When it comes to freelancing or managing a team I usually don’t post much about my experiences. I do however make exceptions if it makes for a great lesson. For this particular blog post, I’m going to walk you through one of the startups I was working with and why it failed. For everyone’s protection, I won’t be mentioning any names. Before I dive into this, I do want to say that I have full permission to disclose the following information.
Like Most Beginnings
It was about a year ago that a colleague had reached out to me about joining his team. Of course, since I’ve had worked with him on many occasions before and recognized his skills as a developer, I agreed. Like many start-ups, things kicked off reasonably well. Everyone had gotten the chance to personally introduced themselves and learned a bit about each other’s backgrounds through various Skype calls. The team consisted of a total of five members of which two, including myself, had worked remotely.
The first project we had taken on had been planned to have a period of at least a year through a year and a half of development. Since the project was going to be an online multiplayer game with on-going support, post-production timelines were made to give a realistic idea of what we wanted to achieve.
We had about two through three Skype calls each week to check-in and make sure everyone was on the same page. For roughly a few months, this worked pretty well.
There Was No Accountability
Like many ambitious projects, this one demanded quite a lot of time. Since this was a start-up, funding was minimal. Most of us had a full-time job with families we had to support. None of us talked about our personal lives very much or thought to talk about our work schedules until the last critical moment.
It became tough to access the situation, and deadlines were pushed back consistently. No one was held accountable. Slowly the fun perspective of working together soon started feeling like the average 9-5 job except, it wasn’t a 9-5 job.
The Stressful Tipping Point
Slowly one by one life caught up with most of us, and many of us stressed out about issues which caused many problems to develop within the team. A couple pushed for rapid development to get financial support, and many threw temper tantrums.
The team started slowly breaking apart, and on many accounts, damage control meetings took up a majority of the time rather than productive production meetings. Eventually, this has led us all to agree that dropping the current project and starting fresh on a new one with less complexity was the only way to go.
Different Pages, Different Times
At first, the new project gave us all a fresh breath. Mechanics were planned out, concepts created and prototyping was a breeze. Everyone was happy with the results. We actually for the first time thought we had a fun, solid prototype. The biggest downside, however, was that everyone was on different pages at different times. No one was ever on the same page.
Disagreements arose, as they tend to, as features kept creeping in. Concerns about “breaking into the game industry” versus “releasing a game to release a game” was in debate. Both to some extent had some very valid points, but no one ever met at the middle ground.
Lost In Communication
By this point, we were already a couple of months into development, which was re-prototyping the prototype to accommodate the different mechanics and ideas. Concepts were just being pushed back and forth which led to features that weren’t even going to be in the final product. Communication soon became an issue, and more damage control meetings had taken place.
The planned release for summer soon became winter and then became spring. Parts of the team began dropping off for days at a time without notice, and soon excuses became flowing one after another. The project dragged on for a couple of months and eventually managed to enter a beta state.
Feature Creep
As the game became, polished more features kept creeping in. Instead of working towards a final product we soon found ourselves with yet another prototype. Basic mechanics soon became clusters of multiple, and gameplay soon became untestable. The light at the end of the tunnel dimmed even further because the project was no longer within scope.
Lost of Trust
As the project timeline extended and communication undoubtedly worsen, trust became an issue. We did eventually get the game to an open beta release, but that was the end of that project’s lifeline. Legal severe matters got discussed, and much paperwork was involved. I, of course, had already left at this point only to find out later that the team has disbanded.
Conclusion
To wrap things up here neatly there are a few key points I wanted to touch. Creating a team is relatively easy but managing one with trust isn’t as simple as it seems. There will be many roller coaster moments, but if your team can’t handle and tackle any issues that arise together, it will become increasingly hard to continue. A team can only be a team by working together.
Communication must always be clear, and feature creep must never be a thing, else your product will never see the light of day. Many start-ups fail because they lack communication. So next time, instead of playing the blame game, communicate.
