CTO Playbook
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Transcript of CTO Playbook
CTO PLAYBOOK 2011Tony Parisi
CTO at Large
Who I Am
Entrepreneur
Consulting Architect and CTO
Technologist
Web 3D Inventor and Evangelist
What I Do
Consult
Advise
Plan
Develop
Manage
Challenge
Cajole
Comfort
<StealthMobileGamingStartup>
What This Is
Startup Stuff
Product, Process, People
Tony’s Tech Toolbox
What This Is Not
Gaming Goodies
Success Secrets
STARTUP STUFF
Goals
What are your goals?
What is the company mission?
Where do you see yourself and/or the company in X months? Y years?
Change the World
$ Cash In $
Make Great
Games
…prove to my friends I’m not a
total loser
Build My Empire
Strategy
Pick one and stick to it.
Your go-to-market plan may be very different from your long term goal.
Choice of platform may– or may not– be a core strategy decision.
Focus. You can always expand that focus or PIVOT later.
Get clarity on this early and often; challenge yourself.
Launch a killer FB game; expand to mobile
later.
Develop a platform, and find a partner to make a
game.
Raise the bar in game play, and become
famous for it.
Create a money machine:
Beg/borrow/steal revenue.
Some examples
Funding
1. Self
2. Partners/Customers
3. Publishers
4. Investors
Investors invest in team and market opportunity first; technology and game play second.
Partners, Customers and Publishers have additional requirements (genre, platform etc.) and introduce additional risk.
If you are self-funding, you only have one job (initially): make a great game that generates $.
Investors invest in platforms, not titles.
Consumers buy titles, not platforms.
Team
Your team should be a PACK™
PassionateAlignedCommittedKick-Ass
If your team is not 100% committed, investors and partners will smell it. No part-timers!Your livelihood depends on your team creating something new, different and awesome. Your team needs to kick ass.
Startups require long hours, huge sacrifice and absolute dedication-- against the odds, during bad times as well as good.Lack of alignment will kill a team. It is not a matter of if, but when.
PRODUCT, PROCESS, PEOPLE
Product
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Get User/Player Feedback Early and Often Be Thou Data-Driven, CeaselesslyCollect Data From Day One
Awesome MVP rant on Jon Radoff’s bloghttp://radoff.com/blog/2010/05/04/minimum-viable-product-rant/
ProcessAgile (Scrum, Kanban, XP…)
Everything in broad daylight Short release cycles
(“sprints”)
Iterative Features can roll out over time
Inner vs. Outer Methodology Design and requirements
distinct from project management process
Continuous Integration Integrate daily, automate
build/test
Test-Driven Development Ideally, all features are unit-
tested before submitted to QA
Interdisciplinary Teams aka “Pods”
Nearly all features require multiple disciplines and have many stakeholders
People
TONY’S TECH TOOLBOX
Platforms: An Omnivore’s DilemmaA Tyranny of Choice for Client and Server
HTML5/Flash/WebGL/Molehill War
Android/iOS/Windows Phone/Playbook War
LAMP is Rapidly Fragmenting/Dissolving
Server Frameworks, Client SDKs are a Double-Edged Sword
Design for Scalability
Shared-Nothing Architectures
Asynchronous/Event-Based Where Possible
Horizontal Scaling with Cheap, Disposable, Replicable Parts
Cloud Hosting/Virtualization
Edge Networks for Assets
Build Cheap at First, But Design for Big From the Start
Separate Your Log Server from Prod
Build Analytics in At The Start!
Load Balancer
Application Server
User DBUser DB
memcache
Application servers scale horizontally to user
connections
Players
User DB scales
horizontally to user growth
Application Servermemcac
he
Inventory DB
Inventory DB
Inventory replicated across application instances Object
DB
Object DB
Object DB scales
horizontally to repository
growth
Log DBMetrics and
reporting offline from production
Tony’s Toolbox
Cheap Cloud Hosting Linode
Cheap/Free Project Management
Rally Community, Pivotal Tracker
Cheap Corporate Docs/Mail Google
Cheap/Free Sharing Dropbox, Evernote
Content Management Tactic (not hosted, costs
$)
Client Code All depends Use as much HTML, GL,
SVG etc. as possible
Server Code PHP, Node.js
Database CouchBase
Revision Control SVN or GIT
Frameworks Home grown
“I love frameworks… as long as they’re mine.”
CTO PLAYBOOK 2011Tony Parisi
CTO at Large