Like many founders of gaming startups, we started our company with an idea to make games. Or rather one specific type of casual games with big emphasis on social. That is what we love and know how to do. It fun, natural and making games is something that we learned over the course of our careers.

However, making a game is only a part (surely, essential) of building a company.

Great games can’t come to life without a great team behind them. That team must be united and driven by the same work principles. I have to say, I made plenty of mistakes in my career, underestimating the importance of team culture and team values, rushing for deliverables and faster hires instead.

Indeed, building games is the nature of our business. But building motivated, effective, creative and happy teams is what really makes the magic happen.

Easy, right?

How would one do that?

Each CEO I’d talk to would give me pretty much the same advice: ‘Take your time. Sit down and discuss where you'd want to see your business next year and in several years from now. Make sure that you are aligned on that. Make sure that you and your co-founders have the same idea of the future. Make sure that people you hire know where you are headed'.

Once we started PlayPack, we actually dedicated quite some time to define our values and align on our goals. Our idea was to create a few key principles that can drive our work culture.

As the industry matures and grows, many studios start this way. However, often when I’d look at websites, I’d find great calls to action that hardly tell me anything about the team or the people that work there. It’s a little bit along the lines of one of my favourite TV shows ‘Silicon Valley’, where every startup is trying ‘to make the world a better place’.

We were trying to avoid those generics. Our principles had to be clear, easy to understand and, most importantly, actionable.

There are two big questions to answer for every team: 'What?' and 'How?'

What do you create?

How do you get there?

So following the techniques we use to make game, we sat down and brainstormed, coming up with probably something like a hundred notes that we’d consider worthy of a good company to work for.

As the three of us spend many years working at the same place, it was a very natural process. We share similar values (and pains) coming from our former professional experience.

We ended up separating our cards into two big groups: Goals and Values.