After more than 13 years in the games industry, I’ve come to believe that most indie companies are more like project groups than they are actual companies:
You’re a small group of likeminded individuals, all that matters is that the game gets finished, and you really don’t have to bother with most of the additional management hassle that comes with running a more fully fledged company.
At the same time, I’ve always felt that there are a best practices indie devs can borrow from the world of management that will increase your odds of long-term success.
After all, you still need to have a shared understanding of where you’re going, what you’re doing to get there, and solve problems along the way. These things are bigger than the game you’re working on, and they need to be managed.
The problem is that most out-of-the-box frameworks are too unwieldy for small, creative companies like your typical indie studio.
So I created something more suited to the needs of indie studios.
FIRM
By taking everything I do with my clients and reducing it to the bare essentials, I’ve developed a minimalist, four-pronged management framework for indie development: FIRM.
Sure, it’s not as robust as a more complex framework, but it’ll get you focus, alignment and accountability at a fraction of the time investment.
The framework consists of just four elements:
- Future: define your company vision and plan for the year
- Issues: structurally collect, discuss and solve all company issues
- Rocks: define and commit to the right priorities each quarter
- Meetings: adopt a set of meetings to set the pace
By committing to these practices, you can get a head start on the all-important company management stuff before it catches you unawares.
I laid out the full framework in terms of Pokémon during my recent talk at Reboot, which you can watch here:
Full slides are here.
And if you’re ready to dive in and give the framework a try, you can find the completely free Notion template, including much more information, context and step-by-step implementation instructions, on my website.
If you do try the framework, let me know any questions or comments you might have—I will continuously update the template, and share additional insights in my newsletter and on socials.