The Sword of Azeroth featuring Tony Won

Transcript

Tony Won (00:00.258)
they are.

Rob Dwyer (00:01.756)
That is true. That is true. Thank you, thank you, thank you for joining another episode of Next In Queue. Today, I've got a returning guest. His name is Tony Won. Maybe you've heard of him. Welcome, Tony. How are

Tony Won (00:17.834)
I'm doing well, Rob, how are you?

Rob Dwyer (00:20.562)
I am fantastic for those that do not know and shame, shame on you if you're a long time listener to the show, but you joined me in season one of Next In Queue episode 36. That was way back in May of 2022. So for those of you watching on YouTube, check out the end.

credits, right? I'll put a link to that episode there. It was a wonderful conversation. We learned a lot about Tony, really, as he was just starting to launch this new venture called Player Support.

But you've launched. It's been a thing for a hot minute now. Let's talk a little bit about that. Let's just start with, tell us about Player Support and a little bit about that journey. What is it that you do?

Tony Won (01:10.851)
Damn.

Tony Won (01:23.63)
Sure, Player Support grew out of just the side gig I was doing when I was working full -time jobs for video game companies. just as a way for me to get out some writing initially, it was a free publication, mainly just doing blog posts. And then it grew into some consultancy.

And then over time, a friend of mine just challenged me to do more with it. He's a good friend. And it was really a conversation where that he drove and a former business partner. And so we did a couple of mobile game companies together, you know, making them from scratch and then releasing them on the App Store.

And he kept on with entrepreneurship and I went to go work for companies like Riot and Epic. then, so he's pushing me to go back into it and do something much larger with it. And we started operating building teams for...

say, video game publishers, video game studios, really focused on the gaming industry to try to help solve very specific challenges that they have with outsourcing operations. And, you know, we got our, let's say, operational start with agents and everything like that. At the end of June, we're at a

about 75 people plus right now. And yeah, it's been a great start to things. We wanna be very careful about how we grow, but you could think of us as a provider for specialized, whether it's customer service teams or moderation teams.

Tony Won (03:37.47)
or even if you want to try to do, because some of my friends have done this in the past, use these teams to supplement your network operations center as like technical triage that uses your runbooks. So all of these kind of operational teams that benefit from being in different geographical locations, doing the follow of the SEND model.

We build these kind of teams. We do consulting from if you don't know what to do with your customer service functions or any of this kind of stuff. Because a lot of video game companies, don't want to think about all these extra bits and bobs. It's really, most of them just want to make a great game.

you worrying about business operations or customer service operations or all this other kind of stuff is really not in their wheelhouse. And it's nice to be able to have a partner who you don't have to hire full time. You know, you could just kind of ping once in a while when you need something or you need direction for a function because

A lot of times the parts of the tools are custom. They have to be built in -house at the studio. And you need to know how you're going to fit that into your development schedule as you get ready for launch. All of these kinds of issues that come up and questions that arise during your development process, especially if you're going to be doing any kind of a live service game.

We can partner with you and help and there's a lot of things where people just need a fraction of someone's time for testing. And so you even need a full -time customer service person, but you would like somebody there for.

Tony Won (05:42.426)
your internal tasks for your limited, you know, beta tests, whatever it is, we're happy to do that as well. Because for a lot of larger places that are enterprise, it doesn't make sense for them as a business, but for us, it totally does. We're happy to do that kind of stuff.

Rob Dwyer (06:03.428)
Yeah, it is fascinating to me to see all of the different little niches that people find to offer support or customer service. And there really is something to having that kind of experience and excitement and affinity for supporting a certain type of business, right?

I recently had on Margaret Garcia, whose company focuses on the pest control industry, right? It's wildly different than supporting a game. But I know that when she talks to pest control owners, she knows their business inside and out. And there's a lot of trust that's there. And I have to imagine that when you talk to gaming companies and development teams, knowing their business and knowing

Tony Won (06:48.481)
Mmm.

Rob Dwyer (07:01.388)
All of the things that are going to come up allows you to come in from a position of trust. Where they know no matter what happens, right? Tony and Tony's team, they're going to be able to support us.

Tony Won (07:20.62)
Yeah, mean, for sure. believe that the more you know about your... And it really supports the idea of being a business partner. And it's not just sort of being an order -taker, let's say. And I think it's important when we talk about adding value to the business...

Rob Dwyer (07:34.19)
Mm -hmm.

Tony Won (07:49.292)
your function needs to provide some kind of information or insight that's going to help the leadership of the company make decisions or make better decisions. And being able to understand what the core concerns of the business are and how things get done on the other side really does help out. And it does build, I think, absolutely a lot of

Rob Dwyer (07:59.943)
Yeah.

Tony Won (08:18.024)
ease of conversation when you're starting the relationship and they understand. There's a lot of things you just inherently understand. Like this person you're talking about, I that sounds very specific, right? And...

If she knows it, then people know that she knows it. And it's really cool. It's really cool to have somebody say, I don't have to explain everything to you. like, yeah, I've heard that before, seen that before. We've been through that. Certainly, it's going to be, it doesn't reduce the challenge of execution, but.

Rob Dwyer (08:38.012)
Yeah.

Rob Dwyer (08:43.985)
Alright.

Tony Won (08:56.71)
It does help, It reduces whether it's misunderstandings or time to ramp up or it increases accuracy in terms of when you're hiring for specific roles, you understand what it is that they're looking for. And so maybe as you put candidates in front of them as an example for.

what you might consider to be a very specialized role. They talk to them, they're like, yeah, this is the kind of person we want. So it helps to streamline a few things.

Rob Dwyer (09:35.452)
Yeah, absolutely. Now all that said, going from being a guy who writes articles coming from a position of expertise and who consults is very different than spinning up your own team and your own real business, right? With payroll and all of the challenges that come with that. Tell me about

Tony Won (09:56.173)
you

Rob Dwyer (10:06.49)
What were some of the big things that you were like, well, I didn't expect this or maybe some challenges that were unanticipated or hard to figure out, or maybe you're still trying to figure

Tony Won (10:20.735)
Yeah, well, I had done this is about the fifth startup that I've been involved in directly. So it wasn't the first time. But even then, I say to everybody, there are always things that are going to pop up that you cannot perfectly prepare for or anticipate.

and it's better just to accept that fact and as they come up figure out how you're going to manage through them. One for sure was the challenge of navigating a new business environment. I had never operated a business in Malaysia before.

Never. So getting in and learning the environment and how to interact with all the different government agencies, getting used to, I think every country has its own flavor of bureaucracy. So just getting used to, know. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Rob Dwyer (11:13.849)
Ha

Rob Dwyer (11:28.242)
And you've experienced a few of them. Let's be clear. This is not your first rodeo living abroad, but this is a new flavor.

Tony Won (11:38.603)
Yeah, it's a new flavor. So I mean, it's it's challenging, but it's interesting at the same time.

I wasn't expecting something that's very unique about the bureaucracy here and the way things, I would say that the kind of flow of business here. A lot of people have a challenge with this. think especially maybe if you're coming from the West and I feel comfortable saying this as an American, like

Even if you're paying money for an agency to do work for you and help streamline some things or help you understand something, it is best to approach it as, even though you're the client, more like you're a co -worker.

I think just for your own kind of disposition, it helps because you're just trying to be helpful and there is something that you've got to do to help push things forward sometimes. And that's okay. And so, you know, those kinds of cultural differences where...

You know, you might be pushing things along to say, is there anything I can do to help make this move faster and using even the kind of communication tools that people prefer in their different countries? You here, like WhatsApp is like a really big part of regular daily communication as one example. So you have things like that. I think.

Tony Won (13:29.211)
Another additional thing to get used to was the very heavy use of notice periods as a thing in this country. As an American, was like, notice periods, like we kind of just have our two weeks, right? Like we give two weeks notice and.

you know, it's seen as a courtesy, right? And, you know, there's nothing legal saying, for most contracts saying like, you you got to, I mean, yeah, after you get to be at a certain executive level, it's like, sure, yeah, you know, they ask you for a month or two months or whatever it is, but for most...

regular roles or entry level roles, it's like simply two weeks. But just standards are different around the globe, right? I mean, you've got people very commonly have a month, sometimes two months. I had one person come and interview and they're like, yeah, my notice period is three months. And I was like, three, wait.

Like a quarter, like what? Like, what would I hire you now? Like three months, like how are we gonna do this? So I'm like, do I? And being in video games, it's like we rarely have people come to us and say, yeah, know, we don't need people until three months later. And usually it's like, we need people yesterday, right? Like we need a team now. I'm just like, you know. So some of those timing difficulties or challenges.

Rob Dwyer (14:55.1)
Right, right.

Tony Won (15:05.502)
learning all of the labor laws just to make sure that everything is done well and compliant and getting used to stuff. And so there's all these different little things as an employer. Renting an office space because you're unknown to anybody in the country. You don't have a credit history, you don't have anything. So they want...

like massive deposits, right? Just like massive. I'm like, wait, you want how much? Like just to park there? And it's like, okay, cool. Like, I guess I don't have a choice. And so you've just got every, you know, little bits and bobs and none of that's too bad. They just kind of pop up and you deal with them as they come and you try your best to adjust and to learn. And...

You know, you shouldn't, if you're gonna start a business, if you're too rigid and you're insistent on your way all the time, like either you need someone else to handle all this stuff or you're not gonna make it, right? It's just gonna frustrate you too much and you're gonna frustrate too many people yourself and that's not gonna be good. you know, mainly it's all of these kinds of things.

Rob Dwyer (16:11.674)
Right?

Tony Won (16:25.226)
Operationally, I think the hardest thing was you have, there's this concept when you're doing startups of what I call stacked newness. So new company, new processes, new team, new client. Maybe they have something that's new, new game, new product.

So you have all these new things stacked on top of each other and that's really hard for human beings. really, I think everyone does themself a favor thinking more carefully about disposition, especially for those first couple of teams or hires that you have as much as possible, trying to make sure that.

people understand and expect all of that chaos because in any cohort of people that were a population you're trying to there's gonna be people who more or less comfortable with those things. sometimes it's a little too much for some people and that's not their fault per se.

Rob Dwyer (17:40.603)
Mm for sure.

Tony Won (17:50.21)
And so I think I should have paid a little bit more attention to that in some cases.

Rob Dwyer (18:00.75)
curious, you are not a stranger to Southeast Asia, but what made you choose Malaysia as your base of operations this time around?

Tony Won (18:14.952)
The way that I share with folks.

Tony Won (18:21.13)
is just focusing on the word value. I think for our type of business, we have to be aware of where the customers, where our clients find value. And they have, let's say, a really strong

Let's say general push for education for their kids out here. So you have an educated workforce. English is very commonly spoken. Let's say sort of the lingua franca for especially for business out here. You have a lot of people who do learn Mandarin growing up and.

They have good Chinese schools out here as an example. They've got great Tamil schools as well.

Tony Won (19:32.53)
if that's something that your business needs. So they have a wealth of different kinds of cultures and languages that have their different kind of strong language schools which supplies. And for us in gaming, like being able, like China's always a huge market and we have a very unfortunate geopolitical situation right now.

And so Malaysia has great relations on both sides, which helps things. And then just a natural placement of it geographically puts it in a time zone that makes sense for video games. If you think about many typical play patterns of Western game companies,

Rob Dwyer (20:21.98)
Hmm.

Tony Won (20:33.634)
You know, a lot of the peak playing time coincides with our regular day. And so that's nice to just have so that you don't necessarily have to always have like a huge number of people on night shift or something like that, especially if you have other locations together with this one.

And so all of these things combined together, it also helps just very selfishly that it's closer to South Korea and our family there. It's only a six and a half hour flight, something like that, from here to Seoul. And so it's much easier for.

my in -laws to visit and see their grandchild and vice versa. The food here is also amazing. yeah, all of that combined makes it hard to say no.

Rob Dwyer (21:40.538)
Yeah, that flight from Seoul to whether it's LAX or Seattle or whatever, it's not a fun flight. No one wants to do that.

Tony Won (21:51.15)
Yeah, man. Wow, it's rough, you know. And coming from like when I was in Cary, we always had to connect to like a larger hub, right? So it's like you go to Atlanta or you go to New York and then you go and it's like 20 hours.

Rob Dwyer (22:02.382)
Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and the recovery takes just as long as the flight took, if not more so. I want to talk a little bit about the intersection of Dungeons and Dragons and people management. So you sent me a little blurb, and I want you to expand on this. I don't even know what question I'm asking other than.

Tony Won (22:18.126)
Mm

Rob Dwyer (22:37.582)
Tell me more, Tony. Tell me.

Tony Won (22:39.758)
What is it? Yeah, so I've been working on a light framework for people management that because I was going to, you know, working for different companies, different corporations, everyone's got their version of a a nine box or some kind of 360 feedback survey thing and

some kind of write -up with some kind of software or whatever that it is and all of it seemed well intended but insufficient and it really felt like we were with all of those kinds of typical practices we were depending too much on

Tony Won (23:37.366)
on a

rigid form that didn't capture all of the important details of somebody's performance and what value they brought to the company in combination with the challenge that we have of different personalities and so you have those sayings where people say you don't leave companies you leave managers

or people have the experience where I love the company but I don't like my manager or I don't like the company and I like my manager and my manager provides shelter for me within a very difficult company environment or any combination of those things. So it's too heavily dependent and too subjective. A lot of it is just based on like,

when you read the feedback, it's pure perception. And if there's anything evidential in there, it's being recalled from like eight months later or something like that. Like, hey, can you give me positive feedback on the project we worked on like seven months ago? I don't remember anything seven months ago. So instead of doing all of that, as I continue to progress in my career,

I was trying to think of, well, what would I want as an employee? Like, what do I think's more fair and transparent and actually creates value for those meetings instead of them being like a buddy -buddy, let me kind of just socially talk to you and get some updates that I could easily read in an email to.

Tony Won (25:29.172)
more substantial conversations around the key points of your employment that really matter for your overall performance, but also your longevity, how long you're probably going to stay with the company.

And so it eventually came out to be the system based on D &D. If you have a good character creation module feature for your RPG, your video game, I'm probably going to play that for hours just before I even get started in the game. It's how obsessive I am about that stuff, and I really enjoy good character creation. But even for pen and paper D &D, when I play with friends. And so I'll actually put effort into that.

So it's broken up into five sections. The first section is just about your class, right? So if you're an archer, if you are a warrior, if you are a mage, if you are a preacher, whatever it is, this is just about the person's job role. Like, what's your job?

What is the core of what we expect you to do at work every single day? And so core responsibilities for me should take up about 80 to 90 % of your time on any given week. And so are those clear? And often, as you know, jobs change over time. So new things get added, some things fall away, but nobody ever keeps track of that.

Rob Dwyer (26:41.106)
Mm -hmm.

Tony Won (27:05.356)
But this makes sure that you do keep track of that. The cadence is meant to be every two weeks, but it makes sure that we have this as a touch point. And so when you hit section one on class, it's just like, hey, does this all still match? Did we add anything else that's significant? Because another thing that happens is people get overburdened and they add on all these things. They don't get a title change. They don't get raises. And it's unfair to people

Rob Dwyer (27:28.828)
Hmm.

Tony Won (27:35.82)
have a certain disposition where they're really hard workers but they're not good advocates for themselves and there's a lot of those people that you're very pleasant to work with but they they often burn out and don't know what to say and they'll end up just leaving and you're like why and you're like we burned them out and they're not good self advocates and you didn't pay attention to this so you know they're gone and so all of that goes there

and to make sure that the scope's appropriate. And if someone's overburdened, you have that conversation. Like, hey, let's trade something. Hand this off to another person or delegate this and then just do this new stuff that we gave you instead. It's a much fairer way of doing that for people and helping people manage their time as well.

The second section is about a person's disposition. We call them attributes, right? you know, and it's a way to talk about someone's personality. And we use the terms positive and negative, but don't think of that in a typical good.

versus bad type of way. It's more like yin and yang, right? It's like two parts of a whole, right? So these are the things that make up who you are. And if we can talk about it and we come up with a language that the manager and the employee understand mutually, we can then more easily talk about relationships at work.

Rob Dwyer (28:55.546)
Yeah.

Tony Won (29:18.7)
So you hit this section and after you kind of work this out and a lot of it's self identified from the employee.

Tony Won (29:28.27)
talk about what's your relationship like with your colleagues? Was there any notable interactions that you had with anybody, good or bad in your opinion? And so you get to talk about personal interactions and hopefully nip things in the bud so that they don't fester. But then also reinforce, like maybe someone really likes working with somebody else and you can, as a manager, work something out so that that happens more often.

So people have, you know, better time at work, but also they have a better time at work and they work with people that they like.

their outputs are probably gonna be better, right? So that's one thing. The other question is just very simply, even though a company is not a person per se, we always blame, we talk about companies like people, right, like personalities. So it's like, well, what's your relationship like with the company and why is it that way? Do you feel bad about the company this week? Why? Well, they did layoffs and I didn't like the messaging. I didn't think it was forthcoming. And you can have...

Rob Dwyer (30:05.958)
Mm -hmm.

Rob Dwyer (30:16.476)
You

Tony Won (30:33.548)
that conversation and you can have clarification as a manager if it actually was something, maybe it's a judgment that's a bit more emotional, or maybe you as a manager you would just honestly confirm and say you're right, we don't have an excuse for that, I'll bring the feedback to my boss, we do need to fix this, right?

Whichever way that it goes, at least you have the conversation and the employee has an opportunity in a safe place to share some honest feedback for the company overall on how something is done. It could be a problem with benefits, it could have been a problem with payroll, there could have been a problem with the event that was held last week or whatever it is, but at least you have a place to talk about it.

The third section is really about, we just call them skills or in HR speak competencies. So we label all of the core competencies required for the job out. We lay out the competencies that an employee aspires to develop for their next career step. And we make sure that we're acknowledging the growth of the ones that you're going to focus on to grow.

so that people are building for themselves a step -by -step roadmap for what their next promotion should be within your company, and they feel like they have a tangible long -term goal.

and you're actually looking for opportunities to stretch a person, challenge them, develop new skills on the job. But what it also does is as a team, gives you a competency map of everyone's skills so you know if you need to hire somebody new, what kinds of additional competencies or new ones would be helpful for your team to have overall. So it's a place to lay that out to talk about that and to also talk about development.

Tony Won (32:38.832)
So, where are you going? Sometimes you'll hire somebody and maybe you didn't know how skilled they were at a particular thing. sometimes when people struggle with performance, it's because they don't know something or they didn't develop a skill that would be helpful.

and you can more easily, it's not bulletproof, nothing's bulletproof, but you can more easily, you have a space to talk about it now, and you can pinpoint and say, actually, project management would be a very useful skill, and you don't have much project management ability, so that's keeping you back from.

delivering your work faster or doing whatever it is that needs to be done or working with people across silos or in other departments. Let's work on this so that that stops happening. And so you have a place to talk about it. It's a technical conversation. It removes people's personal offense from feedback because it's very clearly about a skill and it's easily solvable. It's like, just learn how to do this thing.

So you have that. then you have section four is really simple. It's just we call them feats. All So the DND language is coming in. These are your huge accomplishments throughout the year. I found a lot of employees never keep track of them. They don't know how they contribute to the workplace. And usually when I started doing this with people, I've even done it with people who I just mentor who are in.

Rob Dwyer (34:05.276)
you

Tony Won (34:20.64)
other departments in the company that come to me for mentorship. When we started doing this, a lot of them are shocked. like, I delivered a lot of value for the company this past year. I'm like, yeah, you totally did.

Rob Dwyer (34:30.246)
Ha ha.

Tony Won (34:33.428)
And, you know, I'm thinking of a very specific person and she said, you know, I never, never did this work. So I never understood like what my worth was to like what I was doing. And I was like, yeah, you should probably get a raise. And, you know, it's, it's, it's just a funny, it's a funny thing that people don't do for themselves. They don't take the time out to do it or managers don't take the time to do it, but it, it, it's material for your employees is the way that I like to phrase it.

Rob Dwyer (34:46.29)
You

Tony Won (35:03.83)
It's really important that we do keep track of these things so that people understand that it's a fair game and that they are being rewarded and recognized for value delivered. So those are less frequent. They're basically proto business cases, part of the business case for whenever you're going to promote somebody or give them a high performance rating. The last section is just a parking lot.

It's called biography. You this is the part where you don't have to do it in a D and D game, but I always do it where I write in like they're from this village and this happened to them and this is where they come from. And yeah, yeah, the backstory. So it's a place for you to spend at least a little bit of time every other week to get to know your employee a little bit more on a personal basis.

Rob Dwyer (35:44.508)
whole backstory.

Tony Won (35:59.192)
But it's also a parking lot. Hopefully you develop an actual positive relationship with your employees. And sometimes they'll feel comfortable with you to share more personal matters. You don't ever document any of stuff recorded unless you are required to by law if it's very extreme. But it's also a place to, like, a lot of people want to talk about mental health, but they don't know where to do it.

And a lot of employees are unaware of the full benefits package they have when it comes to things like mental health or other kinds of medical care. And this is a place where you could, if they feel comfortable sharing things with you, you could actually really help somebody out in a different way. For example, people didn't know one of my employers are like, yeah, we'll pay for three mental health visits of a.

Rob Dwyer (36:33.02)
Yeah.

Tony Won (36:54.836)
of a local doctor, a physician of your choice, a mental health caretaker of your choice every single year. My employees didn't know this, and several of them took advantage of it once they found out that it's a thing. I was like, yes, totally a thing. Just go to HR. And they're like, I didn't know that. I'm like, you need to read your word contract. But it was very helpful to them.

Rob Dwyer (37:19.814)
Luckily, I'm here to let you know.

Tony Won (37:22.862)
Yeah, so that's what that's for. It's just these five sections. Some weeks you just go over it very quickly because nothing has changed or nothing eventful happened. But at least you're touching base every other week to say, hey, we need to talk about these five things. How are they going? you share the document is shared between manager and employee. There's a companion document that's just texts.

that has all of the manager's thoughts on there about the employee, whether it's extremely positive or whether there's constructive feedback, everything needs to be there so that there's no surprises. So an employee, if an employee's everyone, how am I doing? It's like, just go to your manager's sheet. And if you don't see enough on there, you just force it, you just put it in.

Just put, I need to know how I'm doing. You're not telling me. And then it gives them a kick in the pants and say, hey, like don't avoid this, right? You need to talk to your employee about how they're doing and they need to know. So as we start the new company, it's a general point requirement that I have from my people managers. doesn't matter how junior or senior they are.

Rob Dwyer (38:30.716)
Yeah.

Tony Won (38:46.046)
If I ask them how any employee is doing, the answer should be really close to what that employee would say if I sat down with them and hey, how are you doing?

Rob Dwyer (38:57.778)
Yeah, it's great transparency. And I feel like we all just added some people management points to our skill set in this conversation. So I'm going to say at least plus 25. don't know exactly what we gained. I probably need to roll a die to figure that out. But I don't have one handy because I just don't. Tony, you and I.

Tony Won (39:13.506)
Yeah.

Tony Won (39:21.262)
you

Rob Dwyer (39:25.724)
could probably talk for the next hour. There are definitely some other topics that I wanted to get to that we didn't get to. So maybe we'll come back to another episode and discuss those. I really just want to, number one, say how great it is to talk to you again. And number two, thank you for blessing the podcast with your presence. I know the audience is gonna get a lot out of this and it's just great always to talk with you.

Tony Won (39:57.026)
Thank you so much, Rob. Really enjoy our conversations and "Happitu" come back anytime and to chat with you. It's really fun and I really do hope people get something out of this. So thank you.

Rob Dwyer (40:11.664)
I know they will.