Hire Right So You Can Spend More Time Building

In this series, professionals share their secrets to being more productive. Read the posts here, then write your own (use #ProductivityHacks in the body).

Productivity hacks range from the tactical to the strategic. In January last year I wrote about one of my favorite tactical productivity hacks for LinkedIn. Today, it’s strategic.

The best strategic productivity hack for leaders is to hire amazing people, align them on a vision, and let them unleash their creative and innovative energy to bring the vision to life. I posit that there’s no other way to be more productive as a leader than to focus on building the right team.

More than a year ago my company, Kabam, knew it wanted to develop a Star Wars mobile game in partnership with Disney and Lucasfilm. We had the right alignment in Hollywood with proven mobile game hits based on such entertainment icons as The Hobbit, Fast & Furious, and the Marvel universe. We had the right development team in our Role-Playing Game (RPG) studio in San Francisco. We had the right financial footing, running profitably since 2012 and fresh off a $120 million investment from Alibaba. We were just missing the right design leader to develop a Star Wars-theme mobile game.

Bringing a Star Wars mobile game to players around the world in time for the new Star Wars movie trilogy is a company-defining opportunity. We had to get it right at every level. We needed to find the right design director.

Enter Daniel Erickson. A self-described “incredibly huge” Star Wars fan, Daniel spent eight years at a games company where his most acclaimed work was the massively popular Star Wars: The Old Republic PC game. Few, if any, in the industry can match Daniel’s complement of Star Wars knowledge and game design acumen. We knew he was the right person for the design director opportunity at our company.

Daniel quickly married his unique skills with the Kabam culture. He established himself not only as the subject matter expert but also a leader who kept the design team focused on the same vision. “Your team must be able to recite the vision uniformly and know where their contribution fits in,” he says. “It’s like a TV series with episodes by different directors – the viewer must never see any inconsistencies in the characters or story line.”

The work of Daniel Erickson and the rest of the Star Wars: Uprising team made the September launch one of the most successful mobile game introductions in history. The game was named Editors’ Choice in the App Store in 147 countries on both iPhone and iPad, praised by independent reviewers and downloaded with zeal by the fan community.

No one person can do the work of many. But one person can set the vision for many, and hire the right people to execute on that vision. This is even more critical for a CEO, especially a CEO of a growing company. When resources are limited, time is short and expectations are high, you must have confidence in the team you’ve hired to execute flawlessly.

My strategic productivity hack is to hire amazing people like Daniel Erickson. When you nail this from the start, your odds of success go up exponentially.