Innovation on Demand: Paradox Interactive's Strategic Initiatives Division

hi guys very tired my name is dodo epidote SI and i'm the vp of product verification and former vp of strategic initiatives at Paradox Interactive and we are hiring it sound a bit more excited come on anyway second of all I just wanted to kind of remind everyone the thing with the cell phones turn them off and this stuff but also then maybe turn them back on again towards the end and then you know give me a really good rating when the email comes true so I can come again finally this is a surprisingly good turnout considering the topic I realize it's not the most I don't know accessible and maybe applicable for everyone just as a bit of housekeeping and expectation management who came just because we advertise that there would be jokes and it won't come for the jokes one person came for the jokes two people okay there aren't a no I mean look I I went through the presentation and I realized they

weren't very good I to be fair I did keep one so look forward to me telling my joke start off let's talk a bit of background so what was the strategic initiatives division team department whatever that we really put a bunch of people in a room and have them brainstorm of course not it wasn't wasn't just that so the the paradox si division like so many other things that are cool about paradox it was largely the brainchild of the CEO phreatic Wester most people who know anybody at paradox know him and well basically paradox has enjoyed a fair bit of success in growth in recent years I mean right now maybe more so than ever we're doing really well and Fredrik wanted to make sure that the qualities that made the company successful thus far like you know company wide collaboration grassroots innovation and a friendly familiar culture would not be lost just because the organization and number of staff changed and not to mention the

company going public which he knew about at the time but he didn't tell me about which is pretty impressive because we were pretty deep into his good wine when we were discussing this at his house and not less he wouldn't build a beans about the IPO so good job Frederick this is a challenges all this time I think most people who've had the pleasure and the horror of going from a small company to a medium-sized company to maybe a large company has been through this to some degree like something changes along the way a lot of stuff for the good and some stuff for the not-so-good and often you know innovation is one of the first things to go and the reasons can be visualised I mean for instance if your company starts looking like this and you've got maybe 20 people divided between production and maybe marketing or something and then you start adding silos and levels of hierarchy then all of a sudden a lot of the the natural flowing conversation that would otherwise happen is just not really going on anymore and the idea with these strategic initiatives division was to basically exist outside of this thing by

the way this is an accurate representation of what paradox looked like at the time that would be insane but just mental model but to kind of be able to interact with the company at all these different levels and to produce cool new strategies that had been basically vetted by everyone who needed to look at them before they got articulated so that was a cool idea now what was the workflow that we hoped would happen more or less automatically a simple way of visualizing it was something like this so we wanted a paradox employee sometimes someone within the SI division or elsewhere but ideally someone from the grassroots that would otherwise not really know how to go about getting their ideas through would have an idea and then flesh out a bit of a concept and then you know get some advice maybe ideally from someone within Si and if they could execute it on their own they would be asked to do so because we're

very much that kind of company we want people to execute on their own stuff because the results are always a lot better and you know the drill but if they couldn't execute it and we still thought that it was a really good idea it would be ashamed for it to kind of die there and then so we wanted them to be able to hand it over to the SI division and the kind of challenges that would require a site to adopt someone else's idea we predicted would be stuff like bandwidth and priorities so where does this new task fit along all the other stuff you're having me do if someone is already pulling 4550 hour weeks which apparently happens in the games industry you know someone coming along and saying hey you know we've got this new cool thing that we want you to look at you know you you should be happy not to get yelled at ownership so which department takes the lead on this and why cross functional dependencies so what do we need and what can we expect from other departments or functions unclear feasibility should this even move beyond

the idea stage and these challenges can all be solved yes but it's kind of expensive and time-consuming and stressful and perhaps prohibitively so especially for large initiatives and also we didn't want to have this filter where the only people who ever got any ideas through at paradox were the ones who knew how to navigate these things right because those are not necessarily the people who have the best product ideas or you know services or what have you they're just very good at navigating the maze of getting stuff done these are kind of different skill sets right now once something did end up with si and just a reminder that could happen from everywhere in the organization and some stuff actually started within si the execution workflow would be something like this number one produce a strategy that takes all of the previously mentioned challenges into account so feasibility bandwidth across department involvement and so on present this strategy to relevant stakeholders making revisions as necessary number three gets

sign-off from relevant stakeholders number four hand the project over which is perhaps the most important thing so the one thing we did not want to have happen with si is that we end up actually both implementing and then maintaining things so whether we're talking product services anything like that the last thing we wanted is to become yet another production you know business unit within the orbit just balloons and keeps throwing people at problems and before you know it you you're basically part of the line organization and you're not really doing any of work anymore but of course we should be around to provide assistance as the initiative gets executed so one way of looking at it was that we were using or sorry doing a sort of pre-production on new business ventures and improvement ideas and this would require a fair bit of width in our own competencies so if someone from marketing needed to use the SI workflow or someone from is dev or someone from product or someone from you know a department we needed to be able to kind of meet them halfway my

background is primarily in product development game design game development and I got help later from a colleague named David who just added so much he worked in sales and stuff like that so we actually had a pretty good with to our services now I wanted to look at a few of the initiatives because this is all very abstract so far so what were some of the things that we kind of articulated at least through si just a quick caveat though the stuff that I'm going to be showing here is stuff that we worked on within si but the fact that we worked on it within si doesn't mean that it ever actually went further than si so the last thing I want is a bunch of click baby headlines I don't even know if there's media in here but no headlines saying paradox will do this thing very very soon because you'll look stupid when we don't so just to look at a few of the initiatives so starting in q3 2015 and all the way through to q2 2016 we did a lot of stuff you see two colors one being purple for

myself and one being green for my colleague David we are going to be looking at a few of these in a bit more detail over the next few slides and the ones that I've picked out are the ones that fit into very specific categories because well basically there were three categories where all of these initiatives ended up and we'll talk about what those categories are as well so we're going to focus on three specific initiatives and starting with the creative workshop so the question because most of our initiatives tried to kind of answer a question or some sort of problem statement the question was how can we do a better job of identifying cool ideas from within the organization and is there any way we can simplify the pitching of every in house bitching internal pitching games as well as other products services and improvements and we thought that this would be the first step in accomplishing the intended innovation workflow so this is kind of a natural first initiative right if you're gonna have an innovation division where stuff from the grassroots makes it into the

innovation department and then gets executed on there needs to be some way of making this happen we've had a few ideas that we were bouncing around and we kind of decided against sitting by the coffee machine and water cooler and listening really really hard we didn't think that one would scale so we needed something else so what we did was we produce something that we called a creative workshop and it wasn't really that fancy what it was is kind of like a digital idea box most of you have seen something like this before this is a Kanban board that we've made in JIRA right where we have tickets the cool thing about tickets obviously is you can put comments in there so they become kind of like a little forum and you have the different columns with the different stages of the process so you have when something's new it's new obviously and then you have feedback requested feedback provided and then some sort of end state right and I guess one thing that's also very cool is that we have the horizontal swim lanes so every category gets its own horizontal swim lane so it could be stuff like product dev marketing all these other things

that we've gone through you know general business stuff office stuff you know we even put office supply requests through this and each and every one of these swim lanes actually had a curator from the specific you know subject matter area so you could actually get feedback as well as some time a yes-or-no answer from someone who actually you know was in to know so we thought that that was very cool and the results were kind of mixed and we'll get back to exactly why I mean the actual product is such if you can call it that it worked as intended but we didn't really get quite as much traffic there as we would have hoped we'll get back to why a bit later next up we looked at something that had to do with crowdfunding so we were just going fully blue sky like could we do crowdfunding at paradox in some way that you know doesn't feel empty consumer and you know we really love our fans so the question was yeah as I say consistent with our values and image respectful to our fans and has synergies with the many other ideas that we have floating around some of which I really

can't talk about because those might actually happen and the initiative was something that we called paradox II well I mean I call the paradox I see everyone else thought that sounded stupid but so basically both featured traditional crowdfunding because there were multiple tiers to it we had the glorified pre-order thingy where you pay us money we give you a t-shirt and eventually maybe the game if you're nice as well as you know experimental ideals like backing backers voting for game features so the idea was that you know depending on how much money that you'd actually spent on a crowdfunding campaign we could kind of give you tokens and then you can vote for certain little things that we could either do a or B or C with and then we'd have a bit of a voting thing happened and now very experimental I don't think it should be too controversial I mean some people immediately thought no what are the fans gonna say I think it would have gone over well here in America I understand that the Supreme Court has said that money is the same as speech so there you go central to the whole strategy was our

having a virtual currency though and we don't really have a relevant virtual currency that could be used in this way so the results were basically that we did not execute this we didn't actually make this we may yet in the future though or you may call something else Parador see because I think it's really clever next up we did something called an internal culture audit so with some of the initiatives that I had worked on I experienced some pushback that I identified as cultural and I kind of took the step back and asked some questions first of all how does our actual culture map to our desired and stated culture what means could we use to get closer to our goals and the outcome was very good in that we did an in-house culture audit well I say we I did an in-house culture audit producing a mammoth 132 slide PowerPoint presentation and we looked at stuff like what an organizational culture actually is what factors shape organizational

cultures in general case studies from inside and outside the games industry and we also made an inventory of the paradox culture and the results were good so off the back of this we actually started a pretty far-reaching and still rolling process of not just doing an inventory but actually doing a bit of a revision and a rear taquile ssin of the internal paradox culture with a lot of really good activities that I think are going to really help us jell as a team and this stuff can kind of be tracked back to the work with it on the internal culture audit and strategic initiatives so yay me know rates of success well overall like you remember that very first slide with a bunch of different things on there that was not an exhaustive list we did a lot more stuff so if we look at it a little bit statistically we have these three categories right we have we have good we have mixed results and we have the stuff that was not executed 30% or so good 30% or so mixed and 40% or so not executed

and if you've worked at all with innovation and initiatives like these at a company level these are not bad numbers these are pretty good but obviously I think we want to have them even better and you know we have this category called mixed some of the mixed results are more towards the good and some towards the not-so-good so I want to hop into some learnings and tips because there are a lot of things that we would have done a better job of if we would have known at the beginning of the whole si thing what we know now tip number one take nothing at face value simply accepting a premise will lead to false starts so the people who describe a problem for you to solve are going to have various challenges themselves they might be constrained by their vantage points they will engage in wishful thinking they may confuse facts and timelines maybe be wrong in some other way like let's take the creative workshop thing for instance go back to that one the assumption from everyone up front was that people were simply dying

within paradox to communicate their cool ideas somewhere but the behavior once the system had been implemented didn't really reflect that I mean there were some people who were really super enthusiastic what didn't happen was this big massive blow out a really cool actionable ideas that we could just make billions off of so if you get such an unexpected result that's sometimes a blessing you know you should ask yourself what do I believe about my own company that simply isn't so and try to kind of dig into that a little bit so when you're given a mission like for example provide people with tools to innovate can we find ways to make people live our culture more head up our new innovation department and incubate awesome stuff do everyone a favor and push back on the premise just a little bit figure out what the background is what is assumed and/or taken for granted so that you don't end up exhausting yourself working the wrong angles and solving non problems next up stress test your mandate so some change

will always come at the expense real or perceived of some people it follows that some people will have a vested interest in your failing most important thing is not to figure out who these people are and target them but rather to figure out what to do in general if and when this happens different people may work against you or at least not help you at different times for different reasons and you should probably know what to do if and when that happens I would suggest to apply good game dev prototyping practices identify your deal-breakers try to provoke those deal-breakers to happen as early as you can and at the very least have the uncomfortable hypothetical discussions with your sponsors managers what have you who has the right to say no to me at what point and for what reasons who can I escalate to if I feel that somebody's being uncooperative once the decisions been made whose responsibility is it to enforce and of course hypothetical discussion discussions aren't as good as a real thing so when not if when your progress grinds

to a halt make whatever is blocking you the number-one priority because if something or someone is blocking you and you may have a hurdle there that is going to happen again and again and again unless you solve it right then and there especially if it's something that someone is doing if they get away with it once now they have a tool that they can use repeatedly so whenever something needs escalating just do it however in popular that makes you within your first six months of working at a place next up this is a bit of a trick of mine I like to itemize and map out the relevant forces I like to think that I'm a reasonably empathic person and I like to apply that in a somewhat sociopathic way I just like to reduce certain things down to two kind of things and a science strength values to them I guess that's a bit of a game design occupational hazard thinking that way but I suggest developing an understanding of the forces working for or against you including the individuals so the role

formal Authority informal influence and so on culture so relevant aspects of course like is the culture conservative is a consensus minded and whatever the company's structure in the formal sense the makeup of the executive team etc processes so what do and what we what don't we already know how to do with consistent results strategy so where does the company see itself in the medium and long term and where does innovation fit into that like how important is innovation or innovation processes to the goals of the company and then I suggest assigning a strength value to these factors and prioritizing them accordingly for example stronger forces at the bottom weaker ones at the top you've got your Tier one forces like you have a snowflake culture or something a very strong focus on profitability these don't need to be tied to individuals sometimes they just exist in the walls CEOs of authority and influence ambitious growth targets a strong but reactive board that's not gonna step in unless a lot of money is

lost you may have an enthusiastic executive team and a complete lack of innovation or change management processes and these will obviously change over time and that's kind of the point that's why you're there but it's really good to kind of have these organized in this way because sometimes you can basically take a high-level idea or you know whatever you were going to do and and just do a little pretest against this and just kind of figure out where the minefields are going to be you know I'm going to be working on this one thing where I don't know when it will be profitable well you're in conflict with the tier one force you may want to be careful with that one next up obviously account for scale so for the initiatives that I've outlined which factor do you think was the biggest predictor of success the short answer is the size of the initiative so every time an initiative scales up to involve more people departments resources your challenges automatically multiply there are simply more things that can fail because complexity goes up

this is not news to us this is the one thing that we had hoped to solve that we didn't really manage to it was just as hard like it's scaled as much for us as it did for anyone else as we started you know requiring more stuff and there were more dependencies were I don't have any silver bullet for this one I think this this may go down in history as just like the brute force problem you just have to just work your way through it I mean we still had an easier time in absolute terms than an average employee would have but that was mostly because we had the time and resources and it was time-consuming a resource consuming to solve some of these issues final thoughts so was strategic initiatives as a thing a good idea yes yes I may have sounded kind of critical up until this point but yes absolutely thing is even if not every initiative that we executed on yielded the results that we'd hoped for the fact remains that without the SI divisions the thing

that we are the things that we actually managed to deliver on would not have happened at least not the way paradox was you know configured at that time as soon as we've not really tried any other configuration just yet I have to say that overall I'm really happy that we did it this way that's not to say there's not a better way to do it also right now we're in the process of kind of doing a a bit of a retake on some of this stuff so we're kind of reorganizing the whole innovation pipeline a little bit and one of the things that's happened is we actually have a an external vendor I think I'm allowed to say this that they're kind of helping us a little bit with looking at these things when you know with innovation and stuff and one of the first things that they suggested was hey have you ever thought of a ticketing system like yes we actually have a ticketing system that's not the challenge the challenge is getting people to use it at the rate that we want but there's this better mind you they actually have apps and stuff like that you know obviously I wasn't about to start building it to that extent but conceptually the idea was a good one so you know some things were good in theory

but we just couldn't execute at the level where we should have nonetheless doesn't mean that si was a bad idea I will say though that both the things that went well and the things that didn't go so well we're probably because paradoxes paradox and ultimately this whole thing may not be for you because your culture is your culture your organization is what it is I'm sure very different if you're EA or if you're valve but at least think about it I think there are there are ways of working with this that can kind of be made to work if you really try and if you're doing it honestly so if you don't want to take the plunge with both feet for instance you might consider a more flexible solution so maybe employees with cool ideas could be given like a temporary seat in Si sort of like a mission to evaluate something further maybe during downtime between projects I've heard that there are certain studios where people basically get

benched waiting for new projects to come around not naming them but you know some of them might be in Montreal and once their idea is properly fleshed out and improved they can then help to execute right so it could look like this and this is my awesome diagrams again button temple you might have an idea go before some sort of approval committee yes and then get taken away from that flow and put into the SI division where you know they can flesh out a concept together with other clever people and then maybe after that be put into the team that handles the execution of that same thing so thus being part of the whole flow and actually managing to to Midwife their own ID or whatever you call it so you know oh and as it so happens though both me and David are actually in new roles so I was VP of strategic initiatives and one of the strategic initiatives that I suggested I was really well received so much so that they said we can't imagine anyone else doing it so they just kind

of plucked me right out of there and same thing with David he'd worked on some stuff with our friends at $0.10 and that went over really well so plug came out too so and guess that's a good place to wrap up so the two people who were in charge of innovation managed to innovate themselves right out of the innovation team and I suppose you could call that a paradox I'll take groans it's okay any questions oh thank you I don't know this man I've not paid him to do this where was the joke how big is your team like was it a few people was it tens of people did it scale up and down as you did different things or is it like a fixed number of people yeah so the

question was how big the team was and did we scale it up and down with the size of the initiative and the thing that was being worked on so the only permanence were myself and my colleague David at least in the way the SI division used to look in the newer permutation we actually have more people but the roles are a little bit different what we would do them when something would scale up is that we would use like outsourcers and stuff so there were one of the things that actually happened off the back of something that my colleague David did was this whole thing with the choose-your-own-adventure electronic book things that we've been releasing a little bit I don't know how many of you have caught that that actually came out of Si and the first iteration was actually done exclusively with outsource vendors so thanks yes thanks for the talk I'm wondering so you mention in the work flow that some of the ideas submitted by the employees will just go directly to them if it's executable just in the team so do you have any examples of game features that you guys looked at

and I eventually went back to the games team like how much influence do we have on game feature strategy about game features you think this is very important you should add in it versus just cross company initiatives yeah so the question is how much influence did the si Division but more importantly the work flow itself have on you know game team features and so on actually quite little because they have their own process for that kind of stuff but what we did have is we had some ideas that had to do with corollary things that were not really part of the current scope of the game project so there was one gentleman that had a really cool idea like what one thing that's pretty big in our strategy games are the so called after-action reports where people like write down their game sessions and stuff like that and he had a really cool idea about having a system that would at least partially maybe automate that so that we got more of them there was really cool thing and then he quit so you know we'll pick that up someday I'm

sure but yeah so but those kinds of things I mean this was also a way place to get feedback but also to some degree it was a way to get attention of the people who can sign the checks and say well this sounds good enough that we we can actually give you the hours that you need to put on this and not have it be something that you're supposed to do in your own time because that's just not how it works thank you I hope question about you're talking about a strategy initiative so actually I think it's harder to value the how much money you have making through your department so why the paradox can you know establish this permanent like that permanence department within your company and make sure that think is worth to wronging you know so the question is it's very difficult to assess how much money and what kind of return on investment that you can get right from doing something like this we did it because we're paradox and this is the kind of stuff that we do if it's small enough scale Fredrik will

basically go let's try this and we will try it but of course part of the hope was that the work that we did would kind of validate itself eventually if that makes sense so we would not have run it indefinitely we were keeping track of the amount of billable hours and if nothing actionable would have come out of Si it would have died guaranteed what happened now though is that we did a lot of stuff that actually went somewhere which is a very good thing and I don't know I I don't know if if there is any way of knowing like where the thresholds should be ahead of time for profitability but I'm pretty sure that in this case we did reach it because I still have a job does that answer the question yeah I think though thank you nope time for another question for me it's fine yes so where were some of the strategies that you use to get stakeholder influence when it came to creating the strategic initiatives program so the

question is what kind of strategies we use to get stakeholder influence and like buy-in from the stakeholders yes well there you go so that is work that was actually done by the CEO Frederick before I even hit the ground before I was in the in the office so you know I showed up and this had already been kind of advertised within paradox and he kind of handled that more or less himself but there was an element of maintenance so it was kind of you know like I like I said the de gentleman just now we were expected to continuously kind of validate and justify our own existence to to some degree and you know with some people I think the the tolerance and patience was a bit should we say different I had some people I'm trying to be diplomatic here but some people were a little bit you know harsher on us I guess but I think eventually I mean as I say there is a more modern permutation we're still doing it to some extent even without me in the theme so I think overall we managed to do it as for

specific techniques that I would use I guess that I overall I'm a big fan of just catering to people's wallets like find some angle where you're solving other people's problems or at least pretending you're solving their problems and that should probably get you funded at least until you've proven that you're not actually solving it Provost gotcha Thanks I think that's about it thank you so much for coming everyone [Applause] you [Applause]