What are the most effective ways to evaluate a game development team's problem-solving skills?

I cannot overstate the importance of practicing communication between team members in order to effectively tackle fires and detect them earlier. Creative and process oriented exercises can help increase efficacy of communication, deepen relationships, and inspire innovation in others. Many ways to achieve this, the most relevant and necessary is regular play testing across departments. Escape rooms can increase performance and expose people to a pressured environment with little price to failure. Team games like Overwatch, League of Legends, or co-op games like It Takes Two, or Mario Wonder can all help stimulate and help create the environment to learn how to effectively work together. Challenge folks in the right ways

I feel the best way to do this in practice is to stay curious and focused on the solution, not the problem. When you leave your personal ego at the door and instead of identifying blame you try to focus on what can be done to fix the issue, you will get to a solution faster and prevent future issues from propagating both in the project and interpersonally. It’s also incredibly important to engage in regular retrospectives in order to support a healthy sprint planning. You can’t find new places without knowing where you’ve been.

Categorizing, defining, and agreeing to work and work processes during stand-ups and sprint planning is critical to everyone’s success. Someone cannot engage effectively or be set up for success in their work if they lack understanding of its full context, are missing dependencies or key pieces, or if the scope hasn’t been fully communicated. This way, talking about and defining what exactly needs to be done, how it will be accomplished, in what time frame, and identifying potential problems can all happen before they pop up during sprint execution.

I find the best way to give advice is to keep things positive, specific, and solution oriented. Try not to focus on blame or aspects of failure if it’s not a big problem and instead focus on what can be done in the future to prevent that, or the thought process that can help that person make their own decisions in the future. Give positive feedback just as much as constructive feedback, if not more. Identifying things that go right is just as important. Resist the temptation to be nice just because, as every word not filled with heart dilutes your intention and muddies the environment we all work and live in!

Over time, I've come to realize that it's important to strike a balance between positive feedback and radical candor. Both are equally important. If someone isn't doing a good job at something it's important to point that out to them specifically during a 1 on 1. From there, you can ask open questions such as "now that I've shared this with you, how do you think we should move forward so that we avoid this situation in the future and what can I do to help/support".

Keep in mind that game development rarely works with pre-defined boxed. Each studio, team, project is different and possesses a different skill set. My personal preference is ask my teams how they think they'd work best together, what success looks like, in what timeframe and we discuss until we reach common ground. After that, we set clear milestones so that we can track on agreed metrics. In doing so, every member of the team has given their buy-in to the plan and will generally highlight when things don't go as planned.