Understanding who you are and who you want to become
As a person with a truly multidisciplinary background, I had a great guest this week as I sat down to chat with Diego Labajos. He is currently a Lead Product Manager at Scopely, working on the roadmap for Star Trek Fleet Command. Previously, he worked at Socialpoint as a part of the product team and he also has quite the technical experience working as a developer in different teams and even being CTO at one point.
Diego didn’t have a conventional career, but he certainly accomplished a lot prior to joining the games industry. Working at different companies as a developer and then trying his chance at being a CTO to realize that was not what he wanted helped him look for opportunities in a space where he was genuinely interested in. And using his experience in addition to his passion for games, he was able to land a job in Socialpoint just before they started to skyrocket their games back in 2015. As part of the team growing the games there, Diego had been an important part of the success while learning from people with more experience on gaming back at the time.
While having this massive transition in his career, Diego also experienced departmental transitions inside the games industry once he got in. Moving from the production side and being responsible for a team of 30 to the product side and working as a single person building LiveOps at Socialpoint, he had the chance to learn a very important lesson. In order to become successful at your team and continue growing, you need to be providing value while still learning new things. Diego didn’t stop providing value to his team despite dealing with brand new challenges, which helped him become better throughout his career.
When it comes to what people should do in order to join the games industry, Diego offers two different paths depending on the financial conditions. If you can afford it, going to a game development-specific program (be it a bachelor or a master or anything else) is going to be really helpful. It will give you a nice head start in your job search with the knowledge you will acquire by the time you finish those programs. On the other hand, if you need to start a full time job, starting in a simple yet effective department like QA (Quality Assurance) will be one of the most convenient ways to start your career in gaming.
With respect to improving himself and setting goals, Diego has a quite methodical approach. His main advice to people is you need to first understand who you are. Understanding your strengths and weaknesses will help you see how you can use or improve them. After understanding who you are, you need to understand who you want to become so that you can see the path you need to take to start from who you are to become who you want to be. And he does it by creating goals for himself while tracking his performance with respect to how well he is moving towards them, which I can also suggest as someone practicing a similar approach.
Understanding who you are and who you want to become may sound too high level or cliche, but I think these are extremely crucial in growing in the way you want. Spending time reading and learning continuously are required for anyone to grow themselves, but understanding yourself and who you want to be will show you the way that you need to grow. I think we can call it “growing smart” since it will help anyone spend their time much more efficiently once they stop and understand those important factors.