Leveling Up a Heroic Team
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RailsConf 201842 / 88
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:15
You can hear me, right? Okay, we're good. Alright, so hi, I'm terrified I mean Ali Fulton. You can find me on the Twitters at Synthetix. It's spelled sin, the T-I-X, don't ask, teenage
00:27
angst, whatever. And this is my talk, leveling up a heroic team. I'm going to try to remember to breathe, but if you see me turn purple, please yell at me. It's been
00:42
three years, so. Oh yeah, I have a clicker. Look at this. This is so fancy. Alright, first some background on me. I've been leading massively multiplayer online role-playing games. It's a math school, which is why we call it MMORPG
01:00
communities aka guilds for the better part of a decade. Currently, I lead the guild Tonic. You see our fancy little green lime logo right there in Guild Wars 2 and have been since 2012, which that's like six years ago, I think. Previously, I led guilds and progression rage teams, which I will get
01:24
into the definition if you are not familiar with those in a minute. Anyway, in a little game, maybe you heard of it, called World of Warcraft. Nobody knows that game, right? In my spare time, I am a software engineer at Sun Tzu. I can also be found running after my toddler and trying to herd my
01:44
cats. Alright, I have 23 alter egos in Guild Wars 2. My guild tells me I have a problem. Here's one, and another, and another, and another, but we should probably move on. So how do we begin? The first step in building both a
02:04
successful community and business is to recognize a problem in need of solving. In games, this tends to be more obvious. It's a monster. If you don't take it down, it's gonna take you down. This, for example, is the Vale Guardian, the first raid boss of Spirit Vale in Guild Wars 2. In business, it's your product or
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service. Hopefully, a problem you're trying to resolve is clear you as well. Maybe not that clear, but hopefully clear. You want to get to the point where you say, yay, we're killing it, but a bit more metaphorically and hopefully with less damage to everyone all around. I'm breathing. These are the kinds of
02:48
problems you're unlikely to solve by yourself. It's dangerous to go alone, so take a team. I mentioned progression raid teams earlier and promised a definition, so here it is. Essentially, they are a group with a shared goal of
03:03
tackling difficult objectives impossible to obtain alone. They are progression raid teams because they improve over time for smoother, faster completions. They continue to push the goals further and further with completing more difficult objectives and achievements. This, for example, is
03:21
Gorsevala. He's the second raid boss in Spirit Vale, which you can only get to if you've defeated the Vale Guardian. You must progress through the progression raid teams generally have three different level or they have different levels of commitment. In Guild Wars 2, we have about three
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tiers, hardcore, semi hardcore, and casual. Hardcore, they're the people that live and breathe raids. They raid for long hours every day until they've mastered all the objectives. They're the ones writing complete detailed guides to their classes, making the world first, setting the benchmarks, etc. I'd like to
04:06
tie this into the people who work 40 hours a week in a software job and go home and work on nothing but software side projects. Maybe. Then there's the semi hardcore people. These are the people that generally like to be good
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at the roles and like being efficient in taking down their objectives but still prefer a more relaxed environment and they like balancing between raiding and their other interests. This is personally in the camp that I fall into both in work and gaming. I love coding and improving my craft but I want
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to have time for, you know, other things like my family and my other hobbies. This is one of the reasons I switched jobs to Senzu, actually. They understand and appreciate work-life balance while still shipping quality code. Unfortunately I come from a place, sorry former fam that's here, that didn't quite
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appreciate this balance and it wasn't the right level of commitment for me. Finally there's the casuals. These are the people that enjoy raids but can't commit to one group every week. Casuals are usually a mixed bag. Some
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people just want to do things for fun and don't care about being the best at what they do but others are casual just because they have lots of other commitments. They're still great at what they do, they just don't have the same time to commit to it. This probably applies most to people who do code or projects at a hobbyist level. Alright, sorry that was loud. We know what a
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progression team is so let's start building one. This is my new favorite team GIF. I love it. Let's just give it a second. Look at how adorable it is. You may have heard the concept of value fit versus cultural fit. One of the
06:03
most important things in assembling your team is to make sure everyone aligns with your concrete values and goals. Creating teams based on cultural fit is problematic because culture is hard to define and matching new recruits based on culture is going to create a pretty homogenous group anyway. I just mentioned the different commitment levels. This ties tight in with the
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values. Hardcore players and guilds that cater to them are going to value dedication, mastery, and achievement. Semi-hardcore players and their guilds are going to value efficiency, balance, and empathy. Casual guilds are going to
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value fun above all else. If you throw a casual player into a hardcore raid group, you're going to have the casual player tell the hardcore people that they're taking things way too seriously and the hardcore players are going to be upset because the casual player is not taking things seriously enough. A mismatch in values results in a negative experience for everyone. You
07:06
need to build your team on the same foundation of what is important. What is important to your team? What do you want the driving values of your company to be? If you cannot easily recite your values when asked or if your company
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doesn't have defined values, you need to work on that right away, like during the happy hour. Please. Values are important for everyone to share, but the same role is not. You can't bring 10 healers into a raid. I mean, you could, but you're probably going to hit a boss timer from not doing enough damage in
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time. There's going to be skills that those healers don't have, etc, etc. This group that I've highlighted here apparently took 10 healing tempests to Veil Guardian and it took 40 minutes. I didn't watch the video, but I probably should because last time I checked, I think Veil Guardian has a 9-minute boss timer
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and after the boss timer runs out, he enrages and his attacks do way more damage and it's pretty unforgiving. They obviously did this to prove that they could, but clearly it's more effective to diversify. It's the same with your business. You can't just have all developers and think your product is
08:23
going to magically sell and support itself. You need devs, ops, QA, sales, support, HR, etc. People who are skilled and trained in those specific roles so that everyone can focus on what they do best. In MMORPGs, that's still a
08:44
DPS role because they get all the glory. They're the ones doing what is visible, the damage. DPS stands for damage per second. But guess what? You're not going to down that big boss guy without a tank and a healer. The tank and the healer are mitigating damage so that the DPS can
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do what they need to do. I can tell you that as a healer, people who don't respect that I have to heal 10 total people and expect me to just clean up their messes out of the time end up dead on the floor. I'm actually dead in this screenshot as well, but I'm on my healer, so minor details. Diversity is a
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necessity. Great. You have some diversity in roles, but if all your DPS are necromancers, you're going to quickly find that there are problems you can't solve with your ability pool. You need an assortment of DPS classes. Throw in some warriors, guardians, shadow priests, whatever. I mixed in multiple
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games classes, sorry. It's the same with developers. If you get everyone from the same background, people with the exact same abilities and experience, people who look and think just like you, you're going to have a hard time mastering all of your goals. Better to take the person who is inexperienced
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and willing to learn than the experienced people unwilling to take criticism. Recognize that some people just have more time to min-max than others. In tech, this is usually found in the amount of open source, just
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because somebody doesn't commit to open source doesn't mean they aren't good coders. Just because, and it's the same with players, it doesn't mean they aren't good players. Everyone has to learn. Experience elsewhere helps people pick things up faster, but no one runs right into a raid knowing exactly what to do. Senior developers don't magically appear out of nowhere.
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Sorry if that's news. Gills often only look for experienced people, but they could train some people. However, a group of ten inexperienced people is going to take a lot longer to achieve the objective. In Gills and
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raids, specifically, I find it's healthy to have one to two junior and experienced people. I think that's the same in business. Hire junior developers and support junior developers. Bold, metallic, underlined. Thanks. In raids, people become obsessed with the meta. This is an
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actual website for Guild Wars builds, and it is called meta battle. It's where you look, one of the places you look, to find the best builds. There's a debate on that, but I won't get into that. Okay, and they spend a lot of time thinking that they need this role, and nothing else will be good. When in
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reality, letting someone play what they are comfortable with will accomplish the same thing in probably 90% of the meta, but playing the meta when you're not experienced with it will be even less effective. In tech, we get so excited about the latest and greatest. Sometimes we don't think about the
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role this takes on our people, the time it takes to learn new roles, and how what's the best for XYZ is always changing. You don't need the flashiest and the best all the time. Sometimes the best technology or role is what
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people are the most comfortable with. Objective, check. Team, check. Now you need some leaders to lead the way. Strong leaders serve as beacons, guiding the overall direction of the team, but what is a leader without people to lead? I'm a
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big fan of servant leadership. This belief that as leaders, we serve our team and its individual members first. This is a little, these are quaggons. They're a little creature in Guild Wars 2. They're adorable. Well, that's also debatable, so I think they're adorable. Their needs need to be met before your
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own. I think I talked about promoting growth at the individual level a few times in this presentation, but it's because it's that important. As a leader, we want to work with each member to identify their strengths and weaknesses. As you lead each member to individual growth, your team grows too. As leaders, we
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want to keep morale high and get people excited. We want to keep people focused so that they can get the job done. This screenshot is of a ready check, which is what people usually do right before they go in and try to kill us. Above all, we need to keep the team working together. Sometimes this
13:47
means resolving conflict the team members aren't able to resolve on their own. Sometimes this means holding meetings. I know, so we're all on the same page. Sometimes this means breaking down communication barriers. Speaking of
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communication barriers, with more and more companies moving towards the distributed and remote model, as they should be, optimizing communication and information access is more important than ever. You have your leaders, and now you're almost ready to go off and slay. How are you gonna make sure everyone is on the same page? Anybody is. When I was leading WoW raids, we
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would use this voice over IP software called Ventrilo. Generally, the Ventrilo channel was meant to be kept clear so that the raid team could all hear the instructions from the raid leader. Anytime multiple people would start
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talking over each other, the raid leader would shout, clear WoW! The sound is like engraved. I will never forget it. I think I have nightmares still. This was to keep the channels clear so that all the important calls are heard. In many companies, this is accomplished by a no-noise announcements channel where only important updates are placed and all
15:02
other discussion is elsewhere. In addition to must-know-right-now information, you probably accumulated, or will accumulate, an incredible amount of knowledge and documentation. I'm sure you have tool fatigue already, from your Kanban, your Slack backlogs, your GitHub issues, your Wikis, your readme's,
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etc. Wouldn't it be nicer if it was all in one place where you knew to search and look? Guild Wars 2 actually has a slash wiki command in the game that will pull up the wiki page for whatever you put in the command. It's an awesome go-to resource for figuring out simple questions so you don't have
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to bother other people with them. I know many teams are not good at this. Trust me, I really have not worked for a team that's amazing at this yet, but it is important to start working towards. Are you gonna run in and
16:01
attack that boss? I mean, you might try to pull a legal sentence, but you'll probably be wasting your time. If you're unfamiliar with Leroy Jenkins, it was this guy that said he was AFK, and then all of a sudden he goes in without his raid team and just runs in and agro's all
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these little baby dragons, and I think this was back when WoW was 40-man raid, so yeah. If you haven't seen it, check it out. It's on YouTube. Anyway, you're gonna think about it strategically. You're going to break it down into steps, roles, just like how you break down a programming or business
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problem. It's probably gonna feel like you have no idea what you're doing, what you try anyway. We need a starting point. The boss is going to die as long as you reach the minimum. Going beyond that minimum is definitely optimal, time efficiency, etc. But at first it might not be pretty, but it's done. Clean it up
17:04
later. I personally love refactoring. Once you have your minimum viable whatever, you move the goalposts up from there. Time and freedom to experiment is an important learning tool. It's okay to try something and fail if it is a learning experience. It helps identify weaknesses in your system
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or process. You experience and expose different angles of the problem, which ultimately helps better your product. We live in the information age and there's lots of blog posts, guides, tutorials, and conference talks. Maybe one strategy that works for others doesn't work for your team. Maybe no one way to do
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things, but some things definitely work better than others. Make educated decisions based on other successes and failures. Don't go in without a basic strategy unless you have to. Have some sort of idea what you're doing. In order
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to have your team feel comfortable experimenting, you need to foster a blameless culture. If your team fears making mistakes, they'll be hesitant to try something unfamiliar. Worse, they might try to hide the mistake they've made and find out way too late to recover. We need to treat what is often seen
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as failure as a learning experience. It's only a true failure if you gained absolutely nothing from the incident. Here's a little doodle I found on the internet. People tend to think there's one straight line to success, but really it's pretty messy and sometimes you go backwards. Usually when experiencing
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some sense of failure, there are some recovery protocols. Someone will step in where it's needed or there's some automation in place. Tank killer went down? Okay, your other healer will try to cover them and be mad about it, but they'll do it.
19:04
Someone else just took an attack to the face and they're about to hug the floor. Your healer is overloaded, everything's on cooldown, and now your tanks block missed thanks to a critical hit based on a random number generator you have absolutely no control over. It's officially reached the
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point of failure and the raid was wiped. Large-scale failures are rarely the result of one person. Is it the tank healers' vault we wiped? They went down first and caused some stress on the other healer, sure, but there were not people alive to keep going. It was the accumulation of mistakes and also
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things outside of the group's control. It's unfair to blame one specific person for failure. Well, usually. Story time! Yay! Alright, back in my World of Warcraft days, anybody who played World of Warcraft, you probably know who this is, I was
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leading a group in the 25-man Icecrown Citadel raid in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. It was a frost wyrm boss named Sindragosa, pictured here, and we were trying to get our first ever kill. One of her mechanics was that she would target players and they would have to run out of the group
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because they were gonna be ice blocked, and if you're near anybody when you're ice blocked, you also ice block them, and so on and so forth, it changed. Well, here I am with my team, leading my team, after hours of work, we're exhausted, we're frustrated, we're ready to get this done. She's almost dead and I'm
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calling for the target to move out. I'm getting frantic now, nobody's moving out. Ice block, move out. It was me. And I ice blocked the entire group, all 25 people, at less than 10% somewhere around there. We were absolutely devastated. I guess the
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moral of the story is to be more self-aware. So how do you become more aware? Logs and metrics! I work for a monitoring company, so of course I have to bring up logs and metrics, but actually logs and metrics are big in gaming as well. For each boss kill, we review damage output, healing up time, as well as
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build mechanics and time to complete. It's the same with your application. You need to collect some baseline metrics and use them for comparison to ensure progress, and applications you care about speed, health, and output too. Without seeing these numbers and logs, it can be difficult to pin down the areas you need to improve. I've been at companies without any monitoring or log
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aggregation, so if you're one of these companies, I assure you that you're not alone. However, to level up, you really need to implement at least the basics, which they have not been seen. Here's an example boss report for
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Mursa Overseer, who is a boss in Guild Wars 2, but is from way back in September. I really don't expect you to be able to read this, but you'll be able to look at it on the slide deck. We downed him in 2 minutes, 30 seconds. You can see all the roles that are present. This screenshot is
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highlighted on Boon stats, because I am a healer, you see me somewhere, or you will see me. Lullaby of Thix, that green icon means I'm a druid. I've sorted it by a boon called Grace of the Land, or Godel, because back then as a druid, your job was to maintain a Godel uptime of as close to five stacks as
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possible. It might still be the case, I haven't read it in a while, so this is showing the average, which I had, of 4.5, which is pretty darn good if I am able to toot my own horn, but definitely one of my better runs, but Mursa Overseer, if you play Guild Wars, is also one of the easiest bosses, so I can't toot my own horn too well. So anyway, you have this team, you're
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communicating effectively, and you're starting to get pretty efficient. How do you keep it that way? I'm gonna briefly introduce some of these topics, but they could easily have their own talks each. There are plenty of great blog posts, I've said we live in the information age, by different thought
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leakers, so if you're looking for more in-depth coverage to the interwebs, one of the core foundational needs of maintaining happiness is maintaining safety. People stay where they feel safe. People are often surprised at how
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diverse Tonic is. We don't do any particular outreach or call ourselves an LGBT guild, but we have members who are openly trans, queer, disabled, and neurodiverse. In a game, it's pretty easy to hide your identity and to try to blend in with the perceived status quo, but in Tonic, as people have outed
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themselves, they find more and more people saying, me too, and realizing that they aren't alone. They're safe and they're accepted for who they are. They found their people, so they stay, and because they stay, we've built a diverse community. We created this sense of safety using a code of conduct that, as
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explicitly as possible, maps out boundaries to not cross and the consequences of violating this code. This isn't new. You all are here. We have a code of conduct at RailsConf, but it serves as a definitive guide to acceptable behavior and lets people have minimal doubts as to what is and is
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not allowed. A code of conduct is meaningless if it is not actively enforced. I have had to cite removal of... had to use it to cite the removal of numbers a couple of times. Thankfully, it's not often, which I think is because...
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When we invite anyone to the guild, we review our values in code of conduct. I have turned people away because they weren't sure they could commit to it, so yes, you should review your values in code of conduct and the recruiting process to filter out some potential conflict later on. Once people feel
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safe, they want to feel included and a sense of belonging. In raid groups, people who are constantly only considered substitutes are gonna find a different team where they feel appreciated. If your community in the game is supposed to be focusing on the entire game, but you were more than often not... more often than not focusing on raiding, the people who feel
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left out are gonna leave. At my last company, they did a great job of having events, food, etc. for people local to the main office, but remote people were often not included. I didn't feel appreciated at the same level and that
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was part of the reason I left. Oftentimes, as companies grow, clicks form. Try to avoid them as best you can. I know that's easier said than done. Don't let your teams end up like this, fam. Try to promote different people working together, but don't force it either. Celebrate your team's
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success. This stuff is hard. Recognize and reward your team for a job well done. Have you been working on a boss for weeks and you finally got him down? Bust out the in-game fireworks like this image right here. I have gilt fireworks. It's so cute. I've been grinding on a new product feature and
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you finally are ready to release it? Send everyone a cupcake or something. Failure to celebrate success is one of the factors leading to burnout. Yes, this happens in games too. You want to be balancing your team goals and your team's health. We are not machines. Sprint after sprint is really just a
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marathon. Everyone needs a break. Time off is good for everyone. Recruiting and retraining takes significantly more effort than letting people just relax from time to time. I'm a fan of mandatory minimum time off. Sensu has
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four weeks minimum that you have to take. They will disconnect all your accounts if you don't take it. I've seen some companies only have two weeks total vacation time or they set the minimum to only two weeks which is a start but not quite there. Or, which is probably the worst, they have
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unlimited PTO but nobody actually takes it. So set a decent minimum. I recommend four weeks or more and make sure it's actually taken. We're more productive when we're relaxed. Stress leads to mistakes and
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avoidable failures. If your team members burn out, they're gonna leave. If you're constantly retraining new people, you're presenting more and more opportunities for mistakes. New people to your team generally lack the knowledge of the deep internals of your system or product. High turnover
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leads to high failure. Your reputation is also important to maintain if you want to maintain team happiness. Having toxic members representing you causes damage to your reputation. In Tonic's code of conduct, we have explicit rules against causing grief or harm to the greater community.
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Anyone found violating these rules is immediately removed. I have a small section of our code of conduct on this slide. Again, I don't expect you to be able to see or read but it's there when it goes on the slide deck. But basically it's saying, it's mentioning some pretty toxic gaming behaviors that
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we don't tolerate like exploding, griefing, chat spam, various others. To give you an example of what I mean by this, in Guild Wars 2, a few members belonging to the same guild, not mine, wanted the achievements and rewards that came from winning a player versus player PVP tournament. So they purchased
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a tournament win from skilled PVP players. Essentially the skilled PVP players played as them and they won the tournament for them. Well, ArenaNet, the makers of Guild Wars 2, found out and they recommended them.
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As these players all belong to the same guild, the greater community found out too and they lost respect for that guild. Despite only a tiny, tiny percent of the guild being the offenders, you don't want people to lose faith in your company over a few bad actors. Having a positive impact on the greater
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community has a positive impact on your image. In games, we do this by hosting events, helping out newcomers, and just being friendly in our interactions with people outside of our guild. Here's me randomly dancing in the PVP lobby with some strangers. I'm the purple cabbage in the middle next to some
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other purple thing that happens to be my pet. In business, maybe you do this by sponsoring things you agree with, open sourcing your core software products, or having a great support team that interacts with your customers. If you have a good reputation, which is earned by both how you treat your
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members and how you treat your community, you'll have a much easier time recruiting new talent and also retaining the talent you currently have. All right, we have a working team now, but we always want to get better,
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harder, better, faster, stronger, yeah, something like that. Okay, the ultimate goal of how your team operates is to be coordinated at both the individual and group levels. Cogs in a machine of awesome, despite the fact that I just said we are not machines. You want people who know how to do their roles and able to make decisions
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in the best interest of the whole group. You want people who know how to step in and recover from a weak spot seamlessly and just as seamlessly return to their original role. This is not an easy thing to do. It takes a long time to achieve this kind of synergy, if it's achieved at all. Yes, I used the
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energy and I'm going to use it again, but we still want to keep working towards this point. One of the ways we reach this energy is to help people grow where they are currently struggling. Maybe that's by extending additional educational resources or working with them directly to strengthen their skills.
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Simply telling someone to get good is not going to help. Okay, constructive feedback with working points and pairing probably will though. If one person isn't carrying their weight and the team notices, you have to address it.
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Start positively though. Give them a chance to improve resources, assistance, what they feel they need within reason. If they still show no interest, can't keep up, whatever, it's time to let them go. You also need to evolve with your market,
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your company, your community, etc. Tonic is a completely different guild from six years ago, based on the changing needs of both the Guild Wars 2 community and our members. I started Tonic before I went to grad school when I had plenty of time. We were focused on
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friendship and partying and voice chat and now me with a kid and a full-time job. We're relaxed after a hard day. Change is inevitable. Embrace it and grow. I truly believe that the
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worst thing you can say is we've always done it this way and we're not going to change. Last step. Well, here's a Pallavale Guardian. Only, wait, he's no more. We have vanquished him, yay. And we got the trophy and all the loot's inside. We did it.
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And we did it some more. And some more. And some more. And some more. Building, maintaining and growing a heroic team is a long process. One that is constantly evolving
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and in need of improvement, but the benefits are definitely worth it. Go level up and get those trophies. Thank you and plus 50 DKP dragon kill points for everybody here. Thank you.