Why did Supercell abandon the traditional management model?

Ilkka Paananen, the founder of Supercell, explained why he chose a “cellular” management model for his company in his report at the Roviocon 2017 conference in Helsinki.

Paananen’s first studio was called Sumea. He founded it in 2000. The studio specialized in mobile phone games.

By the time it was sold to Digital Chocolate in 2004, it employed 40 people. The new owner renamed the studio Digital Chocolate Helsinki, which continued to produce projects for the J2ME platform.

In 2010, Ilkka left the studio, which at that time already had about 400 employees. It was one of the largest (if not the largest) at that time in Finland.

He was not satisfied with many internal processes. One of them concerned how the greenlight of projects was held.

To begin development, the team had to prepare piles of papers: a business plan, a case study, market opportunities, a story about a niche, and similar things.

Paananen came to the conclusion that the purpose of all these documents was not to make a cool game. The main task was to convince the entire company – from management to marketing, sales and accounting – that its development is worth undertaking, that it has potential.

But the reality is that only developers understand their game. Not business managers, not employees of the finance department, but those who are engaged in its direct creation.

Realizing this, Paananen came to the conclusion that he may have been thinking about the games incorrectly.

Games are part of the creative industry, not science.

It doesn’t matter how well the team is organized, the processes, how great the presentation is. All this by itself will not create a great game.

These reflections pushed him to experiment, to create a Supercell built on a completely different model. In the company, the managerial role is given directly to the development teams, whose initiatives and experiments are supported by the studio, but does not try to “steer” them.

Paananen himself compares this to the existence of independent startups within the same company.

It is important not only that the teams inside decide for themselves what to do, but also their very small size.

Lack of resources encourages innovation and allows employees to focus on the most important things. When there are only two programmers in a team, they have to concentrate on the most important things, figure out how to solve the tasks facing them with such forces.

Independence also teaches responsibility. There are very high requirements for greenlight within the company. And if something doesn’t work, the project is killed or its team is changed.

Paananen notes that this model is not suitable for everyone. Employees should be very proactive, work for results. It’s about people who don’t need a boss who tells them what to do. Perhaps these are those who can start their own business.

Another pitfall of such a model is stress. It arises due to constant work in conditions of lack of resources, high responsibility and a strict internal greenlight for the release, which leads to the fact that many employees may not have their games for years (worked on one – closed, worked on the second for a long time – also closed and in a circle).

In conclusion, Ilkka once again mentioned that the model is not universal. Moreover, the structure of the company is a constantly evolving thing. And it has been evolving for as long as the company exists.

Based on the material PocketGamer.biz