Agile Game Development: Build, Play, Repeat, 2nd Edition

Chapter 19

Coaching Teams for Greatness

One of the main lessons I’ve learned from decades of game development is that you don’t remember the games you shipped so much as the people you worked with making them. The teams I most fondly remember are the ones that enjoyed the work and the camaraderie. Coincidentally (or not), these teams made the most successful games.

In 2012, Google launched project “Aristotle” in a quest to identify what made its greatest teams great. For Google, a great team, as Aristotle famously said, is one in which “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” The study eventually found that, other than intelligence or skill, what differentiated high-performing teams from dysfunctional ones was the level of emotional ...