Challenging Supercell's Sacred Cows: The Importance of Evolving Company Culture as You Grow

[Music] well hi everyone oh an interactive group um well great to be talking live finally at an event i hope you guys are having a great gdc um just to make sure that you're in the right place i'm going to be talking about challenging supercell sacred cows and the importance of evolving culture as you grow just a little bit about supercell um we're probably best known for our five games clash of clans boom beach heyday clash royale raw stars we have 250 million monthly players playing those

games we're also somewhat known for our game teams killing their beloved games when they just don't quite reach the experience that we want to create for our players around the world so we're currently almost hitting 400 people from a head count standpoint the majority of the people you'll see are based in helsinki where supercell was founded and born the games that you saw on the previous slide were all developed in helsinki but we now have game development happening in shanghai and our latest news was that we're opening up a north american studio and our our why our dream is to create great games that as many people as possible play for years and remembered forever

so now for the most important part of the talk you know who am i um i don't know if you can tell from my accent which is a little bit mixed up these days but originally from england um started in gaming actually in the mid 80s and um was one of the people to launch electronic arts in europe i then found myself at electronic arts in the us was vp of marketing there and then went on to found or co-found pogo a web game startup which of course was then acquired by electronic arts so went back there for a while longer have to admit i had a couple of my own failed gaming startups and so i took a little bit of a detour for a while to explore actually being outside of gaming and um went into philanthropy and i

ended up coming back to gaming and coming to supercell to launch our philanthropic epic efforts and that's what i do now but i've also won many other hats and i'm really happy and proud right now to be our first co-chief people officer at super supercell along with um my fabulous partner in crime frieda johansson hi freda so let's just talk more about culture you may have seen the next couple of slides uh if you've seen any of our talks we've talked about this before but the traditional model of operating a company is where you have a few leads leaders at the top who are creating the vision for teams who are telling the teams you know what they should be doing and then the teams are the ones execute on

that the super cell model from the beginning has been a little bit different we've tried to sort of flip this model upside down and actually it's the stars the teams themselves the games teams who are making all of those decisions the leadership you know or their management are really there to help them focus on creating those great game experiences it's not the only piece of our culture but it's definitely at the heart of it where teams get to be independently making these decisions without seeking approval from the outside or from leadership so now let's talk about evolving culture and i'll talk a little bit about why we think it's important a little bit about our cultural journey as a company and then also our sort of latest culture assessment that we did

last year so here's a quote that i used to attribute to bilker until i found out that he'd actually stolen it from marshall goldsmith but it's something we talk about at supercell you know what got you here won't get you there the importance again of learning evolving and not getting stuck and this is um this is our most recent culture memo which i'll talk to you a little bit late later but at the end there you can see that we end the memo with basically culture is never done um and so that's something that we believe strongly in so i'm going to take a little trip down memory lane here um the timeline starts in 2009 that was a year before supercell was founded and then the blue numbers are a headcount and then obviously the game

logos are when our games launched so it was actually the year before supercell was founded that bilker our ceo came across the netflix culture deck um and you probably have all read that by now but at the time it was quite new and the crux of that was around um freedom and independence and responsibility and so ilka thought about you know the deck itself at netflix was very focused on individuals and how individuals were and he thought you know this would be kind of a really interesting model for teams the other thing that him and his founders when they founded supercell in 2010 took from the netflix deck was the statement or the idea that it's really the best people that make the best games

but the colossal mistake and those are his words not mine um but you know his mistake was that he just never wrote anything down at the very first holiday party at um supercell he wanted to talk about culture and so he just presented the actual netflix um culture deck but it was um in 2012 where he was hanging out with a bunch of early super saliens and they were talking about responsibility and he realized that everyone had slightly different interpretations of what that word actually meant so that was the time where he thought you know i've got to start to put this on top of the to-do list and at this time he did a lot of one-on-ones with all the people in the company at that point to really just trying to get an understanding of what the values of the company should be

but it did take another couple of years until there was an actual sort of official supercell culture deck which focused around you know the best people how they work together and our purpose and this deck was presented at an off site it was really really full of great content but in many ways just far too much content so what then was realized through the years is that it was so rich in content that no one really could remember very much from it so then we kind of went to the other side and decided well we need to streamline that content and so that was another mistake perhaps not as important as the one of not writing it down but that was the next mistake but during this particular cultural assessment there were a few good things that actually came out of that process

so i mentioned earlier that we had taken that statement around sort of the best people make the best games and that was something that we talked a lot about in the company but we then came to that realization of the years that it isn't necessarily um the best people that mess that make the best games it's really the best teams and it's how great people work together within a team so it was a fundamental shift in our thinking the other thing that we did during that cultural assessment was write down for the first time our dream and the mission of the company and then we organized our thinking about what did we need to do to actually pursue that dream and so that was looking more into the best people the best teams and the best culture or environment to support our dream

so back to our mistake where we basically um sort of streamlined everything um with all good intentions but we ended up with sort of short catch phrases for things perhaps the best example is supercell first and understandably people interpreted that in many different ways you know and some people interpreted interpreted it as supercell above anything else above personal lives and personal well-being and that obviously wasn't the intention behind that it was more to stay in a in an environment where we're heavily focused on teams you know just to give some um you know some indication and help as to how teams can work together oops so that led us to um in 2019 our

first culture memo and the difference there was we decided that we did need to put a little bit more material into our culture deck and we moved it to this format of the memo which was meant to be read the deck is more for perhaps presentation purposes only but the memo meant that we could include a lot more information there around different scenarios and how to think and behave in those scenarios so finally as i said last year we went through probably our most exhaustive exercise of taking another look at our culture before i sort of go into that process that we went through i thought this would just be interesting to share so at the beginning of 2021 when we kind of

came back from our christmas break we had our first um you know company update with ilka and he posed this very you know interesting provocative and actually really inspiring question about are our best days at supercell behind us or are they ahead of us um and obviously we decided they're ahead of us but it was a very interesting thing for all of us the supercellians to think about um and also set the tone i think for for 2021 and even the culture assessment so looking at how we went ahead with this review but just a few sort of learnings to start with so one thing i think that is important i mean it might sound very obvious but is to set a goal and to share it you know we announced earlier in the year that we were going to complete

a cultural assessment um within the year we missed it by a month but it was important enough kind of body of work to to slip by a month the other thing i would say is that just because because we look at we take a conscious effort every two to three years to look at our culture we approach it with you know looking at it from what can we improve as opposed to um you know do we need to improve and then as you're exploring you know perhaps your own culture assessments you know focus on sort of the actual usage and practices at the end of the day culture is about action and behaviors so this is how we went about our culture assessment process um we started with some pre-group discussions and they were small group discussions with the leadership team we had you know some folks had been with

the company for a really long time people from game development but we also brought in some people that had only been with the company perhaps for less than a year um the most recent people that had read our culture memo and wanted to just make sure you know you know were we living what they had read um earlier in the year the second thing we did was a company-wide survey and then after that we had these deep dive focus groups and then the end result was a revised culture memo so the survey itself it had um just two simple questions and then the first one here was you know what do you love about our culture that you would never want to change and you can see the different themes here that jumped out um many of them are the ones that i've been sort of talking about that have been core to our culture and

the way that we operate from the beginning so you know independence trust freedom responsibility the second question that we asked was what needs to change so that you can do your best work at supercell and some of the themes there you'll see are you know communication some people said nothing needed to change um discussions around mental health the role evolving role of a lead at supercell so then we jumped into these deep dive discussions we used an external party for that and we had 11 groups and about quarter of the company participated they self-selected to join a topic that was interesting to them you know and you'll see there we touched on some of the topics around where people thought you know we could change in order to

improve people's work lives at supercell but we also did some groups that would focus on our strengths and you know how can we take these things like independence and trust and how can we build on them and and be even stronger so that led us to you know that exhaustive process of about eight months led us to a new culture memo and um sort of no surprise what didn't change in the culture memo was a lot of the sort of the meat and the heart of supercell our mission stayed the same how you know the traits around independence responsibility trust etc stayed the same but there were some new things within the memo um and some things that perhaps were there before but were highlighted a little bit more so the first one is what we we call internally the improvement mindset

and um you know if you're familiar with carol dweck's book mindset around the growth mindset it's the same concept you know how can we continue to improve how can we learn daily how can we be more open to risks and and new ideas and how can we really think about making our games better every day another theme that we really introduced a little bit more front and center in the memo was around mental health and well-being and i think the shift there for us was more um less about the individual and and the responsibilities of the individual but really what's at the root of mental health and well-being challenges and where's supercell's role in that and where do teams play in that and really encouraging teams to sit down and discuss this topic

at that team level sort of connected with this was a discussion around healthy team size so you know supercell part of our identity has been small teams and it still is small teams in comparison to many many other companies but i think what we learn is that one size doesn't fit all and there's different team situations stages of development where we might look need to look through different lenses so you know for a new game two to five people that makes a lot of sense but as we're getting to beta games and live games we wanted to introduce other lenses so one being what's the ambition that we want for our players you know what do we want to deliver to support our player community and then the second lens also being you know what do we need to do to make sure that we are creating the healthiest work

experiences for our super salience oops sorry the final one was again just highlighting a little bit more the concept of inclusion and belonging is something that we think is core to high-performing teams creating that open safe environment where ideas are heard and it it doesn't matter who says them so this is the sort of the final delivery i guess of the culture memo so this is greg harper he's our gm at the international offices and um he presented a company update and shortly after that we published the memo but i wanted to just add as well the ilkara ceo immediately jumped onto slack and was asking you know what's missing you know what do you guys think about this

are there things on this piece of paper these words that you're not seeing in action that you think where we can be better and i bring it up in the concept of learning and that learning process started from you know sort of day one of publishing this memo so some of the key lessons that i just wanted to highlight again start early write it down you know especially amongst if there's you know founders out there who are just starting off um there is always something perhaps else to do but it's so important you know set goals and and listen hard listen hard to your teams what are you hearing from them challenge your sacred cows that can be very very very difficult i think um you know very sensitive and very brave thing to do um and then again as i said it's about

actions it's not about presentations and decks and memos and another thing that's super powerful i think is when you see culture in action to you know share that and broadcast it so just to end here on you know culture is never done um you know we think it will continue to evolve at supercell we believe that we will continue to learn and so our culture will evolve so that's the end my talk um this is a sort of shameless plug for my other gig where i run the social impact but just wanted to use this opportunity if you were interested so we um we've donated as a company a million euros to the unhcr for ukrainian

refugees but we also set up a fundraiser for others to donate through that and we'll match it so we'll match individual donations but we've also worked with some other small studios that if they want to make a donation we'll match that and thank you for coming if you have any questions brian's here hello philip from octo um hello regarding kobit have you seen any challenge in keeping the culture and related to remote work and the second question i see you have uh many offices around the globe uh can you have

the same culture in these different countries well yeah yeah they're both great questions um yeah sure i think you know covid's been as challenging for supercell as other country other companies but i think that given that we have it's been helpful having such such a strong culture to start with um and i think we've you know one has to over communicate in an area where we have very little connection so just doing our very best like others um it has been challenging i think for you know of course we've had a lot of people join during cupboard and we haven't met each other um i'm looking forward for that to happen but i think just starting with that core culture and then having more of a habit of being over communicative has been helpful

um and to your second question yeah it is an interesting one but i think that um i think our core culture which i've made it pretty clear is around the concept of independent teams you know works everywhere and certainly there may be slightly you know different nuances with you know our culture in shanghai or even in san francisco but i think at its core you know we hire people that are excited about being part of that culture and i think it's something that we can hang on to in all of our offices hi thank you very interesting process um it seems like a bit of a daunting process i was wondering if on a team basis you have practices like i know with some of my teams we have been doing you know every week as we discuss not just the project but you

know at the end we always discuss like how we working together what is working what is not working what is like one thing we can change next week and try it and then you know iterate um so are your teams like also constantly like revising their own culture because yeah at the company level it's a huge task but like yeah you have any micro like regenerative practices so i think that's great what you're saying is sort of a good example of a sort of improvement mindset that we think is really important one of the things that we've introduced recently in the helsinki office is just the process of teams sitting down and talking about their individual individually what ways they want to work and then collectively how does that sort of fit um and i think that's you know just about becoming stronger as a team but it's also very helpful when we're talking about

mentally healthy workplaces and and having those conversations which you know perhaps haven't happened in the past thanks thank you hi there my name is nikki and then thank you so much for this presentation it was really interesting and really exciting to also hear that supercell um sort of this role model of a company that it is sort of also goes through these sort of culture evolutions and growing pains and things like that and to my question is more so regarding you've you highlighted the focus and desire from a cultural level on more risk taking and things like that i love for you to sort of dive a little bit more into detail about that in particular just because again supercell being a role model from the outside looking in it seems like you guys have like this great system of really intimate teams um having that independence to be able to take that risk taking in that you guys aren't afraid to

sort of kill projects that aren't quite hitting the notes that you want it so um just to learn a little bit more about yeah your guys struggle with risk taking and um for us to learn a little bit more yeah i think um again as you said it's it's sort of been core to our culture from the very beginning that um you know quality was one of our earlier values and what does a quality experience look like so empowering our teams to make decisions about that so you know all of those decisions being in that in the team model also um you know and i think part of our introducing the concept of the improvement mindset and ilkers talk to us about you know the best days behind her ahead is how can we be better about that and how can we be better both individually sort of challenging ourselves on a daily basis as well as

within a team being perhaps a little bit more diligent about that improvement mindset that's awesome thank you so much when you define the culture you're writing the memo do you ever get resistance people who disagree and like how do you work through that if there is any no one ever disagrees is it are you being serious no i'm not sorry it's my british sense of humor um yeah sure people um i mean you can just see from the process that we went through with you know sort of that between 2019 and 2021 clearly we there were areas where we weren't necessarily perhaps living up to our culture um i think that we have a fairly i mean we're still a fairly small company and people aren't

shy about uh sharing if they're they have something that they disagree with and and you know we encourage those conversations we'd rather have those things out in the open and sort of working through it and but the reality is as well we're clearly not going to be have to please you know everyone but the important thing i think is the core components that are truly supercell that make us special um if we can be aligned there but you know also as a leadership team as well you know we'll take in any of that information and you know have group discussions and figure out other areas where we need to continue to grow hi thanks a lot for the talk welcome netflix has this idea of talent density which requires people which requires processes to let people go um and does supercell also have a

similar culture and how how do you do deal with these moments or how do you deal with the talent density question yeah i mean of course there are i mean i think you know netflix and supercell well there's many similarities i think there's you know different approaches to different things um and perhaps as a you know i've never worked at netflix so i can't really say but on the outside a little bit more perhaps a you know sort of direct culture um you know i would say on the supercell side it's pretty hard to get into supercell so we focus a lot on making sure that we are really attracting you know the best talent and put a lot of emphasis on that process but you know like any company you know we might get it wrong or it might not be the fit and

you know we have those sort of difficult discussions thanks okay well i would just say i'll be around a little bit and we have a few other super salients here if you wanted to chat more on any of these topics thank you for coming [Music] you