The following is the organizational framework we use to self-organize, grow our company, and enjoy our work. It outlines how we work together, complete client projects, and work towards realizing our vision.
We started out as a very small agency, but we've quickly grown to over 30 people and we continue to grow. When we were small, all decisions could be made by everyone on the team. As we've grown, it's harder to make decisions as a group.
Happily, we've managed to build our team on talent and trust, and thus we've decided to outline a framework by which we can continue grow, while at the same time retaining the culture we've fought so hard to build.
Our mission is to create genre-defining, innovative entertainment experiences that inspire consumers and create outstanding value for all stakeholders.
In no particular order, we value:
- Strong Opinions, Loosely Held
- Brutal, Respectful Honesty
- Passion, Integrity, and an Adventurous Spirit
- A Positive and Fun Work Environment
- Dedication and hard work
- Being platform and tool agnostic
- Personal Growth
- Maintaining a work life balance
- Working together
- Build community in Upstate NY
- Individual Differences
- Effectively market our passion & experience to our target customers
- Selectively expand our platform business
- Selectively expand our design business
- (Very) selectively add new partners
- mission
- strategy
- short term goals
- everyone takes responsibility of good citizenship
- loosely coupled - tightly aligned
- aligned autonomy
- little standardization
- internal open-source model
Each employee at MadGlory is considered a partner and participates in the governance process.
When each partner joins the company, they are hired for a specific role. Over time, they may choose to learn additional roles. The following is a list of roles as they are defined today:
- Designer
- Developer
- Producer
- Spokesperson
Guilds are small groups of people from various roles, that self organize and work towards a shared set of goals.
Guilds stand for:
- Art & Craftsmanship
- a group of professionals united by common interests
- sharing common information & united under collective actions
- mutual assistance
- support network
- place for apprenticeship, encouragement to learn & to improve
- spread knowledge, practice & expertise
- share the same goals organized around MG’s core values and strengths
We currently use three types of guilds.
Initiative Guild - Organized around a specific strategic initiative. Initiative guilds are charged with working on large goals that advance MadGlory as an organization as and/or the partners employed within.
Project Guild - These guilds are organized around a specific client project. They exist for the life of the project, and typically disolve when the project is complete.
Client Guild - As an alternative to Project Guild, we sometimes use Client Guilds. We've identified
We currently use three types of guilds.
Initiative Guilds - Organized around a specific strategic initiative, initiative guilds are charged with working on large goals that advance MadGlory as an organization as and/or the partners employed within.
Project Guilds - These guilds are organized around a specific client project. They exist for the life of the project, and typically dissolve when the project is complete.
Client Guilds - As an alternative to Project Guilds, we sometimes use Client Guilds. We've identified
a few cases where this type of guild is more effective.
- We are working on several concurrent projects for a single client
- A project guild is too small to be effective
- Multiple project guilds would benefit by working closer together, sharing project and organizational knowledge.
Currently we have the following active guilds1:
- [Initiative] Outreach
- [Initiative] Creative
- [Initiative] Product
- [Initiative] Culture
- [Project] Compensation
If you're interested a joining a Guild, comment on or create a new Github issue for each Guild. A member of that Guild will contact you. [to be updated with links to each issue or Guild repo/page]
We do not list client or project guilds here, due to confidentiality requirements.
Each circle uses the organizations mission, vision, and goals to define it's own goals and performance metrics. Guild meets regularly (needs definition), and report back to the group periodically (needs definition).
Guild may require their own budget.
Guilds may work together on some large initiatives.
Guilds can be created, and destroyed based on the needs of the organization and the interest of the partners.
- peer review -> guidelines -> standards
- expected to find your own solution, we need to help each other succeed based on shared interests - MG's guilds (spotify’s guilds)
- release is easier if it is done often and routinely
- self-service
- release “trains" & feature toggles happen once a week -> integration problems are exposed early, & this process makes it * visible and easier to solve these problems
This repository will contain all governance documents. Changes and proposals can be discussed, and submitted via pull-request.
- no politics and no fear
- if we fail, we learn about it fast, and improve fast
- fast failure recovery (MG example: rides on struggle busses are not fatal; they are teaching us what areas we have to improve on)
- experiment-friendly culture
- more data-drive decisions & less opinion-, ego-, authority-driven decisions
- vizualization of goals and processes, regular updates via synch meetings, demos to get Big Projects done in a better way - all to reduce risk and waste
Idea of a Lean Startup:
- think it, build it, ship it, tweak it
- put user in the center of every problem we solve.
- hackathons to try out ideas, and to prototype - demo results to get feedback
The MadGlory Governance Framework is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
growth pains are inevitable, we have to remember:
- goals arer better visualized, learn how to fail, think about progress
- most problems are short lived, if we do something about them
- everyone should learn to work together!