Stephane Kurgan, former COO of King, discusses the rate of decision-making errors expected from top-tier leaders and managers.
Disclosure
Kurgan: King repeatedly lost newly promoted female executives to competitors
“Very often, once you promote them to an executive level, be it VP or CXO, you lose them within weeks, and so it happened to us multiple times where we made that investment over years of, you know, bringing up and developing great female leaders, and then when …”
Insight
Kurgan: Product teams in data-rich environments must trust data over intuition
“Trust the data, not your intuition. You know, King was always pretty data driven, but it, it's, it was an incredibly data rich environment. I mean, the beauty of free to play on Facebook and later on mobile is that it provides you know, faster and a higher qua…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
King capped player spending and directly verified high-spending accounts
“One way of doing that was to cap the amount of money that you can spend in the title, and when would, when we would see high spending, we actually would reach out to the players, and we would ask them if they were aware of what they were doing, and to make sur…”
Assertion Supported
Stephane Kurgan: Successful US software founders average in their early 40s
“If you look at the average age of company founders, and I think we, there was a stat in the US that, you know, successful, you know, founders of founders of successful software companies in the US are in the early forties.”
Insight
Kurgan: Leaders shouldn't assign tasks they were never willing to do
“Well, I think you shouldn't ask people to do what you haven't been willing to do at some point in your career. I mean, obviously, as things evolve, you know, the highest impact you might have with, for your shareholders and your company and your team might not…”
Insight
Stephane Kurgan: Digital companies must iterate features in days, not months
“And speed of iteration is, is very important, especially in, in digital businesses. And, you know, to your earlier point, I, I've seen companies where, you know, they take six weeks or eight weeks or 10 weeks basically to come up with you know, a minor iterati…”