How did Supercell create a winning culture?

Ever wonder how did Supercell achieve success? By having a strong culture. Wired did a good interview explaining how Supercell wins in the gaming arena. I’ve included the key points below explaining how Supercell create a winning culture.

Does your company culture have the mentioned points to win? 🙂

1. Minimise bureaucracy
“It maximises the time people can spend on their work… individual designers can make decisions and optimise for speed and create sense of ownership within the games.” He says no-one knows the potential of a game and its chances of success or failure better than its creators. At least until it is released when the reaction and requests of users become the dominant factors in its evolution.

2. Be transparent
“We send a daily email with all key performance indicators to everyone in the company,” says Paananen, causing a few eyebrows to be raised. “It isn’t restricted to executives, it is the same information released at the same time so we can all figure out on our own what is needed. A new employee started recently and he told me ‘I think I got the wrong email, I just got all the revenue data on our games this morning'”.

3. Celebrate failure
“You have to eliminate the fear of failure. If a game goes wrong we throw a party for its developers and give them champagne to celebrate what they learnt. As a company we have failed far more than we succeeded. We have killed five games and launched two. You need to take risks to succeed and for that you must take fear away from that risk.”

4. Get big by thinking small
Clash of Clans and Hay Day were each developed by teams of just five developers. Even now they are global smashes each has a team no bigger than 15. “Small independent cells is where the company name comes from,” explains Paananen. “We say ‘get big by thinking small’, we value the speed of small teams and keeping things simple. Our employees don’t need layers of processes and layers of management.”