Supercell’s strategy of building small teams that do big things is evolving.
Speaking to us ahead of his ‘Evolving culture for player-centric games’ talk at Pocket Gamer Connects London today, Supercell’s Brawl Stars general manager Frank Keienburg told us that his team has expanded from around 20 in the summer of 2020 to over 45 today. Most of the team are based in Helsinki.
The below Q&A was conducted over email and has been edited for clarity and readability. We’ve also added in the key slides from Frank’s talk at PGC London today.
What size was the team in 2020 and how big is it now? What do you feel has changed the most about the team?
In summer 2020 the Brawl Stars team was just over 20 people strong. We’ve just crossed 45 people working 100% on the game now, with most of them being in Helsinki. We still try to maintain some of our core pillars: trust, empowerment, collaboration and open communication.
What changed is that we created clearer responsibilities for individuals and sub-cells within the team, introduced more leads (who are still following the servant leadership principles) and in general put a bit more emphasis on production. The improved structure and more leadership within the team also enabled us to add some juniors to the mix. We are even looking to add the first full-time producer to the team… I know, crazy…!
Which parts of the team did you find it hardest to expand? Are your requirements as a team and culture quite specific?
The hardest additions to the team are essentially new roles to the team. How does a producer fit into our world? What does a people partner do? It’s mostly about working with the team to come to an agreement on what our expectations for specific roles are. Our requirements for hiring are pretty much the same across the entire organisation, but I wouldn’t say they are overly specific.
At the end of the day all companies are trying to find the best people they can. This being said, we are surely leaning heavily towards hiring people with an entrepreneurial spirit – and even for some of our new juniors the focus was on finding people capable of building up their skill-set but who demonstrated a good level of independence.
Is geography a factor too? Do you have people you’d love to hire but they don’t want to move to Helsinki? How do you overcome that?
This is completely down to the individual teams and some of our teams started to experiment with remote hires. In Brawl we are working in a hybrid mode today but expect people to be in the office at least 2-3 days per week. This might change however as we are developing our structure further.
There is an underlying topic though: it’s crucial for us to have diverse teams inside the company. How could we create the best games for players around the globe, if there’s no broad representation? Our players aren’t one specific age group, nationality or gender. Our teams need to reflect this. Ultimately if you want to find the best talent for a specific role, you cannot limit your search to one geo or talent pool. So we aren’t!
How have the team changes affected your approach to development?
It helps us to challenge our existing fundamentals in the company. The world isn’t a static place. Strategies that worked in the past might not work anymore. We have to adapt as a company, as teams. We are continuously improving our games to make them the best experience possible for our players. That won’t change.
Was there a particular piece of player feedback that made you think more seriously about expanding or changing the team? Can you tell us about what it was and when that was?
Our communities are very vocal, in general. Sometimes it’s not easy to identify the most important aspects of feedback. If you listen to your community on social media, are they representative of the community at large? The feedback we’re acting on usually is a combination of player feedback, our own observations as players and data.
A good example would be a never ending flow of solid quality of life improvements pouring in from the community. Great, non-controversial features that would just make the game objectively better. The problem? We didn’t have the bandwidth to work on those ideas and at the same time still deliver on the core features. So the backlog kept growing, and growing.
Now we’ve both added more development firepower to the team and re-structured the team and our development approach slightly in order to fit in a good amount of those improvements every update cycle.
Internally, are there any moments or things that happened within the team that made you think you need more manpower?
Yes, of course. We’ve encountered quite a few situations that triggered this thought. We were never able to explore the limits of how much cosmetic content our players actually would prefer for example, mainly due to headcount limitations. Then occasionally our inability to get ahead with our content planning, for skins, brawlers, game modes and features. These were all caused by a team that was too small to do the best for our players.
Then there’s obviously also the topic of individual stress. Empowerment goes hand in hand with responsibility. Responsibility and the trust by the people around you leads to people putting stress on themselves. If you are the only person in a team to do task x that has some serious implications. All of a sudden thinking about a vacation also means thinking about the workload that’s piling up.
While we always tried to balance these things, we’re also getting to a place where we have a healthy level of key roles in the team which ultimately leads to lower levels of unnecessary stress.
