Rise and Play Podcast

You know it, you need to drastically pivot your company otherwise it will go bankrupt. So, what do you do, and how? Nicolas Godement, Managing Director at Twin Sails (previously known as Asmodee Digital) shares the exciting transformation journey of a company that started as a board game IP publisher to a PC and console game publisher. When Nicolas joined the company in 2018 to support the CEO, the financials were not good, the team morale was low. How do you start with that?Get the practical steps from Nicolas on how to pivot a company strategy, team, and branding. How do you accompany the teams throughout this uncomfortable phase? Those changes don't happen overnight if you want to them be sustainable. They usually take 2 to 3 years. Are you ready to lead that journey in your company?Thank you to our sponsor! Identify your ideal audience with today's sponsor Solsten to streamline development decisions and get to market faster. Visit ⁠go.solsten.io⁠ and mention Rise x Play for a demo and receive 30% off your first Solsten engagement crafted to your studio’s needs.Don't forget to subscribe to Rise and Play: ⁠https://www.riseandplay.io This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit riseandplay.substack.com

What is the one thing that the best CEOs do? They manage themselves and their time, above all. It is easy to get distracted by the everyday buzz, people's requests, emergencies, and life in general. How do C-suite and Executives manage their time and life, to make sure they keep the focus on the few important things? Managing your time guarantees a healthier and more fulfilled life.In this episode, Simonetta Lulli (CEO at GameHouse) and Ioana Hreninciuc (CPO at Homa, ex-CEO at Game Analytics) share their Monday routines and tools to ensure they stay on top of things. How do they make time for themselves, to think of the big picture? How do they juggle the demand of personal and professional life? How do they incorporate White Space into their daily routine?You don't need to be a CEO to apply those discipline tools for yourself. But you can learn from successful CEOs!Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/yG2oIWJ74vUThank you to our sponsor! Identify your ideal audience with today's sponsor Solsten to streamline development decisions and get to market faster. Visit ⁠go.solsten.io⁠ and mention Rise x Play for a demo and receive 30% off your first Solsten engagement crafted to your studio’s needs.Don't forget to subscribe to Rise and Play: ⁠https://www.riseandplay.ioDon't miss out on episode #33 with Simonetta (How To Break The Bias Of Being A Female CEO): https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/rxweBnk4Lyb This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit riseandplay.substack.com

UX design is still a misunderstood field in games. Therefore, it is hard to hire great UX designers who understand games or game designers who deeply understand UX. How do we solve this human and skills puzzle?In this episode, Olga Marushchak, UX Director at King, will deconstruct what makes a great UX designer. Olga will share practical tools on how to hire and identify great UX designers, when you don't have internally the knowledge yourself. She will also prove that it is possible to hire UX designers without a prior experience in games if they demonstrate certain key skills. Last, how do you train your UX designers in games, once you found the One?Olga has been working in Game Dev for almost 14 years and has worked in various gaming companies: AAA, small indie startups, and medium-sized organizations such as Playgendary and Wargaming.To learn more about UX, check out episode #32 What You Did Not Know About UXThank you to our sponsor! Identify your ideal audience with today's sponsor Solsten to streamline development decisions and get to market faster. Visit ⁠solsten.io/contact-us⁠ and mention Rise x Play for a demo and receive 30% off your first Solsten engagement crafted to your studio’s needs.Don't forget to subscribe to Rise and Play: ⁠https://www.riseandplay.io This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit riseandplay.substack.com

In this new segment of Rise and Play, I sit down with my business partner Miska Katkoff, CEO at Savage Games, and the founder of Deconstructor of FunIn those episodes, we will share with Miska our reflection thoughts on our leadership work at Savage Games.What can you gain from being more Stoic as a leader?As leaders, we tend to believe that we are responsible for everything that happens around us: company outcomes, actions, and behavior of others. The reality is that we have very little control over what’s going on around us. It takes wisdom to know the difference between precisely what we have control over, and what we don’t.“Identify what you can change and what you cannot change. Accept the things you cannot change, and have the courage to act on the things you can change.”The only things you can really control are your perception and actions. So, how do you apply this to your day-to-day business and process of decision-making, especially tough decisions? That's what we will cover in this segment today!Watch the full video: https://youtu.be/OyIpv-cEViYhttps://youtu.be/OyIpv-cEViYThank you to our sponsor! Identify your ideal audience with today's sponsor Solsten to streamline development decisions and get to market faster. Visit solsten.io/contact-us and mention Rise x Play for a demo and receive 30% off your first Solsten engagement crafted to your studio’s needs.Don't forget to subscribe to Rise and Play: https://www.riseandplay.ioRead more about How to Lead Teams As A Stoic: https://medium.com/ironsource-levelup/leading-teams-as-a-stoic-1-2-d0045dd024d3 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit riseandplay.substack.com

Saara Bergström is the COO at Next Games, a Finnish mobile game developer recently acquired by Netflix, known for their successful IP mobile titles such as Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales and The Walking Dead: No Man's Land. Saara has had a close to a 15-year career in advertising, product marketing and public relations. At Next Games, where she has worked for nearly 10 years, she pivoted from CMO to COO last year and started a new journey officially in an operations role. In this episode, we will walk you through Next Games' cultural journey and transformation from its early startup days, to the company's financial restructuring, to going IPO, to becoming a Netflix studio.Thank you to our sponsor! Identify your ideal audience with today's sponsor Solsten to streamline development decisions and get to market faster. Visit solsten.io/contact-us and mention Rise x Play for a demo and receive 30% off your first Solsten engagement crafted to your studio’s needs.Don't forget to subscribe to Rise and Play: https://www.riseandplay.io This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit riseandplay.substack.com

Carol Miu is the CEO of PeopleFun known for the casual hit game Wordscapes. The company has seen tremendous growth from $100MM in annual revenue in 2018 to over $300MM currently. Carol shares her whole journey from joining the company in 2018 as the product leader on Wordscapes to becoming the CEO. Learn how Carol approached scaling an organization of 17 people to a mature organization of 100+ employees, and how to grow the team leaders in a sustainable way. After all, the leaders of an organization are the most influential people to steer the culture and company results.How do you give the best chances of success and training for your new leaders in the company? Use the EDGE Technique to lead: Explain, Demonstrate, Guide, Enable. How do you ensure that leaders have a manageable number of reports? For a new leader, it should be one report. For an experienced leader, it should be six-seven reports maximum. How are you following those principles?Thank you to our sponsor! Identify your ideal audience with today's sponsor Solsten to streamline development decisions and get to market faster. Visit solsten.io/contact-us and mention Rise x Play for a demo and receive 30% off your first Solsten engagement crafted to your studio’s needs.Don't forget to subscribe to Rise and Play: https://www.riseandplay.io This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit riseandplay.substack.com

For the occasion of International Women's Day, I want to celebrate with you all the virtue of Courage. The courage to be ourselves, the courage to change our lives when something is not right, the courage to listen to ourselves and to respect our needs, first. A month ago, I did something I was really afraid to do: tell a personal story on stage. The story you are about to hear is a performance I gave on stage at The Bear, a Berlin storytelling event with up to 100 people in the audience. You get up onstage, no notes, and tell a story that is related to a theme (on this evening, it was 'Work'). The more vulnerable you are, the more powerful the story ends up becoming. I really wanted to do it because I felt I had something to tell. I was afraid because I thought I was not capable of doing it. I thought I would panic on stage and fail. But what I usually do when I face a fearful situation, I dive into it. Because I know I will grow from this, I will learn, even if it is scary. I hope you will enjoy this special story, that will inspire you to do something daring and fun today, too. For yourself.Happy International Women's Day! If you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe to Rise and Play: https://www.riseandplay.ioVideo of the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP850uh36g0Thanks to The Bear for giving me the space on stage! The piano song is played and composed by James Harper. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit riseandplay.substack.com

A proven way to build a strong company culture starts from the top, with the leadership. Is this the only way? Today, we discuss with Jussi Tähtinen, CEO and co-founder of Nitro Games, a Finnish mobile mid-core games studio, on how to build a culture bottom-up. How do you start the process when you want to involve your people in reevaluating your culture? How do you define company values bottom-up, and at which stage of the company should you do it? How often should you update you values and culture? Values are not just pretty words on the wall, so how do you turn them into everyday habits of the company life?Identify your ideal audience with today's sponsor Solsten to streamline development decisions and get to market faster. Visit solsten.io/contact-us and mention Rise x Play for a demo and receive 30% off your first Solsten engagement crafted to your studio’s needs. Don't forget to subscribe to Rise and Play: https://www.riseandplay.io This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit riseandplay.substack.com

What is managing up? While there are plenty of books about how to be a good Leader, there are few to none about how to be a good follower. Why is that?Wherever you are in this world, you will always report to someone, your boss, a stakeholder, or an investor. Making those relationships work is as important as the relationships you build in your team. How can you apply your empathetic superpowers to your manager? Managing up is good for you, good for your boss, and good for the organization as a whole.In this episode, we cover how to "Manage Up" with Michail Katkoff (Managing Director at Savage Games Studios and Founder of Deconstructor of Fun) - How to be a good subordinate?- How do you identify the "type" of your manager, and how do you adapt your leadership style for each?- What are the upsides of managing up well?Full video of the episode here: https://youtu.be/jlXkU0N2UKcCheck out the book Manage UpMore resources from HBR: https://hbr.org/2015/01/what-everyone-should-know-about-managing-upIf you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe to Rise and Play: https://www.riseandplay.io This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit riseandplay.substack.com

In this episode, we cover the journey of Celine Pasula, Managing Director at Ubisoft RedLynx, on the evolution of the studio after the acquisition from Ubisoft. Being a game studio acquired by a big company is no longer a single story these days. So how do you manage this transition to preserve the DNA of your studio, people, and culture? Is this a realistic outcome to expect?We will cover in the discussion how to tackle strategic communication when you are onboarded as the new General Manager/Managing Director/COO/CEO, post-acquisition. It might be tempting to execute core changes fast, but this will have a cost on the people and culture. You need to go slow, to go fast. Sit down, talk and listen to everyone in the company to understand the history, where is the company now, and where it needs to be.Celine Pasula has over a decade of leadership experience in top mobile gaming companies including startups and bigger companies. She has been working with experiences on all platforms, mobile and HD. Celine is an expert in leadership, finance, legal and business development and also in building a great company culture.If you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe to Rise and Play: https://www.riseandplay.io This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit riseandplay.substack.com