Angry Birds: From Bankruptcy to a 1 Billion Dollar Company
Welcome to the 5th issue of Zero to One newsletter!
In this issue:
1. From The Editor: Key Lessons for New Managers from Director of Engineering 2. Featured Story: 50 Fails Before Creating Angry Birds and Becoming a 1 Billion Dollar Company
From The Editor
QA Engineer to Director: Key Lessons for New Managers
My time as a manager proved to be one of the most challenging experiences in my professional career. From those difficult moments, I learned new lessons and skills that may prove useful as you embark on your own Zero to One journey.
To give you a little background, I started as a QA Engineer at Entertainment Partners in 2009 and moved on to newer opportunities after a successful stint as a Director of Engineering one month before my 10-year anniversary in 2020. Needless to say, there were many lessons learned through the years and perhaps the most interesting and unlikely was my first six months as a manager.
As a Technical Lead/Staff Engineer with no direct reports, I was asked to shadow a team facing difficulties scaling. The company specialized in payroll and accounting for the entertainment industry and literally wrote the book on the subject. The team I was shadowing worked on the most complex rules engine in the company and brought in four additional QA engineers in an effort to speed up delivery.
During my first week, I started to shadow the team part-time and learn about the project. Next two weeks I spent time familiarizing myself with the architecture, software roadmap and the people. Onboarding new hires was proving difficult and those that were fully onboarded had a lot on their plate.
During my third week with the team, I was ushered into the VP’s office and told that my management team would like me to join the team full time and have the test engineering team report to me.
The team recently had gone through a growth spurt and the Technical Lead/Staff Engineer had put in her two weeks notice and their current manager did not have the bandwidth to take on a more hands-on-role in the interim.
To this date, I am not sure why I accepted this assignment. I was convinced I was going to fail and it wasn’t just imposter syndrome. Yes, I was a successful and performing individual contributor but I didn’t know this product and had no management experience. I would be leading a team of five test engineers who were all new and the subject matter’s expert was leaving in two weeks.
Here was my approach:
Adeel Mansoor
Featured Story
50 Fails Before Creating Angry Birds and Becoming a 1 Billion Dollar Company
领英推荐
Niklas Hed, Jarno V?kev?inen, and Kim Dikert, the initial forces behind what would later become Rovio, weren't immediately recognized for their game-changing potential.
In an era where mobile gaming was nascent and smartphones weren't everywhere, in 2009, they forever shifted the landscape.
If you haven't experienced it yourself, you've undoubtedly heard of it:
Angry Birds – the slingshot adventure.
It didn't just redefine casual mobile gaming. The game introduced an era of physics-based puzzlers, a fresh departure from the score-centric arcade-style games of the past.
It transformed how we perceive mobile games as genuine entertainment mediums, positioning them alongside traditional forms of storytelling and film.
Their venture began in 2003 when the three students, fueled by passion and a hint of youthful audacity, won a mobile game development competition at the University of Helsinki and decided to start their own company.
One might see the likes of Angry Birds topping charts and assume a straightforward trajectory.
But behind every monumental success, there's often a mosaic of trials and errors.
Before the avian triumph, Rovio developed 52 games. Some found moderate success, while many others vanished into the forgotten apps.
Unlike PC games at the time, mobile games required relatively small teams for development.
This allowed the company to continue moving forward on their own and keep creating new products.
But the path wasn’t easy, and by early 2009, the company found itself on the edge of bankruptcy. The only way out was to build yet another game.
"We went through a lot of different genres, and we made so many mistakes. But we also learned a lot. Without those games, Angry Birds wouldn’t be here," says Niklas Hed in one of his interviews.
The initial budget for developing Angry Birds was a mere 100,000 Euros. Once released, the game became an overnight hit in Finland, rapidly reaching the top in the Finnish Apple Store.
It took another 2 months to become successful internationally.
In August 2023 Sega acquired Rovio for $776 million.
Roman Balakin
Founder @ To The Next Level | Jax Business Club
1 年Very useful…