An excerpt from Impact.
Roblox is a social platform for user-created games and virtual experiences, and in early 2012, it faced a crisis. Its revenue growth had suddenly slowed compared to its player growth, and the trend lines were diverging to a worrisome degree. I was senior vice president of engineering & operations at the time. This was not the first challenge Roblox had faced, nor was it the first time I had worked alongside its CEO and his cofounder. But the crisis of 2012 was sobering. More Roblox players—a good thing—meant more infrastructure, application monitoring, and human moderation. Scaling these costs without an accompanying growth in revenue would drain our cash reserves. And because Roblox was relatively small in 2012, the risk was company survival.
There were many potential explanations for these trends that were both in and out of our control. Maybe something in our game engine or web application was broken. Or perhaps existing players were losing interest, newer players were less willing to pay, or players were spending their money elsewhere. Or maybe players had less money to spend overall. Adding to the challenge, a few employees—including a recently hired executive—lost faith and left the company over the next year while we were working through ideas.
The revenue crisis was a challenging time, but it was also a transformative time. Why? Because the Roblox team rallied. While a few employees moved on, the vast majority leaned in, put in the work, and figured it out. And by the time the crisis passed, Roblox had not only realigned revenue and player growth but had also established a new critical piece of its growth engine, leaving the company better poised for the future than ever before. Roblox rallied.
How did Roblox turn a crisis into an opportunity? There were a few key components. First, we believed. Roblox had a very meaningful role in players’ lives, unlocking their creativity, expanding their friend circles, and delivering adventures made for the community by the community. For all these reasons, players loved Roblox. Second, we focused. From the top down, revenue was the one thing everyone worked on that year, aside from the necessary activities of scaling, content moderation, and bug fixes. Third, we iterated. We didn’t wait to act until we had the “best idea,” and we didn’t let uncertainty about the success of each idea reduce our speed. Fourth, we worked from first principles, questioning every aspect of our product. And that ultimately led to the solution—a move away from early mainstays such as avatar clothing and club memberships to big new ideas that improved the quality and sophistication of virtual experiences. And finally, we had fun. The team’s creativity and energy were infectious, and so was our shared belief in each other. We knew we would figure this out and that Roblox and its community would be better for it.
The revenue crisis was not a one-off. Roblox repeatedly turned crisis into opportunity, so much so that Roblox’s first employee coined the term crisitunity. There were certainly outsized thinkers during this time, but valuable ideas came from passionate thinkers across the team, and the design and engineering that transformed creativity into product was a team sport. In short, Roblox didn’t repeatedly convert crisis into opportunity—Roblox’s people and culture did. And that combination was not an accident.
Roblox succeeded through multiple crises because its founding CEO was an expert team builder who invested in people and culture from the start. And that’s what [Impact] is about—the people and culture needed to create, innovate, and solve problems repeatedly and better over time. Team building is not rocket science, but it is not always obvious. [Impact] is for all those leaders who have earned their roles through subject matter expertise and innate leadership skills, and who now face the challenge of building and growing innovative teams.
During my tenure of almost ten years at Roblox, I contributed across the business with a focus on product and engineering, but my chief contribution was team building. I formed the first engineering pods (cross-functional teams) and insisted that each pod have a clear set of company-aligned vision, mission, strategy, and goals. I institutionalized the product team with a vision that product is a shared resource owned by founders, community, and employees. I held the line on hiring and retention to those most able to work as a team. And I operated by a set of values, along with my teammates, that contributed directly to our success.
My time at Roblox and more broadly my time over the years in startups, good and bad, helped me develop what I now understand to be my life’s passion—empowering people to get things done together, to focus on what matters, to create and innovate, and to have impact.
What we can do alone pales in comparison to what we can achieve together, but a raw ability to get things done is not enough. How teams get things done is critical to enduring success. That how is a team’s people and culture. It is a vision and mission that inspire and focus, shared values that drive urgency and ownership, a commitment to mastery that elevates skill, a leveraging of autonomy that maximizes brainpower and horsepower, and a team of compelling peers who fuel personal growth. The behaviors a team cultivates and the people it hires, develops, and retains are what transform a group of talented individuals into a self-actualizing, high-impact team.