Why does Playtika need professional communities?
In late 2020, right in the thick of the early COVID-19 period, people suddenly started working from home. There was a huge sense of disconnection. Until then, what defined the company was face-to-face contact: at the coffee stations, in the kitchenettes, the little conversations along the way. Closing loose ends and trading ideas. There was a lot of interesting professional dialogue happening. And then suddenly it was gone.
Right around that time I'd just finished a term in a monetization role and was thinking about what to do next. The organization said it had an idea that had been sitting on the table for a long time. They'd run their annual organizational survey, and a very strong need for knowledge sharing had surfaced from employees. It came up in every conversation, with employees from every profession imaginable: "I want to know more." They gave me a mandate to build a knowledge-sharing initiative that would make an impact through strong, global professional communities (called Clans).
Playtika is a gaming company built autonomously around its games: every game has a studio that runs as a fully independent organization. There's a lot of knowledge locked inside each studio that could help people in the same role at a different studio. To get to that knowledge, I built a strategy, and one of the key goals was for the communities to be global, connecting people from a specific profession across all of Playtika's studios worldwide. Because I came from the business side myself, out of a studio, I understood just how much each studio is a bubble. I barely knew anyone outside my own. I came in with a known set of pains, we translated those pains into a need, and from that need we created interesting methods and approaches.
How were they built?
We picked which professions to focus on based on employee retention rates. I looked at where the biggest departures were, which profession was the most strategic at the organizational level, and where knowledge was hard to retain. We didn't want to do things just for the sake of it. For example, if a shared profession already had a well-developed body of knowledge, maybe there was no need to touch it. But if knowledge was only passing from one person to the next, that's probably where we needed to put more focus.
For the pilot, we chose UI/UX. We felt the designers came with an openness to sharing, so that was the POC we launched with. We also wanted to test the global angle, and this profession has a lot of people abroad. We started with 6 Playtika sites.
Of course there were tons of challenges, starting with finding a time that worked for everyone. How do you build a community over Zoom? Even the people in Israel were still in COVID, working from home. There were language challenges too. We didn't know whether the conversation would be open enough in English. Would people feel comfortable sharing in a language that isn't their mother tongue? And beyond the operational challenges, there are cultural differences at the professional level.
We knew which professions we'd open Clans for next, but I waited to see that this one worked. The next step was selling the idea inside the company. I did roadshows for every relevant stakeholder and had to explain WHAT'S IN IT FOR THEM to each audience. It took a ton of energy to crack the right messaging for each audience and get them to back the move. It felt a bit like an investor pitch. That stage was challenging and Sisyphean, but it worked, and it was critical for everything that followed. Once we had management and every relevant stakeholder on board, it was time to bring in the employees.
What are the Clans and how do these communities work?
There are 4 Clans running in 2022: UI/UX, analysts, monetization, and game economy. We started with UI/UX as the pilot.
We called our communities Clans. Clan is a term from the gaming world. Literally it means tribe, and in games it's a feature that says: I join another group, not necessarily one whose members I know, but we share a mission in the game. Everyone contributes their piece to solving it, everyone gets rewarded, and we work together to complete the mission. We wanted to take that professional jargon and bring it into the Clan.
We decided the first Clan would be open to anyone working in UI/UX. That part was very technical: search for the job titles in our internal system (Oracle) and pull the lists. The second step was building a leadership team. I recruited a team from inside the organization, people we call Champions: a group of 5 to 7 people from different studios who would lead the community together with me. They live the profession, they know the pains, they know what they're missing to grow professionally, and how they'd define success both as professionals and as team leads. I actively reached out both to relevant people and to managers, and asked them to recommend suitable employees. Then I ran interviews, meeting with everyone who wanted in or who'd been recommended, to put the team together. We told them how many hours a week it would take and what was expected of them. I knew that if they didn't really, truly want to take it on, it wouldn't work. We wanted enough people to split the tasks, and a diverse group: personas that complement each other. It's hard to pin down someone's exact persona in an interview, but you figure it out very fast. And sometimes you realize you've recruited a Champion who isn't the right fit.
One of the first questions management asked me was: if the Clan is open to everyone, how do you segment the content?
At that first stage I told them we couldn't segment yet. We had to open it to everyone. No question, the people who'd gain the most would be the less senior ones. They're the ones who'd get the most value. On the other hand, we'd chosen the professions based on attrition, so the two go together quite well. As the Clans develop, we may split them by seniority, because the challenges really are different.
The Clans have one professional meeting a month. The Champions team plans a six-month content program: we start by brainstorming topics, figure out which ones on the list hit the broadest common denominator, then take a topic and break it into a practical session made up of an intro, a frontal lecture, peer learning, and discussion. There's a very strong emphasis on peer learning and discussion. People sit at round tables with people who aren't on their own team, and that's where the real magic comes from. Yes, there are interesting, cross-cutting things happening in the organization that are relevant to everyone, but sometimes people just want to talk about the most basic things with colleagues from other studios. So there are monthly meetings geared toward peer learning and knowledge sharing for each profession. For example, the analysts said they needed to get better at working with SQL. I connected them with someone in one of the departments who's an SQL master, and he runs a very practical session. He took queries every analyst uses on a daily basis and showed how to cut the run time, which is a big deal for an analyst. Instead of a query running for X amount of time, he cuts it in half. That's meaningful peer learning with immediate impact.
On top of that, once a quarter we bring in an enrichment talk, from inside Playtika or from outside. There are conversations on Teams all the time, and there's the annual flagship event: a two-day offsite, held separately for each profession, somewhere outside Playtika, that combines knowledge sharing, professional development, and networking. The structure of the offsite has changed a lot over time as we've learned from the field. You have to tailor it to the personas and to the need, figure out what activity they'd actually enjoy, and how to bring them together. In monetization, for instance, it was obvious the evening called for a party and a band, while in game economy we knew we needed something calmer, so we gave them a casino night. We ran 4 of these in the last six months, and it's amazing how in 2 days, 30 hours, you can create incredible things on a personal level, plus a lot of professional content you just never get to in the day-to-day. When you're inside an organization, it's really hard to look up and see what's happening elsewhere. You have to climb 5,000 feet up, spot the patterns in how people think, and try to influence them, and that takes a lot more than the daily routine allows.
Each offsite had very meaningful deep-dive workshops, and we made strong connections between the external speakers and the Champions and experts from that profession, who know how to look at the profession at Playtika and tie the workshop back to people's day-to-day, so they genuinely take something away from it and it doesn't drop off their radar the next day.
A lot has changed over time. The keyword is re-shape. Everything I think I know has flipped on me several times over. Take the variance between professions: what I thought would work in monetization didn't work in economy. There really is variance in the personas of each profession, in their needs, in their pains. You can actually see a personal thread connecting the people within a profession, and how different they are from one profession to the next. The Playtika of today, December 2022, is nothing like the Playtika of December 2020. So at the organizational level too, we've been through so many changes, shifts, and new ways of looking at things. The organizational need changes as well, and you have to adapt the activity to it.
When did you realize it was working?
The moment I realized it was working was when one of the employees asked us to open a Clan for his profession. I knew we'd succeeded, because demand was starting to come from the bottom up. I also remember one of the most successful meetings we had in the UI/UX community, one we called Show Me Your Miro. Miro is a collaboration tool a lot of designers work in, and there are different ways to use it. We picked 3 community members and split the meeting into 3 rooms (it was on Zoom, since the community is global), and people simply showed how they use Miro. The meeting got amazing feedback. We learned that the basic stuff is what gets the best feedback.
In the analysts community we also did round tables around the features. We split the whole community into 6 or 7 topics, everyone had to pick their main domain, and the discussion was incredible. The meeting got an amazing score in the survey. People want to talk about the simplest things. Stupid-simple. All you need is the structure: what it looks like, guiding questions, structured time. You have to hold the session. Telling people to "talk" doesn't work. But with precise guiding questions, you can draw out a ton of information.
The analysts told us it only opened a window onto how deep you could go into each topic on its own, and it left them wanting more.
One measure of success is how many organic meetings came about because of the Clan. It's also some of the strongest feedback I get from Clan members: that they're working together on a feature. "Without the Clan I wouldn't have known who my colleagues are, and I wouldn't have known who to turn to when I started working on XYZ."
For the metrics we defined, we looked at things across 3 dimensions:
- Activity: how active are you in the Clan? Do you come to the meetings? Each community has a channel on Teams that works a lot like a Facebook page, where activity happens between meetings too: knowledge sharing, sharing challenges, questions. Which studios showed up to the meeting?
- Belonging, or community: your sense of belonging to the profession. How proud am I to be a designer/analyst/monetizer/economist at Playtika?
- Engagement: how many people do I know personally, and how comfortable do I feel reaching out to people on professional matters?
We asked all of these questions before opening a community, then checked again a few months later with the same questions. We saw a huge improvement.
It's important to say that there's sometimes confusion between professional communities (CoP) and guilds. Guilds are professional communities backed by an organizational structure, which makes it easy to give them quantitative goals. Playtika doesn't work in a guild structure. We're a professional community whose goal is knowledge sharing, networking, and strengthening the sense of belonging to the profession. That's why our metrics are softer. We do watch the attrition of each profession very closely, and there too we saw that in managed communities, the rate of employees leaving voluntarily goes down. Of course it's hard to prove a direct link, but I can say you see improvement there as well.
You have to keep asking yourself how you're giving value to your community and how you're connecting that value to the business.
Cracking the win-win: how do you make sure both the community and the organization get value?
The win for Clan members: professional development, learning, and a sense of team pride. Fun! A sense of belonging.
The win for the organization: knowledge sharing at an organizational level never seen before, and professional collaboration.
What challenges did you face?
- It's very hard to make clear to managers what their WIIFM (what's in it for me) is. It's a mindset, not a clear number. The challenge is still there, which is why the plan going forward is to figure out how the Clan can produce an output that flows back into the business and delivers value.
- The challenge of transparency about everything that's being done: being both strategic and hands-on, and communicating what's happening.
- Keeping the Champions. These people do amazing work, they're real talent in the organization. But they have their ups and downs too. How do you keep 25 Champions over time? Our way of recognizing them, after a meaningful term (6 to 12 months), was a trip to a professional conference abroad in their field, of their choosing. It's an amazing perk. They love being seen.
- The Teams channel is a challenge. It's not active enough, not engaged enough, and people are afraid to expose themselves and get criticized. Israel doesn't have that culture of sharing. It's always about how I'll look to others. We added an option for anonymous questions, but it isn't really ingrained here. In Berlin, for example, it's deeply ingrained and people do share.
Tips for community success
- You have to show value. Understand the added value the community can deliver, and to put it in black-and-white terms: can the organization exist with it or without it? Would the organization be the same with or without it? You have to keep asking yourself how you're giving value to your community and how you're connecting that value to the business. Once you can connect the value to the business goals, the answers will come on their own.
- You can't succeed at something like this without getting stakeholders in the organization on board. They need to understand the value I can create in order to believe in the project.
- When you build a Champions team, diversity matters. You're looking for genuinely different personas, with one trait they all share: the drive to get involved and have an impact far beyond where they sit, beyond their own little corner of the studio. And they come to realize that beyond what they give, they gain a great deal themselves.