Supercell rejected traditional top-down hierarchy. Instead, they empower small, autonomous teams ('cells') with full creative ownership over their games. Management's role is to support these cells, much like a record label supports its artists, not dictate creative direction.
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Companies mistakenly bundle management with authority, forcing top performers onto a management track to gain influence. Separate them. Define management's role as coordination and context-sharing, allowing senior individual contributors to drive decisions without managing people.
To reignite growth, Supercell created two distinct operating models. Teams managing existing hit games adopted a 'scale-up' playbook, focusing on iteration with larger teams. Teams developing new titles operated like independent 'startups,' focused on high-risk innovation with small, agile teams.
Huang eschews traditional hierarchy, engaging directly with employees at all levels and delivering feedback publicly. This "parallel processing" management style ensures rapid, simultaneous learning across the organization, mirroring the architecture of the GPUs his company builds and creating a uniquely flat structure for a company of its size.
Large corporations can avoid stagnation by intentionally preserving the "scrappy" entrepreneurial spirit of their early days. This means empowering local teams and market leaders to operate with an owner's mindset, which fosters accountability and keeps the entire organization agile and innovative.
Gamma maintains a flat, high-impact organization by eschewing traditional managers. Instead, all leaders are "player-coaches"—they actively contribute as individual contributors while also mentoring their teams. This keeps leadership close to the work and empowers teams to adapt quickly without top-down commands.
At Crisp.ai, the core value is that the best argument always wins, regardless of who it comes from—a new junior employee or the company founder. This approach flattens hierarchy and ensures that the best ideas, which often originate from those closest to the product and customers (engineers, PMs), are prioritized.
Instead of traditional managers, Gamma hires "player-coaches"—leaders who actively contribute to the work, like shipping code, while also mentoring their team. This model maintains a flat structure, keeps leadership grounded, and works best in a lean organization.
The traditional "assembly line" model of product development (PM -> Design -> Eng) fails with AI. Instead, teams must operate like a "jazz band," where roles are fluid, members "riff" off each other's work, and territorialism is a failure mode. PMs might code and designers might write specs.
Gamma scaled to a $2B valuation with only 50 people by innovating on org design, not just product. They prioritize hiring generalists over specialists and use a 'player-coach' model instead of a traditional management layer. This keeps the team lean, agile, and close to the actual work.
