Five Minutes With: Justin Manning
REWIND’s Head of Studio, Justin Manning, on developing talent at the company.
“Five Minutes With” is a regular feature that gives you an insight into some of the greatest minds in the immersive industry, all within the time it takes to grab a cup of coffee.
Justin has over 20 years of experience in the game industry, including long-term positions at Electronic Arts and SuperMassive Games. His career has spanned QA, Marketing, Art, and Production, working on titles across a range of platforms and genres from casual, through racing and third-person adventures. As Head of Studio at REWIND, Justin is involved in every aspect of running the studio, from product and people to process and infrastructure. He is focused on ways of working that allow REWIND to face the challenges of now and the future, not just in what the studio makes, but how it makes it.
How would you describe REWIND?
REWIND is focused on bringing the physical and digital worlds closer together using real-time technologies and creativity to deliver spatial experiences that people love. The advantages of social interaction in virtual or mixed digital spaces have come into sharp focus in a short amount of time. The work we have been engaged with for years has now got public attention away from just entertainment.
We are a learning company. We are always looking at what we can do better and adapting to changes in both the immersive industry and in the wider world.
What is your focus at the moment?
People are everything. As Head of Studio at REWIND, this is a driving value for myself and any leader in the studio. Our company and our industry rely on the skills, creativity, experience, motivation, and commitment of people and their willingness to continually learn and develop.
For the past three years, we have been drawing primarily on the games industry for the skills and expertise we need. With the explosion of indie companies, as well as the increasing size of the AAA players, this has been competitive enough to recruit the right people. We now have a team that brings years of experience directly from the games and real-time industries and uniquely combines this with the emerging practice of immersive experience design.
As a leader in the immersive industry, it is important for us to try to increase the pool of talent, not just fish from it. Not only should we be developing the leaders of tomorrow but also the skills and expertise of the next generation.
What issues have you faced?
Like any company, we have the same issues of recruitment, retention, and development, but in the context of a fast-moving and changing industry. To meet these demands we have had to build and shape a team with the right values, skills, and experiences.
Our strategy has been to put the senior people and experienced leaders in place first. We have always had the eye on being able to develop young talent, but know that this can’t be done if you don’t have people with deep experience to draw upon. And this has been the big issue — we are set against a backdrop where real-time engines and real-time development expertise is in growing demand.
We are seeing almost daily new industries starting to use real-time engines like UE4 — everything from architecture, automotive, and music to virtual production in the film industry. These are developing fast and are adding to the competition for talent. For a small company, it can sometimes feel like an arms race with the larger players with deeper pockets.
How do you keep your team motivated?
To keep people working at their best they need to be happy and engaged with a sense of purpose. And to that end, we have made it a focus of the studio to ensure our staff have great relationships with their managers, but also have a clear plan of development. We have introduced regular 1:1s and ensure these are treated with primary importance as key two-way communication and feedback tools.
Everyone’s voice is needed to make improvements, so establishing a trusting environment where people can feedback and see a change in the company is important. To support the 1:1s we have ensured that all staff have a personal development plan to define how and in which ways they develop within the company.
These mechanisms are incredibly important, but only work when resources to aid development are easily accessible. This can be anything from allotted time to do personal learning, to books/materials, access to coaching, access to opportunities, or training.
This is where REWIND Academy comes in as a means of meeting some of these demands.
What is REWIND Academy?
REWIND Academy is an initiative that both reinforces some of our core studio values and also helps us grow our internal talent as well as increasing our access to talent. REWIND Academy is intended to holistically address our challenges. Its mission is to:
- Increase access to training opportunities for REWIND personnel to help with personal development.
- Fill in skills gaps present in the company that we can’t find with recruitment.
- Develop leadership from within the company. Good leadership is hard to find and ensuring leaders live your values is even harder. If we want to train and develop people we need good leaders first. REWIND Academy’s first priority is to set-up courses to develop the leaders of tomorrow.
- Developing people from education — the wider games, entertainment, and immersive industries are all recruiting from the same pool of people. The only way we can grow the talent pool is to provide an opportunity for professional development to young people leaving college/university. REWIND Academy is aiming to provide them with professional training and experience.
How is REWIND Academy doing?
The fantastic thing is that the initiative has quickly developed a virtuous loop. We train management and leadership who can then run training, this further develops them as managers whilst enabling us to provide training to our teams. We’ve had some great success stories in this area, some of our developing managers are running courses of their own and also people who have participated in some of our technical courses are providing support for the people who are next on the course.
What sort of courses have you got up and running?
We started with only a few courses in mind, but in a short space of time, we have seen a variety of courses being developed and run.
We started with the Management for Mentors course to support our mentorship initiative and to move people towards leadership roles. The course covers a number of areas to help build awareness and understanding of the skills of leadership, including management models and practical ways they can be employed. We take people through the running of a 1:1 and working with staff to develop their PDP. The course is a mixture of information, discussion, and workshops and was run across five sessions over four months.
As a company, we historically have worked in both Unity and UE4 engines. However, strategically, we can’t be top of our game if we have to develop all of our tools and processes twice, so we chose to focus on UE4 a few years ago. Whilst we still occasionally get requests to work in Unity, we need all of our engineers to work with UE4 and have needed to develop a course for taking C#/Unity programmers into C++/UE4. The Unity to UE4 course is a month-long and is a mix of teaching and hands-on exercises culminating in a hackathon-style project.
Many of our senior managers have been using Agile for more than a decade and many companies use an Agile or Scrum methodology. As we employ new people and grow in size, the challenges of running cross-functional teams become greater so being able to update and have regular refresher workshops is useful, particularly as we take on new staff. We are now running a second and revised version of the Agile Primer course.
We developed the Blueprint Workshop course for our designers, as we need them to be able to prototype their ideas in-engine. We are an interactive medium and paper designers do not account for valuable user feedback. With this in mind, we developed a curriculum for the designers to follow, self-guided, with time allotted for learning. They could get support from the programmers when and where needed.
What else are you doing?
REWIND Academy definitely isn’t a substitute for other professional courses. We still organise professional courses across a range of subjects, but having the Academy means we can increase not only the amount of training but also that depth, and most importantly, adapt it to our context and needs.
All course materials are on our internal knowledge site, REWIND Brain, so people can refer back to them or see what courses are available. Additionally, we do regular one-off talks on subjects of professional interest. These have ranged from talks on art direction, aspects of employment law to managing the outsourcing process. We find these are useful as anyone can prepare a talk and anyone in the company can attend.
What does the future of REWIND Academy look like?
REWIND Academy has only just started but is already gaining great traction. Last year was focused on developing leadership in the company, which will continue this year with some more practical courses on running teams and projects.
This year’s focus is to take on, and quickly develop, talented people from University and fast-track their development into the professional world of software and creative development.
Beyond that, as we grow as a company and the size of projects we deliver increases, we will start to see more specialisms and the need to educate people across a broader range of technologies. The future of spatial computing and shared physical and digital spaces will see us need new skills and new ways of thinking — REWIND Academy will be one of the ways we discuss, learn, and shape our future.
XRLO: eXtended Reality Lowdown is brought to you by REWIND, an immersive design and innovation company. If you want to talk tech, ideas, and the future, get in touch here.
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