Hello friends,

Greetings from Utrecht!

I'm slowly putting to paper all the facets of the work I do with clients, especially the elements of the Operating System I help them adapt for running the company.

Today's essay is one such element, which I haven't written about before:

✨ The 3-Year Picture ✨

Today at a glance:

• Essay - Paint Me A Picture
• From solo dev to top 50 wishlist on Steam
• The Ultimate Onboarding Checklist
• Death to PMF

Paint Me A Picture: Setting Medium Term Goals To Guide Your Studio

Like all founders, you want your game company to be successful.

You might even have some idea of what that looks like.

And while that gives you some guidance, you could probably still reach that success in a hundred different ways.

One way to narrow down the scope of possible actions that is available to you today is to define medium-term goals.

These goals serve as essential guideposts along the path to success:

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• Bridging the Gap: Medium-term goals sit between your short-term objectives and to-do-lists, and your long-term vision. They break down the grand vision into actionable steps, making the journey more manageable and measurable.
• Creating Focus: Medium-term goals help you to create more aligned short-term goals that will help you to be more effective and efficient in the day-to-day. They provide a clear direction, keeping the team aligned and motivated amidst challenges and distractions.
• Fostering Adaptability: The games industry is, to borrow a term from the military, VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Chaotic and Ambiguous. The current state of our industry is the perfect illustration of this. With so much of our environment being our of our control, short-term goals can become obsolete at the drop of a hat. Medium-term goals promote adaptability by allowing for course corrections and adjustments while maintaining progress towards the overarching vision.

For these reasons, I advise my clients to work backwards from their long-term goal to come up with a 3-Year Picture, BEFORE coming up with their goals for the year.

The 3-Year Picture, coined by Gino Wickman in Traction, is like a snapshot of your company three years into the future.

It's more detailed than your long-term vision–which is often just a single statement–but less concrete and action-oriented than the goals you will set for the year.

Going through this exercise forces you to think about where you need to be in the medium-term to be on track towards your long-term vision. And this in turn allows you to set more aligned goals in the short-term.

Here's my exercise for crafting a compelling 3-year picture, together with your leadership team:

Step 1: Define Your Future Date

Choose a concrete future date, such as 31-12-2026, to serve as the endpoint for your 3-year vision. This deadline adds urgency and clarity to your aspirations, grounding them in reality.

Step 2: Establish Revenue and Profit Goals

Set ambitious yet realistic targets for revenue and profit percentage. These financial metrics provide tangible benchmarks for measuring progress and success over the 3-year timeframe.

This will also help you think more critically about the annual targets you will set later. If you want to hit 5M revenue in 3 years, but plan to grow your revenue from 1M to just 1.2M this year, you better reconsider your trajectory.

Step 3: Expand Beyond Financial Metrics

If you are tracking any key measurables that dictate your business success, pick a goal for them here.

For example, a work-for-hire studio might track "projects worth 1M+" as their key measurable, and plan to increase it from 1 to 3 in three years time.

Make sure to align this metric with the financial goals.

Step 4: Engage in Collaborative Visioning

Now it's time to envision specific milestones and achievements that reflect your 3-year vision. Have every team member write these down individually first.

Examples of such milestones can be a certain team size, expansion into new markets, shifts in the product or service portfolio, a move to a new office, winning certain awards–anything that is relevant to your journey, that you feel the company should aim to accomplish in 3 years.

Step 5: Narrow the scope

Gather everyone's contributions in one big list.

Go through the full list as a team and discuss which items you can all commit to.

You'll want to narrow it down to somewhere between 5 and 15 items: enough to paint a picture, but not so many that you'll lose focus.

One simple way to do this is to do a few rounds of Keep, Kill, Combine:

For each item on the list, discuss if it should be kept, killed (taken off), or combined with another item on the list.

Once you're happy with both the number and content of your list, put it somewhere everyone in the company can see it, and use it as context for day-to-day decision making.

At minimum, keep the 3-year picture close when you set your annual goals to make sure everything is aligned.

Step 6: Regularly Review and Adjust

Continuously monitor progress towards your 3-year vision and be prepared to adapt as needed. Regular reviews allow you to course-correct, capitalize on emerging opportunities, and mitigate potential risks along the way.

Quarterly reviews are the perfect opportunity to do this.

And every year during your yearly planning session, scrap the whole thing and create a new one that is another 3 years out.

Why start over? Because we operate in a VUCA industry, and you don't want to be unnecessarily constrained by choices you made a year or more ago.

Starting fresh allows you to chart the path towards your 10 year-vision with renewed clarity, taking on board any learnings from the past year.

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By following these steps, you can create a compelling 3-year picture that provides additional guidance for working towards your long-term goals.

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🙏🙏🙏 If you liked this essay, it would help me tremendously if you would consider giving it some love on LinkedIn, either by liking it or reposting it to share with your network 🙏🙏🙏

The Best Bits

​From solo dev to Top 50 on Steam: Great case study on how a solo dev made the journey to having is game in the top 50 wishlist on Steam. It's full of interesting observations and reflections, like this one: "We spent a long time prototyping game ideas to make sure we had one that can be marketed well with even just a single image."

​The Ultimate Onboarding Checklist: Found on linkedin, this is a great starting point for studios that want to improve their onboarding experience. As it's a checklist, it will necessary lack context and details, but it does a nice job of breaking the process down in things you should do before they start, on their 1st day, 1st week, 1st month, and ongoing.

​Death to PMF: Everyone has at least heard of product-market-fit, or PMF. In this essay, Neal O'Grady goes beyond PMF to suggest that, actually, you should be looking at at least 5 "channels" that all need to fit together to become one coherent business.

See you in two weeks!

Martijn

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