At Sakhatech in 2009, a multiplayer gaming engagement needed more expertise than I could acquire alone. I handpicked a multidisciplinary team and invested in how we worked and learned together. It changed my idea of leadership: from solving the problem myself to building a team capable of solving it.

One individual gives way to a connected multidisciplinary team building a shared structure.
If you’ve already decoded the illustration, you know where this is going. Here’s how I got there.

The problem needed more than I could become.

For the first few years of my career, my response to not knowing something was predictable. I learned it. ActionScript, databases, another way around a browser’s limitations.

Then Sakhatech had an engagement involving a US partner working with the National Football League on a large multiplayer online gaming experience.

It needed project management, design, game specialists, animation, front-end development, server-side architecture and testing. Being an intelligent designer-programmer wasn’t good enough. Also, becoming better at one or two technologies wouldn’t make me capable of building the whole thing.

I stopped trying to be the solution.

I couldn’t become all of those people. So I handpicked a multidisciplinary team around the problem.

As Technical Head, my role stretched across managing people, thinking about the product, working with the team on technical decisions and collaborating with leadership in Los Angeles.

My unit of problem-solving had changed. It was no longer just me.

Hiring people was only the beginning.

Capable people need ways of working together. We introduced Agile and Scrum practices, improved documentation and spent time refactoring code.

I also introduced structured learning time. We deliberately invested part of the team’s capacity in technologies that weren’t required for the immediate task.

One was HTML5. Flash was still central to the experience, so learning HTML5 wasn’t an obvious short-term priority.

What could the team do without me?

Being the person with the answers can feel like leadership. People depend on you because you’re useful.

Sakhatech complicated that idea. I needed people who knew things I didn’t. Then I needed those people to become better, and the organisation to respond to changes we couldn’t predict at the start.

The scale changed later at Domy, and again at FYERS. But the core question never did: what can this organisation become capable of doing without me?

Read how this evolved at FYERS