Feedback loops

Their wordsWe'd constantly be improving the tools and just the iterative process and the speed at which that improves products is the critical element to success in games. The slower the iteration cycle, if you make a build every week and you prove, you go through one iteration every week, you're going to be way way way worse by the end of your project than a game company that makes new stuff every day.

Their wordsBut I also think that in my mind, 20 years of DevOps was really about one thing. Trying to create one feedback loop that connected people writing code to that code in production. And it failed.

Their wordsThe lesson is that the feedback loops that we let work on ourselves shape us to an unsettling degree.

Their wordsI would argue that a lot of what defines the learning curve of someone in a field like investing where accurate feedback loops are few and far between, it’s how creative you are in manifesting them.

Their wordsThe biggest thing that that matters on a labs team is making the feedback loop as tight as possible between making something and knowing if it's good. And the tightest feedback loop is making something for yourself.

Their wordsIt’s my strong belief that in games dev, speed is quality.

Their wordsAnd if you're doing a 1.0 and the world hasn't seen you, you're not going to get that from consumers, ever. You have to ship it, and you have to build the entire kind of ecosystem so those consumers see it in the fullness so that when they do the evaluation and they spend their own money, then you're getting real feedback.

Their wordsWell, now I'm getting feedback so quickly that I'm having to sometimes rebuild my mental model dozens of times in like a 30-minute period.

Their wordsI find a very high correlation between the right path and the ones that don't have feedback loops um attached.

Their wordsBut feedback really in my mind ideally should be like a daily practice because the thing that matters for us in the long run as a team is how quickly are we getting better. So a team that just gets 1% better every week compared to a team that gets 1% better a month is even if they start off at a much lower baseline is going to outperform in a very short amount of time the team that doesn't get better.

Their wordsBut the the real theme of the talk is that rate of iteration separates success from failure. And if you can get a fast iteration loop, that really overcomes many other things you're going to run into. And this effect is so severe. I mean, if you can learn one thing every week and there's a competitor that's learning a thing every month, they will they will never matter.

Their wordsFeedback is a fundamental process for human development, without which nothing could reliably improve.