About me

Here’s an exceedingly short summary of principles that I live by as a lead:

• Protect the team
  It’s a lead’s duty to care for their team’s wellbeing, their future, their work and their time. Too many things in this line of work can jeopardize any of the aforementioned, whether is poor planning, unreasonable demands, a bad culture. As a lead I think that my first and foremost responsibility is towards the people working with me.
• Don’t ask others what I’m not doing myself
  Simply put, a leader should never be demanding what they aren’t doing themselves. If it’s too much to bear for me, then same goes for my coworkers.
• The buck stops here
  A leader must take responsibility, either for action or for inaction, when there’s a problem that could have been averted with different decisions on their part. Everyone makes mistakes, a good lead needs to acknowledge their own and correct them.
• Crunch is a failure
  Crunch is a failure of planning, a properly planned production shouldn’t ask anyone any overtime.
  Crunch is also a guarantee for lack of creativity, cut corners and sloppy work. One cannot aim for excellence and find inspiration while being close to burnout.
  Crunch is counterproductive, in the short term one may gain productivity for a week, two at most, but after that the loss of productivity will cause a net negative, with the added damage to morale and health of the team.

Here are some blog posts explaining various situations I faced as a technical director:

• Building a CICD infrastructure
• A disjointed documentation
• Steering to high performance

My leadership experience is quite varied, both on the job and outside.

In work environments I’ve had leadership roles in various environment types:

• indie/informal – when working at sleeping volcano entertainment, while it was a very informal setting I had the role of directing most of our work, keeping schedules and overseeing production in all our projects
• hierarchical – when working at JyammaGames I had first a lead programmer and then a tech director role. The work was organized in a traditionally hierarchical manner, with clear distinctions and work being planned and organized in a top-down fashion.
• horizontal – when working at Fast Travel Games I entered as a technical director from the start. The work is organized in a very horizontal fashion, with the leads setting priorities and goals and acting as coordinators but the individual colleagues being free to make their own plans on how to tackle and solve an issue.
• structured horizontal – while working at Ringtail Interactive I entered a highly structured team with a 3-level hierarchy that strived to be as horizontal as possible in its decision making; while having the same goals of the experience in Fast travel Games, the challenge was to achieve the same goals at a much grander scale

Out of work environments I’ve been in a larping association where I was the regional director of storytelling, directing both the narrative preparation of events with 5 writers to coordinate and the live events on site, where I coordinated up to 30 people under me (with up to 7 direct reports).