Artisanal Concatenations of Sentient Emanations

A friend of mine had some great theories on how stuff gets popular. He used to blog about it many many years ago, but when I tried to find it on Geocities so I could share it with you, the link was not found. His blog is a victim of bitrot, which I consider to be a great tragedy.

Today I want to talk about how to create video games that everyone likes. Before I do that, I want to rant and rail against IPA beer. I am the official President of the No IPA Club. I cannot stand the stuff. Whenever I run into beer enthusiasts, whose eyes light up at the mention of the style of beer that tastes like old burned tires, I always ask them whether or not they know what IPA means, or if they are familiar with its origin story.

I am a little torn here, because I feel this is a story best told, not written. I especially like adding an angry edge to my description of the history of IPA, and how it has extra preservatives in order for the beer to best survive the lengthy ocean voyage to India. Hops, like mothballs, is something you add to keep things from going bad. The endearing quality of an IPA is that it becomes rancid more slowly than your more delicious styles of beer. The average IPA lover will double down on their defense of imbibing extra preservatives upon learning this. I have no idea why. I no longer attempt to rescue them for the sake of their taste buds. I just want them to be educated about why it is that their beer tastes like someone tried to brew old unwashed socks.

I have resigned myself to accepting that the choice of actually-delicious beers in your average store and in taps across the country have taken a haircut in volume. Upon going to a new bar, I am now accustomed to scanning the taps and seeing “IPA… IPA… IPA… tasty beer…” followed by one to three more IPAs.

I do not believe I will ever get over this.

It is only fair now to talk about sourdough bread. I do love me some sourdough bread. The abundance of sourdough bread in California’s stores and restaurants is certainly an IPA offset. I have to confess that there are some similarities between IPAs and sourdough bread. If you look up the history of sourdough bread, you will find that it became popular in California during the Gold Rush. No, not the internet gold rush, or the AI gold rush, or the NFT gold rush—the actual “Gold” Gold Rush. Once upon a time people came to California to dig in the mud for heavy shiny stones. Sourdough bread was immensely popular because it was inexpensive to make and durable. This is a desirable characteristic for someone who was doing their damnedest to spend all of their time trying to find lucky rocks. The fewer trips you make to your local grocer, the more time you can spend pawing relentlessly through dirt and mud.

Let’s bring this back to video games, shall we? Who decides what is popular? Whether it is Hold’em Poker, Minecraft, or Bejeweled, each of these games have had their moment in the sun. Some of them are trends, and some of them are fads.

My formerly mentioned friend, Rick Marazzani,  did have a write-up about some popular themes in games. I was able to use the internet wayback machine to dredge it up. It is an excellent read.

Figuring out what you can do to turn your games into genre-defining content is hard. There is some art to it, and some science to it as well. Attempting to be intelligent about it may help increase your odds of success in shipping games. It may also look a lot like that kid trying to give themselves a “cool” nickname if you fail at it.

That is the whole post today, folks. I do not have better answers today on how to make “IPA for games” than I did twenty years ago. I tell people “There has never been a better time to make games, ever. By coincidence, it is also the worst time to make games, ever.” Is that self explanatory? Does it deserve its own post? Or do I just leave you all hanging with that gaslighting proclamation, and go back to being angry that GDC won’t approve any of my speaker talks? I might be as bitter as an IPA on that last point. If you found this post insightful, interesting, or just want to reward me for my raw outpouring of emotions onto the internet, go buy this Amazon-affiliate-linked book on the history of beer making.

See you all next week.

I was at GDC over a week ago, and spent a while talking with a good friend about good game design. One of the subjects we discussed was the elegance of elemental design and how it translates into gameplay. Many games have three-element loops like “Fire, Water, Earth” in them where there is a clear “Water beats Earth, Earth beats Fire, Fire Beats Water” pattern that is easy for players to memorize. I have noticed that many really popular games have replicated this pattern, including Summoners War. They have a three-element loop that makes it really easy to manage strategy for your battles. The more astute among you might notice that while there are “Fire, Earth, Water” and “Fire, Air, Water” loops, there are in fact four basic elements that exist in canonically significant “elemental magic”. So what is so special about three elements?

I think it is because you can easily remember a linear rock-paper-scissors relationship among them. In fact, there are two extra elements in Summoners War—Light and Dark—and they have their own relationship to each other independent from the strengths and weaknesses of the Water, Air, Fire relationships of other monsters.

This is deliberate and important.

I once modified the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors to play with my kids. We added a fourth element “wounded puppy”. The wounded-puppy move is to place your palm facing up and your fingers splayed like an animal’s legs are in the air and whimper like you are a wounded puppy. The rules get modified as follows.

• Rock beats scissors.
• Scissors beats paper.
• Paper beats rock.
• Rock beats wounded puppy.
• Scissors beats wounded puppy.
• Paper beats wounded puppy.

Of course, the only way to play this game with your kids is to keep picking wounded puppy over and over, looking surprised when you lose, and congratulating them on outsmarting you. If you need some cheap laughs with your young kids, this is about as good as it gets.

If you actually had to add a real fourth element to Rock, Paper, Scissors, the game rules suddenly go from a three sentence, easy-to-remember rule set into a frustrating look-up table.

If you are in the world of expert designers, you would nod sagely here and point out “players love depth, and not complexity.” Adding a new element to Rock, Paper, Scissors, that requires extending the game to one more set of victory conditions, makes it hard to remember. In fact, it is such a tedious chore to contemplate that I am not going to construct a real example of the rules for it—just thinking about it has made me tired.

When you are designing a game, it is important to make the core gameplay simple and to reduce complexity where possible. I once created a magic system with elemental strengths and weaknesses for a small, downloadable game called Spellblazer. Before every battle I tried to give the players a choice for what spells to bring into battle. I had hoped to give them an interesting decision, but after launch it was clear that for almost all of the battles, there was always one perfect answer. You had to remember the strengths and weaknesses of all the creatures you were fighting in order to choose the one spell to omit. This was needlessly complicated, and it was too easy to pick the wrong spells to start the fight.

If you take a look at some of the best games out there, you will find that the best of them have incredibly easy-to-understand strategies based around rule sets like Rock, Paper, Scissors. The less time you need to commit these kinds of strategies to memory, the more time you can spend enjoying the game.
And what better way to enjoy an amazing game like Summoners War than to purchase yourself some awesome merch like this clearly-Amazon-affiliated Funko Pop of a Summoners War Paladin? That’s what’s up, internet. Looking forward to seeing you next week, so I can talk about the deliciousness of sourdough bread and the tragedy of IPA beer.

GDC took its toll on me. See you next week!

Someone today posted on the socials about the launch of Everquest. I remember that event pretty fondly because it happened around the time of my first GDC (Game Developers Conference), and I was super hyped about the MMO space due to a raging addiction to Ultima Online. By coincidence, I am driving to GDC tomorrow to meet up with a small number of long term industry friends and acquaintances.

My first GDC was a surreal experience. I knew very little about the industry itself and I barely knew anybody. I was understandably a bit nervous. I decided to bite the bullet and just walk up to a random group of game developers and introduce myself to them.

By some freak coincidence, the group of people I walked up to were several friends from the Asheron’s Call development team and the Ultima Online development team. These were the pioneers in the MMO space! I felt a little overwhelmed and humbled at the same time. I spent the next ten minutes just quietly listening and trying to figure out what is the best way to insert myself into the conversation. I don’t think I said anything super stupid, and I am happy to report that I still have conversations with one or two of those people up to this day. I am going to name drop Raph Koster here because it is interesting to meet people who have shaped your career, sometimes without even realizing it.

Old Man Szeder is not going to make this post about the good old days. He is also not going to make this post about why persistent worlds mostly aren’t, or why the MMO genre is still mostly “stuck” twenty years later. You will have to pour alcohol into my face before we word-fight on that subject.

Today I want to talk about networking.

Networking is an important leadership skill. Whether you are advancing your career on the IC track to be an Engineering Fellow, or if you are working your way into management, you have to be able to network. They do not teach this in your computer science classes, and there is a high correlation between “I like to work with computers” and “I do not have a lot of experience working with people”.

Over ten years ago, I used to take team members with me to GDC, or similar events, as a shadow. The goal was to get them comfortable with talking randomly to people in the industry and to start building their own network. It was successful for some people, and not successful for others. I have been trying to figure out what separated those two groups of people based on limited empirical data.

Everyone with whom I have spoken about networking agrees that it is important and valuable. For the people who have failed to grow their networks or networking skills, they all say something along the lines of “Yeah, I should probably do more.” It is an interesting statement to me because it is so consistent in its half-heartedness, both in language and in tone.

I am still unpacking what things I can do to help address the reluctance here to build this new professional habit. When I have my “Eureka!” moment, you know it will show up here.

What I want to do today is give you some exercises you can do to help work on your networking.

Attend a professional conference

Like I said, GDC is this week. I am not buying a badge to attend, but if you are looking for networking opportunities, this is a great way to jumpstart your networking. There are a few things you can do to help you here, all of which I have done:

• Sit down at a lunch table and talk to strangers. You might find that odd, but everyone is there for the same reason: To share knowledge. You would be surprised what you find just from people hanging around!
• Ask questions at the end of sessions. I have actually made a few interesting relationships at trade shows because I have asked questions at the end of panels or sessions. Sometimes it is with speakers, sometimes it is with other attendees. An industry friend of mine, who speaks at conferences, confessed that they get nervous when they see me in line for the microphone because I had a habit of asking very provocative questions.
• Go to networking events and parties. Many of these are loud and some are very boozy, but most of the people at conferences attend events where they are still “on the clock”. I remember being in a developer relations role and having my calendar booked from seven AM breakfast to 1 am parties for four to five days. Your voice is gone by the middle of it, but so is everybody’s. I am not doing that this year, thankfully, but sometimes that is what the job will ask for. These are rich environments for making deals and relationships that will pay off in the future, and many people will not waste a second of that.

Go to a local meetup

I do less of this than I used to, and it has its place. Meetups are a great place to practice meeting people, discussing interesting industry things, and finding people in your community. I live in the sticks right now, and by freak coincidence two of my neighbors are people who work in the games industry as leaders and we intermittently go on walks together. A local meetup will help you build those kinds of relationships. There is an interesting local meetup happening this week that overlaps with GDC. If GDC was not at the same time, I probably would have gone, with admittedly low expectations.

Lunchclub

During the pandemic, I joined Lunchclub. I still talk to two to three people from there and also learned several interesting new things and ideas in the process. I stopped taking new Lunchclub meetings because I was absorbed into two significant projects, and I recently debated resuming them. I was meeting great people and having lots of fun!

Creep on luminaries

There are lots of really smart people creating good content for you. Whether it is written articles or TokToks or videos, almost everyone and everything has a comment section, or people have tools for community feedback. In over two decades, there are only two times I have ever been significantly rebuffed from taking a random meeting. Only twice! If you write someone a thoughtful introduction and give a compelling reason to meet, you are likely to get thirty to sixty minutes of their time.

Some of those cold calls have resulted in life-changing opportunities for me.

The Side Hustle

To many people, nothing speaks more volumes than action. This is why I am generally always building at least one side project. Roll your eyes all you want at me. I am unapologetically GenX and steeped in “viva meritocracy!”. You learn so much by building things, and when you broadcast your projects, you will find like-minded individuals in the world to work with you, or talk to you about your passions.

Join a (related) Online Community

This is another one that is relatively easy to do. I have not had as much success in the past five years as previously, but there are interesting online communities out there. I see people actively contributing to online communities and also benefiting from those relationships. Half of the online communities I have joined have been as a result of previous relationships, and so I am discounting the return on investment for myself for that reason. I do have 2-3 significant professional relationships that are ongoing from online communities, just not many new ones.

Create a speaking engagement

The last, and probably hardest, thing that you can do is to create a speaking engagement. I have spoken at multiple conferences in multiple countries. I have also spoken to many undergraduate classes over the years about what life is like as an engineer and as a game developer. I have been on a few different podcasts to talk about projects I am working on or technologies I am interested in.

Being able to speak with some authority to a room filled with complete strangers requires some prerequisites. You need a cool title, or a cool employer, or … “something”. You might have to look for your “something” to find it, but honestly you probably have it. I have had at least three opportunities to speak to students, for example, where my pitch was “students probably want to hear from themselves in the future”, and that has put me in front of hundreds of students who are interested in messages from ten to twenty years of experience.

So there are some tools for you to think about for increasing your networking reach.

We should not forget that people you have worked with in the past are also an important part of your network. If you look at my list above and find that daunting, you should take a moment to reach out to someone you have worked with in the past just to say hello, and that you remember working with them in the past.

If it was such an enjoyable experience, and it is mutually felt, who knows? Maybe the two of you will find a way to work together again in the future!

That being said, I am going to go get ready for GDC. I have a pretty free calendar this year, and I am looking forward to reconnecting with many good friends. If everything above seems scary or hard, then ping me on my Socials. I am glad to take a meeting and see what I can do to help you!

Have you ever looked up a recipe on the internet? Most of the websites with recipes have this two-thousand word “It was summer in Tuscany when I first learned this recipe from my nana” preamble in front of it. There is a lot of scrolling down involved in order to find the three things you need from the store, and the temperature you need to set the oven to. It has given me this irrational fear that all of my leadership coaching stories here are the same—a bunch of random storytelling followed by three things you need to buy at the grocery store. I am pretty sure that is not true, but the struggle is real.

Good leaders need to be able to predict the future. This is an important skill to develop. Since it is March, and you probably put your bonus in the bank last week, next week, or “hopefully real soon now” if you bank at SVB, I am going to give you some late breaking advice on an engineering leader super power.

Here are some magic words to use in your job interview: “I am going to tell you about the software projects I have shipped on time and under budget.” If you do not have any of those handy, it is time to start figuring them out.

If you are at work this week and one of your team starts asking questions about this, congratulations! You have found a fellow reader of my blog on your team.

In all seriousness, shipping software on time is very important. It is also very rare. One of my peers a decade ago loved to repeat a saying from a game developer he worked with: “I love deadlines, and the loud whooshing noise we make when we blow right past them.” Hardly a statement that inspires confidence, but the statement drips with truthiness.

An important skill to learn and master is being able to communicate deadline changes. The secret is: The earlier the better. If you find yourself being asked from time to time about incremental milestones, or “can I get an ETA?”, you should not feel alarmed. Most of the time these questions are designed to look for yellow flags that something is going to be late. This is because for some reason, people have this really bad habit of trying to hide things when they are about to be late. I generally believe that it is due to a scarcity mindset, and it is an important thing to deprogram if you have this tendency.

I get it, everyone wants to be the hero and ship stuff on time. What a beautiful thought. Even the best engineers have projects that run late. I always tell people that building software is like planning a subdivision. You figure out where the roads should be created, what are the lot sizes, and where the various utilities need to go. Sometimes when you are planning out a subdivision you might not know that there is a massive granite chunk right where you wanted to put the sewer lines, or that there is some other kind of physical impediment to construction that did not show up in the surveys.

In order to readjust the work, budgeting, and timing of everything, it is best to find these things out early. It is better to reroute the sewer drainage plans for a subdivision before you have built half of the houses.

This is one of the many reasons why you break down your tasks into small chunks and estimate them.

If you have broken down your big project into twenty pieces, and the first three of them start to slip and run late, the odds are you are likely going to be late overall. Many people like to believe they can power through and put in some extra time to get the project completed. This is a bad pattern to apply because it is habit forming. It is far better to communicate the delays early, and make some deadline course corrections where possible. Sometimes it is not possible. I jokingly tell people that one of my favorite user stories that never makes it onto the planning board is “As a software developer, I wish to move Christmas by one week.” Certainly once or twice a year you might find a deadline that is immutable like that, and you need to coordinate with leadership on the things that you can do together to get the project done on time.

Some deadlines do have some flexibility and can be moved. Those are easier to do earlier in the project. You are more likely to have happy leadership when you ask to move the deadline one week during the first month of a project than if you ask to move it by a week the day before it is due.

There is a small problem here that you might find you need to ask to move the deadline again. This is where things get really challenging. You might get a second opportunity to move a deadline, but it is also a really bad habit to get into.

The solution is to improve your software estimation skills, and to be able to have some amount of prescience about how late a project is going to be once you have established it is going to be late.

If you are a month into a four-month project and you are a week behind, you can either ask for a week extension or extrapolate that you might land a month late. There is some uncertainty there. It might be worth averaging out those two numbers, and giving leadership a heads up that you are at risk of being two and a half weeks late.

You will notice that some patterns emerge as you develop the habit of predicting your deadline changes. More than half of them will get delayed on the same kind of work. As you become familiar with the recurring hiccups, you can use that information to recalculate future estimates.

You will also notice that you will need to ask for deadline changes less and less. This means you are now better at predicting the future, and should add that to things you brag about when you are trying to get a shiny job at NewCo.
There it is. That’s the post. Alexa, send tweet. This post is brought to you by the letter “H”, and the Amazon-affiliate-linked Mueller wrist brace, for those of you experiencing repetitive stress injuries from your work: Mueller wrist brace! Be safe out there, and have fun practicing your prediction skills at work tomorrow!

Hello everyone! Spring is around the corner. Annual bonuses at large companies are appearing in bank accounts. This must be the month of March.

I am unapologetic for advertising March as “International Replace Your Job” month. When you reach a certain point in your career, there is a fine art to figuring out the right time and place to trade up for your next opportunity. There is a mix of end-of-year bonuses, available opportunities, and quality-of-life issues that everyone needs to balance. I have had a number of conversations with people over the past few years about new opportunities, and what is the opportunity cost of a new role versus what goes into the bank from your current employer. I will probably speak to that some more in the future if it is already not buried deep within my blog.

Today I want to talk about making tools. I think that making tools is very important.

“Good companies make products. Great companies make tools.” I am not sure if this is my wisdom or not. A Google search on the subject yields lots of drills, hammers, saws, and wrenches. I am likely to link some from the Amazons later in the article as a matter of course.

Over my career I have worked with all kinds of software—good software, bad software, new software, and old software. Over twenty years I have observed a few interesting questions that come up when I am in my stupid-or-new phase at a company.

“How long does it take a new developer to be ramped on our stack?”

“How do we put software into production?”

Excellent answers to these questions define a thriving business.

At a recent game company, I noticed that there was an interesting pattern forming during product planning. Because we were doing SAAS (software-as-a-service), we needed to build accompanying tools for our product so product owners could make changes in production.

The bulk of the team would play an unusual game during planning. When asked how long it would take for them to build the web tools necessary for the product to be successful, everyone would attempt to play some bizarro-universe version of “The Price Is Right”. What was the largest estimate they could submit to the planning team without bidding so dramatically that it was clear they were sandbagging? It was a fascinating process to behold. People on this particular game team hated making tools. They wanted to focus on making the game. Each person was doing their very best to make sure they could evade tool development by engaging in a super passive-aggressive sandbagging process, where the losing developer would submit the least outrageous estimate, or alternatively, having made such a mockery of the process with their bid that they earned the task as a punishment for sandbagging too much.

Why did this happen?

To understand, let’s discuss what happens when a new game feature goes live in a SAAS game.

The deep truth for game development is that most of the ideas for feature development are stolen from competitors, or they come from a product owner’s butt. There is always a preconceived notion for what product owners will need to tune, and what players will love.

The funny thing about most of these preconceived notions is that they are often dead wrong.

When a feature goes live, there is usually a need to revisit the tools, add new parameters, and change the business logic in order for the feature to thrive.

A big problem here is that most of the squads on a SAAS game are on a rolling feature development schedule—by the time they find out that the tools need to change, everyone is onto something new.

There is no developer alive who is working on “Shiny New” who wants to be pulled off of their project in order to modify tool features—AKA “Stanky Old”.

I watched this pattern play out month over month with tremendous fascination. After a few iterations of this, I observed that the follow up “we need to change the tools” requests were generally a vicious negotiation process that escalated to leadership, and often resulted in a common concession: Let’s Make a CSV import tool.

A Comma Separated Values (CSV) tool would enable product managers to open up their best friend in software development, Microsoft Excel, tweak a bunch of values, and then save that out to a file to be loaded into production.

At that point it occurred to me that making custom UI tools was a painful exercise for everyone and should be done away with. We should build in CSV importers from the very beginning and let product owners Excel at their work.

Some of this holds true today. “Build CSV import/export” ranks high on my personal backlog for tool development.

While this is a powerful feature to add to a product for a plethora of reasons, it papers over a problem. Many production tools are designed well before their use case is fully understood. Oftentimes, you need to build and ship a product in order to really figure out the best way to use it. The “ship-and-iterate” Agile reader is nodding smugly at this point. Get the code into customers hands and improve as we go.

Figuring out what you need to manage your software is a very hard problem to solve. After a few years of building tools you will find that there are recurring patterns for most business users. You will want data driven import tools, you will want a template for building fast CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) pages, and you will want a small handful of other tools for things like managing users and permissions.

If you are fortunate enough to build successful software products, you will find that building out tools like this will be important to iterate on your product. Creating a toolkit to enable new developers to be successful is also really important. If you can make tool development easy and enjoyable for your development team, you will get some of that “1 + 1 = 3” mathematics that people who go to “Bidness” School are so very fond of.

That’s it. That is the whole post. If you love making software, you should learn to love making tools. Being great at that will enable your organization to ship better stuff faster and give you time to explore hobbies. Like me, about to buy this CLEARLY AMAZON AFFILIATED Cintiq tablet.

See you all next week!

So if you ever took a psychology class, or attended a fancy party with someone who did, you might be familiar with the marshmallow experiment. My wife will ask my kids from time-to-time “do you want to do your homework now or later?” It might not come as a surprise to you that they always say “later”. On these kinds of requests, I have been known to cryptically utter the comment “one marshmallow” within earshot.

I have found myself doing the same thing at work. When building teams and products, sometimes people like to make the easy decisions first. Ask for the strongest engineer to be on your team. Pick the shortest task to complete at the start of the sprint. There are lots of places where you can find a clear “one marshmallow” moment.

Sometimes you benefit from delaying that immediate gratification. For career management purposes, you might need to take a different approach to deliverables. Sometimes you might actually benefit from this too. I have seen multiple times when people have delayed the most risky thing on their project, to the end, only to have that blow up and cause them to miss a deliverable. If you defer taking the easier tasks, you might make some painful conversations less painful by taking on the riskier work first, and making adjustments early in the delivery process. We can discuss the pain of changing deadlines later. Let’s get back to those marshmallows!

Deciding when you want to take one marshmallow vs two marshmallows is important. If you are learning to become a manager, it might be easier for you to manage a strong engineer who basically does not need managing. What will you learn from that? A large number of engineering managers optimize themselves for this situation, and essentially push all the necessary crucial conversations and decision making elsewhere. At one point in my career, I was one of a few managers of teams who did not have any names to contribute to a reduction-in-force moment. The leader of the group quite rightly asked everyone else “why aren’t you addressing the problems in your teams instead of just waiting for me to RIF them for you?”

It is a really good question. I had already put the people who needed corrections on performance improvement plans, and in some cases they did not recover. I chose to take on the work of trying to improve people on my team, as well as taking some of the “more interesting” management challenges. Eventually it became clear to everyone that when you got moved to one of John’s teams, you were either a high maintenance rockstar, or a struggling developer. The challenge for some people was figuring out which was which.

We are coming up on the month of March. This is “international quit your crappy job” month for many people, because your bonus check is in the bank, and you did not get the rewards you were expecting for your work.

When looking at your next job, will you have lots of experience with tough projects and tough situations because you are a two marshmallow thinker? Or will you struggle to be considered for more lucrative opportunities and upgrades to your role because you opted for one marshmallow one too many times?

It is… food for thought.

Thank you for reading along! In the spirit of today’s post, I suggest you buy this clearly-Amazon-affiliated-hideously-overpriced bucket of marshmallows. You can use this to experiment on anyone in your household as to whether or not they are a one or two marshmallow person. See you next week.

This might come as a total surprise to you, but something on the internet made me angry this week. Come to think of it, this is now the third time this year it has happened. The three things that have tilted me are the Dungeons and Dragons OGL license kerfuffle over at Hasbro, the “account sharing” announcements at Netflix, and now most recently, the announcement for changes to 2FA (two factor authentication) over at Twitter.

Each of these three things are incredibly damaging to brands that I have come to use and trust, and honestly, I am heavily rethinking my relationship as a customer with each of them.

Let’s go through them one by one.

Let’s start with Hasbro. I have been a tabletop games enthusiast for pretty close to forty years now. The past decade has seen a massive renaissance in the tabletop games space, as evidenced by Netflix’s “Stranger Things”, Critical Role, and Yet Another Dungeons And Dragons Movie. People in the mainstream have taken to Dungeons and Dragons in a big way—they have made fetch happen.

For some reason, the leadership at the company has declared their Dungeons and Dragons properties to be “under monetized”, and they put out a “draft” change to their licensing that went from zero fees to twenty five percent fees for people making over $750,000 dollars.

Insert record-scratch noise.

There are a lot of people who feel that they floated the agreement to see how much fans of the franchise would react compared to creators. A considerable number of people online unsubbed from the Dungeons and Dragons online subscription product to make sure their voices were heard, and the people responsible for business decisions quickly walked back their proposed changes.

For me, that was too little too late. I am fucking gone as a customer. I am a few weeks away from ordering a replacement game system and doing my double-donut best to persuade anyone within listening distance to do the same. What Hasbro did here was to take a shot at the community of creators with which I self-identify. I have been making my own Dungeons and Dragons campaign materials for the entirety of my gaming lifetime, and I do not know about you, but I dream to get paid someday to do this for a living, even if it is a part-time hobby.

Their decision to go after the creator community for revenues makes sense to the business guy in me, but the sheer aggression of their initial ask was so ludicrous that I am not interested in even listening to anything more that they have to say. Going forward, there are plenty of other, smaller companies who can happily take my money for their systems. If they ever get to Hasbro-size as a business, I would hope they make a decision like “hey, let’s start with a five percent tax for anyone in the million dollars range” or something similar. I bet if Hasbro would have started there, they would have had a much more positive response from the creator community. After all, some people pay more than five percent in state taxes!

Next up, let’s discuss Netflix. I am going to ignore the fact that they flip a coin for canceling new shows. I can forgive them for canceling 1899…ish. What burns me is that they are so stunted for subscriber growth that they have entered into the “squeeze our customers for nickels” phase of their business, and I am squarely within the nickel-holding demographic they are targeting. Let’s talk about account sharing.

I have a son in college. I am happy to say he does not live at home while doing so. Because he is a college student, he has limited income and he is still a dependent by the IRS definition until he gets his piece of paper from his school and joins the economy as a happy worker bee.

I get that Netflix wants to go after password sharers in multiple locations, but I specifically pay extra for two simultaneous streams on the account to accommodate for my son using the family netflix account. Quite frankly, I am offended enough by this that I have already told my family that the day this feature goes into effect is the day we effectively turn off Netflix until the next season of Stranger Things comes out.

To be clear, I have faithfully paid Netflix for years as a “mostly satisfied customer” through all of the stinkers and unfortunate cancellations for shows that I really enjoyed. This is really the deal breaker for me. If they are going to treat me as something to dollar optimize, I am going to put them into the same bucket.

Finally this brings us to Twitter. I just got a notification that reads like 2FA is going away. I can say this pretty firmly because lots of people have responded to “we are taking away text messaging 2FA for free accounts”, and it is not immediately clear that you can just swap it out for a 2FA app of your choice. Let’s skip over the fact that this was messaged super poorly. Let’s also skip over the fact that they could have put up a benign prompt offering something like a month free of ads in order to incentivize people to make the switch. Text message 2FA is one of those things you expect as a dial-tone-level feature for an online service. Telling people it is going away gets everyone wondering what they are going to cut next for cost control reasons.

As a consumer of these services, I am pretty shook. That is how the kids say it, right?

I am not going to try to unpack what the hell these people were thinking in making these decisions. While I can assume they are just spending hours staring at a whiteboard with the single word “ideas?” written at the top, I am not in those meetings and I am not going to pretend like I understand what else they could or should be doing.

As a customer, though… Hoo boy!

Each of these companies has spent a long time cultivating a trust relationship with me. I give them money, they give me things—I was once even a Twitter paying customer! Their conduct in the marketplace is so completely toxic that they have salted the earth for their brands.

I am going to give a special callout to Elon Musk here… He is so egregiously damaging his own brand with this Gong Show conduct that it is materially affecting what people think of other companies for which he allegedly makes decisions!

The impact they are having on their businesses as “b” leadership is just that. Bleedership. They are causing customers to flee to… just about anywhere else. I mean, just look at Mastodon for five seconds and the fact that anyone tells you to find them there illustrates my point.

So what does all this mean?

There comes a point in every product’s life that people start making bad decisions. Jira Product Managers from 2017, I am talking about you here too. These three companies have hit this crazy point where they are staring at the data so hard that they are making ludicrous decisions that would not pass muster with an every day customer. How does this happen? And more importantly, how do you fix it?

Maybe it might start by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. I remember joining some product leadership meetings at Zynga and hearing some really sharp statements and questions from a few very senior leaders. They all started with “I was playing your game the other day”. I had tremendous respect for them for that, and it was clear to everyone in the room that they cared about those products deeply.

In the case of Netflix, Twitter, and Dungeons and Dragons, I do not feel that level of thought in the decisions they have made recently. I feel like they are super damaged brands to me. I am eating up the last of Netflix and getting ready to shut them off. I am going to modify my text message 2FA on Twitter, but I am on the edge of the “delete my data” box on the decision making flowchart. I am also just flat-out fucking done running Dungeons and Dragons and about to buy some alternative systems—assuming they are back in stock sometime soon.

Building a strong brand position with your customers is very hard. I am reminded of the black swan event from the mobile sms ringtone era—the Crazy Frog Ringtone that everyone had to have, and in order to get it, you signed up for a 99 cent subscription. The ringtone itself was a fad, but the big problem is that it taught an entire ecosystem how to turn off these services by sending a STOP sms. Each of these companies has created their own Crazy Frog Ringtone STOP moment here.

I hope that someone in decision making at each of these places reads my rant and spends a few minutes sitting in the corner asking themselves what they did wrong. The blood on their hands is not just mine. It is also their own.

I’ve got nothing to sell you this week via Amazon Affiliate Link. This Post Is For Serious.

See you next week.

Hello again! We are going to continue to talk about superpowers as we approach international “collect your bonus and quit your job” month. Today, I decided to talk about decision making.

One of the things I have learned is that it is very important to make decisions quickly—except when it isn’t. One of the most important executive skills you can learn is when not to make a decision.

There are often good reasons not to make a decision right away. You might not have all of the information you need to make a decision, or there might be events happening that will reveal new information within a well known time frame. You might also have more important decisions which you need to make right now. I learned the term “Eisenhower Box” fairly recently as a filter you can apply to work related decisions and tasks.

Knowing what is urgent and what is not urgent is a great first-pass filter on whether or not to make a decision. As clearly illustrated by this friendly, Google-sourced image and link, you can always schedule a decision that is not urgent in the future.

The next time you need to make a big decision you should ask yourself: “Do I need to make this decision right now?”

You might surprise yourself how often you do not need to make a decision immediately. You might also use that opportunity to construct a habit of scheduling when you need to make a decision.

That is it folks. That is the whole post.

Before you disappear, please contemplate doing something for future you. Buy some Clearly-Amazon-Affiliated wrist rests. If you are on your infernal thrice-damned computer nearly as much as I am, you run the risk of getting some of that RSI happening. I have ordered several of these to sprinkle around my house and travel luggage. Your wrists will thank you for it!

I am going to tell someone else’s story to start today, and I am probably going to tell it badly. Someone I work with was telling me about this exceptionally intelligent coworker who struggled to convey their ideas to other people. Whenever you asked for an explanation, you would get a huge whiteboard loaded with dense and inscrutable data. If you ever said “I am not sure I understand”, they would double down on it and increase the depth and complexity. Eventually you would wind up with ten times the amount of information and almost none of the clarity. I am intermittently guilty of this. I have been known to answer a question with fifteen to twenty words that would have been better answered with a simple yes or no.

If you feel personally attacked by this description, I have good news. I am about to help you. I am going to talk about an important superpower for communicating with leadership. Welcome to using metaphors.

When someone in leadership is requesting information, they are often looking for a summary or distillation that is easy to understand. If they are trying to understand why something is really difficult to do in a production environment, lots of people have been known to say “Imagine trying to change an airplane engine while the plane is still in flight.” They immediately understand that you are trying to do something with a lot of potentially scary problems and logistics issues.

Expressing your complex problems in layman’s terms is a very important superpower. I once worked for someone who came from the hotel space. He really disliked the term technical debt, and did not quite understand what it meant.

One day I decided to tell him a story to see if it would help.

Imagine you are building a hotel. It needs to be open by Christmas. You have 100 floors under construction, and it will not be ready in time. You decide that in order to get the 100th floor done in time for the opening, you build the entire top floor out of drywall and two-by-fours. The hotel opens in time for Christmas, and it is a huge success. Things settle down a month later and someone from management comes and says that they need to add 5 more floors to the top of the hotel.

I asked him “Do you immediately start building on top of the penthouse built with drywall and two-by-fours?”

He looked at me and replied “No, that would be bad. You have to tear down the top floor and put in enough support for the five floors that get built on top of it”.

At that moment, he realized what technical debt was. Sometimes you need to go into an existing project, take apart some software that was rushed to market, and put it back together to support new features.

He never stopped disliking it, but he fully understood what it was, how it happened, and why we needed to get rid of it.

Everyone will have a different go-to for their metaphors. Some people want things explained in terms of sports teams. Other people like comparisons to airplanes. Some people think in terms of construction. It will take some to identify the metaphor that will work for each person.

This skill will become more important as your role becomes more senior over time. You should start practicing now. The next time you find yourself giving a complicated detailed explanation, see if you can describe in the abstract using hotels, airplanes, or your favorite sport. After all, the last thing you want to do is to show up for a championship game without having done any warm ups or training.

See what I did there?

Thank you for reading along this week. In addition to describing a superpower this week, I am also going to talk about a superproduct. I tried recommending Amazon Affiliate products I randomly found. I also tried recommending Amazon Affiliate products I buy and love. Today I am going to recommend a product I should have bought. Introducing the HP Neverstop Laser Printer. I am now on my third HP printer since 2001 and I have discovered that I regret buying the latest OfficeJet printer because it eats ink like a hungry family of rabbits in a carrot field (See? SEE?). I have fixated on the hundreds of dollars I could save over the years by buying a second printer. It would pay for itself in under three years. Next time you need to purchase a printer please bookmark this url. Future me will thank you for the nickel you have stolen from Jeff Bezos on my behalf.