Key for creating best product in the world is to care
Before we dig into the article, my officially recommended song to be played in the background while reading this article is: Air - La Femme d'Argent. Click here to play it on Youtube.
Thomas Schranz wrote a article “The simple Secret behind wonderful Products” which you should really read through. After reading it, I really felt like I should write a article about the same thing as that is really something I have also noticed working with MinecraftEdu, from my life and from other people achieving great things in the IT field. I’m focusing more on examples in this article because I always feel like writing too theoretical article that smart people that want to make themselves feel smart writes cannot represent the findings in an understandable format. Even that last sentence felt like something some smart person would come up with every now and then in their writings. Let's avoid that kind of nonsense.
So in a nutshell - what is it that makes some games, products or even Minecraft mods so good, even though they are being created by one to just few people? Some people would say that it is “talent”, so you are a good programmer and you can achieve this. Well, that helps. But if we have a talented programmer that does not care about what he is doing, we can only expect a mediocre end-product. By caring about your product, you spend those extra nights polishing your product, fixing even the slightest problems and you are checking with ruler that even the pixels match in your interfaces. See where I am getting here?
Let’s take an example here. You are being paid to take care of a baby. Your main motivation is money and you care about the baby, but when comparing to the situation that it is your baby, your main focus is that you really care about the baby and want to see him / her grow up. Having everyone in a team to really care about the project, like growing up a baby and see it grow, makes everyone work really hard to achieve best end-results. This creates the term that people call good group dynamics. There you go, it’s not rocket science.
So what is it that makes bad group dynamics? When I was doing group projects at university, some groups failed at their projects even though they had talented people working on it. Why? Not everyone in the group cared about the end-result. They only wanted to pass the course, which promoted the same spirit into the talented ones who stopped caring. You cannot create a great end-result in a situation where group does not care about the end product and this is what we can call bad group dynamics (even though some other situations also promote bad dynamics, like bad relationships between group members, but in the end it just makes them not care about the end result).
Let’s make another example here from large company perspective. Large company, which main motivation is to gain money, finds a project from which they think they can make money of. They allocate, say 3 million dollars into it, hire a team of 30 people to work on the project and think that they can make it amazing product just by having a lot of talented people working on it and throw money into the project.
Money is good motivation to get people working, but where it falls apart is that if you have a team of 30 whose only motivation to work is money and who do not care about the end-product, you will NEVER create something than people who care about their product can achieve (see the baby example I wrote above). People are not stupid and they do realize that this is a large company which just wants to make money and they use you to achieve that. And now you still question why some AA games have insane budgets but in the end they still fail…
I will not discuss here on how to start caring about what you are doing because it really is another subject to write of. But if you really want to get examples of how to care from company’s perspective, take a look at how Finnish companies like Supercell and John Deere both made the whole company feel like a family where everyone got the same bonuses, starting from just hired people and ending in seniors. Having the spirit of family where everyone cares about each other and cares about the end product will make the company work very, very efficiently.
In the end I have to mention that there are also cases which might reduce your caring, for ex. changing family situations or finding something that grabs your attention. This is normal and has also happened to me. But I know that when I do care about what I am doing, I am on top of my game and always aiming for something that others have never achieved before.
Yep. I also left this post relatively small for a reason; the concept what I am writing here is really simple and writing a 30 page theoretical doctoral study would just make people miss the whole point. Also, if you liked the article, feel free to retweet it on twitter by pressing here, thank you! :)
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