Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, and Product Management
Product Managers can learn and implement ideas from the Japanese company Nintendo, and more specifically, the late Satoru Iwata, longtime employee and former CEO.
Iwata passed away in 2015 at the tragically young age of 55, but he left a noticeable impact throughout his years at Nintendo and the video game industry. While the company has seen its up and downs over the years, they have taken risks and bold directional choices that differ them from Sony and Microsoft, while also staying true to their roots that has made them so successful as a game company. Here are some things that you can learn from Satoru and Nintendo.
Satoru never lost sight of his roots. You shouldn’t either.
In what has become a legendary speech in the video game world, Iwata laid bare his identity and his priorities in his Game Developers Conference 2005 keynote address.
“On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.”
10 ways Satoru Iwata changed Nintendo — and gaming — forever
Despite being a General Manager of Corporate Planning at Nintendo at the time, Iwata returned to the programming trenches and helped release Super Smash Brothers Melee, an important launch title for the Gamecube back in 2001, on time.
Aaah, I wonder if it’s alright to admit this? Well, I guess the proverbial statute of limitations is up, so I’ll tell you, but my actual last work on programming happened when I was working as the General Manager of Corporate Planning at Nintendo. Something happened and the Gamecube version of Super Smash Brothers didn’t look like it was going to make its release date so I sort of did a code review for it (Wry Laugh).
At the time, I went to HAL Labs in Yamanashi and was the acting head of debugging. So, I did the code review, fixed some bugs, read the code and fixed more bugs, read the long bug report from Nintendo, figured out where the problem was and got people to fix those…all in all I spent about three weeks like that. And, because of that, the game made it out on time.
And that was the last time that I worked as an engineer ‘in the field’. I was right there, sitting by programmers, in the trenches, reading code together, finding the bugs, and fixing them together.
Here are some of his first actions when he became President of Nintendo:
One of his first actions as president was to meet directly with the company’s 40 department heads and 150 other employees. This contrasted starkly with Yamauchi’s practice of rarely meeting with employees and generally having a single, annual speech. Shigeru Miyamoto described the previous business atmosphere as “stuffy” and stated Iwata “improved the ventilation.” Iwata was acutely aware that his position as president would not ensure compliance from his employees and sought to communicate with them on a personal level. If employees disagreed with his view, Iwata would suggest they follow their idea instead of his own, stating “creators only improve themselves by taking risks.”
For the Product Manager: No matter where you came from, and what you’re doing now, don’t forget your roots, and if need be, don’t be afraid to get some skin back in that game. You might have come from customer support, from sales, or from software development to where you are now as a Product Manager, but don’t forget your roots. Don’t lock yourself behind doors and let people take care of things. Take some support calls, go on sales calls, sit down with the developers. Don’t distance yourself. You’ll be more in tune with what is going on in the trenches.
For something similar with Amazon:
As part of a training session each year, Jeff Bezos asks thousands of Amazon managers, including himself, to attend two days of call-center training. Most likely this was a doctrine borrowed from the U.S. Marines as all marines, regardless of rank, are trained to be a rifleman first.
7 Customer Service Lessons from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos
Play the long game.
“Like Hollywood, which in the past has focused too heavily on special effects,” he wrote in a 2006 Times editorial, “we need to find other ways to improve.”
“We are not competing against Sony or Microsoft,” Iwata once told Fortune magazine. “We are battling the indifference of people who have no interest in video games.”
Nintendo’s President Satoru Iwata was always willing to take a risk
Nintendo released the Nintendo DS in late 2004 and the Nintendo Wii in late 2006. Instead of focusing on more powerful systems with better specs (like Microsoft and Sony), Nintendo focused on building systems that would allow people to play games in different ways and brought in new audiences that didn’t play video games.
The results? (from Wikipedia):
The Nintendo DS is the 2nd highest selling game console ever at 154.02 million units, only behind the Playstation 2. The Nintendo Wii sold the most consoles out of the 7th generation of game consoles at 101 million units, With Xbox360 and Playstation 3 selling about 84 million units each.
Instead of getting in a war with Microsoft or Sony in building a more powerful console, Nintendo took a different approach. Here is what Clayton Christensen had to say about the Wii:
But Nintendo hasn’t truly gone backwards technologically. It has simply innovated in a different way. It understood that the barrier to new consumers using video game systems was the complexity of game play, not the quality of existing graphics. By removing that barrier, it has been able to compete against nonconsumption and create a significant growth business. It is a classic disruptive strategy.
While he passed away about 1.5 years before its launch, Iwata played a large part in the direction that Nintendo took with the recently launched Nintendo Switch, which released in March of 2017. Focusing more on the growing mobile gaming market, the Nintendo Switch was the fastest selling console in Nintendo’s history. Within 4 months, the console has already solid 4.7 million units. Time will tell how it does over the coming years.
As a Product Manager, it’s easy to get caught up in the here and the now, and what’s going on this quarter.
Don’t forget about the long game, where your product or company is going over the next several years. Don’t lose sight of that. Always be ready to play the long game and be thinking down the raod.
Stay Humble, and admit your mistakes.
While leading the charge with the Wii and the DS that helped Nintendo dominate the console market, the follow up releases of the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS did not meet expectations that Nintendo hoped for, which were iterations of the Wii and the DS instead of taking a brand new approach like those systems had. Sony and Microsoft did end up lifting many aspects from the Wii and implemented them into the Xbox360 and Playstation 3 with Microsoft Kinect, and Playstation move. The Wii U only solid about 13.56 million units, compared to about 101 million units of the Wii.
So, what did Iwata do? He cut his salary in half, along with key board members from Nintendo. It should be noted that this is something that Japanese companies tend to do.
When Nintendo were not meeting their targets, he refused to lay off employees.
“If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease,” he told investors in a Q and A session.
Further justifying his reasoning, Iwata says “I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.” Sounds like a pretty solid boss who actually has his employee’s bests interests at heart, if he refuses to give them the ax despite the company’s struggling financials.
“I also know that some employers publicize their restructuring plan to improve their financial performance by letting a number of their employees go,” Iwata explained, “but at Nintendo, employees make valuable contributions in their respective fields, so I believe that laying off a group of employees will not help to strengthen Nintendo’s business in the long run.”
For the Product Manager: Don’t be afraid to own up to your mistakes. I’m not saying taking a pay cut, but don’t be afraid to address straight up that you were wrong. It’s easy to play the blame game, blame the current market, the users, etc. At the end of the day, you have to own up to your mistakes and move on.
Don’t forget to have fun.
If you look him up on YouTube (beyond just the video above), you’ll see things that typical company presidents rarely do, especially at a Japanese company. Iwata had a goofy attitude that was beloved by many, and it was easy to see through the suit and see that he was a gamer at heart.
As a Product Manager, don’t forget to have fun.
You don’t need to take everything so seriously. Have some fun with what you’re doing. Have some fun with the people you work with and what you’re building.
Conclusion:
“Mr. Iwata is gone, but it will be years before his impact on both Nintendo and the full video game industry will be fully appreciated,” said Nintendo of America President and COO Reggie Fils-Aimé in a statement Monday morning.
Read Satoru Iwata’s Unpublished Quotes From TIME’s Interview
By being a gamer at heart, having fun, and pushing for different direction and focus than competitors, Iwata helped bring Nintendo into the 21st century that changed the way people play games. Despite the fact he was the President of a multi-billion dollar company, Iwata never forgot his gaming roots and never lost sight of having fun. The gaming industry has been forever changed by the man’s work, and there are many admirable aspects that you can apply in your work as a Product manager.
Upon his death, many artists produced tributes to the man, in which I’ll end this post on.
Originally published at www.pmpaul.com on September 7, 2017.
