Managing the Unmanageable

What the talk is about

Sergey Sorokin and Philipp Dzyuba share their experience of managing a team of over 150 people on a single free-to-play first-person shooter. They chose an empowerment philosophy and built their processes on the Scaled Agile Framework: two-week sprints, company-wide release cadence, and full-day quarterly planning with milestone-level goals. Even so, only about 30–40% of planned business goals were delivered. The cause was not slow individuals but queues between stages of the asset-creation flow. So teams were rebuilt around content types, with all needed specialists in one team, work in progress was made visible, and the real bottleneck was found. To keep professional ties alive, they created communities of practice. They also cover the project manager's role as a coordinator and prototyping before final quality. Useful for leads of large teams and producers.