that we can never truly be as wise as they are. Immediately after the exercise I could feel an energetic shift on the team as these small squads started to gel and develop a creative shorthand with each other. Cycle times went down, quality went up. Knowing Theron, this is just the beginning. He's a pioneer, and whatever comes next, it won't be in any book - he'll be the one writing it in a few years.”

“Having worked with several agile coaches over the past few years on both department and company wide initiatives, I have been most impressed with Theron’s effectiveness as a change agent. He seamlessly transitions his efforts between executives, product owners and engineers, and his wealth of domain expertise offers an opportunity for individual and team growth—for those new to agile methodologies, as well as seasoned veterans of agile software development. I consider my time learning and working with him to be invaluable.”