I’m Kaeo Milker, Director of Operations for Heroes of the Storm, and This Is How I Work.
Kaeo Milker has a long and illustrious career at Blizzard Entertainment: quality control, asset management, recruiting, and now leading a large MOBA Heroes of the Storm franchise. However, you would probably rather follow his advice than follow him down the alley; Although he is the captain of the ship of Heroes , he quickly admits that you won’t find him at the top of the game’s leaderboards. We caught up with Keough at BlizzCon this year and he gave some great advice on how to manage what you think , what you should do, how to make a career versus what you would like to do, how to make a career.
Name: Kaeo Milker. Location: Irvine, California. Current job: Director of Production, Heroes of the Storm. Current computer: “A machine designed by Blizzard.” One word that best describes the way you work: Triage
First of all, tell us a little about your past and how you got where you are now.
I got here on a very long and windy road. I went to high school to be a veterinarian. This was my path that I followed. I studied zootechnics in college and … it’s a very different path where I am now. But I love video games and I love Blizzard.
Blizzard was the pinnacle for me. I was living in Southern California and found out they were hiring game testers for Warcraft 3 , and I basically gave up my other career and came to Blizzard to try to get my feet back and see what this was about. I had no idea what video game development was. There weren’t many resources back then; There weren’t really things you could learn in school that would definitely put you on the path of game development, because it was still a fairly young industry at the time.
I like it. I wanted to see what it is. I wanted to be a part of it. And I practically didn’t do anything. They were just testing games, and that played a part in the bizarre role of recruiting and asset management. At every opportunity presented to me, I just tried to do my job the best I could – be kind and cooperate with everyone I came across and make sure people knew me as just the hardworking, pleasant person they wanted to be. around.
As opportunities opened up — as the company grew — there were more and more things for which I took responsibility. And I tried my best not to screw it all up. And I think that over time, I continue to gain more responsibility for simply establishing myself as a valuable person in this organization.
Tell us about a recent work day.
Typical Monday: First, I have a director meeting with my game management. So I sit down with this bunch of people and we just talk about whatever’s on our minds after the weekend. We play the game a lot, so we’re talking about the game itself; we’re talking about last week’s problems. We start to agree that we want to make sure we are aware of everything when we get to work weekends – all the crazy things that happen to our game and its development.
This is a very collaborative process. Although I’m the most senior developer on the team, I rely heavily on the CTO, the engineering team leader, the art director, and two design leaders. We all work very closely to keep track of the progress of the game and adhere to the correct principles at all times.
This is part of the Blizzard Executive Meeting I attend. I’m leaving the Heroes part , and it’s a group of leaders from different game teams and across Blizzard who have a similar conversation that I just had about my team of Heroes , but now we’re talking about Blizzard in general. I get many points of view, ideas and opinions from them, and I have the opportunity to raise issues and questions, and also listen to what they raise. So this is, again, a very collaborative environment with many people who genuinely care not only about the work we do on our individual games, but also what the company’s teamwork is like at any given moment.
And then I have a series of meetings – many meetings. In fact, we are fighting against meetings. We want the meetings to be short and effective, and we don’t want more meetings than we need, but I get thrown out for a lot of them. Some of them are informational, where I’m a fly on the wall, just trying to focus and hear what everyone is talking about.
Many meetings involve creative tasks or prioritization, which we try to do within the game. There is also a lot of interaction with external teams, so I could jump from the design meeting where I focus on Heroes, the game, to meet with our web and mobile team, or talk about our new forums that are about to roll out and then move on to the many individual meetings. I have a lot of direct reports – people who work with me – but I also want to talk to everyone on our team.
It is very important for me to keep in touch with them. I will listen to their point of view on the game, on how we manage the team in the game, so that we can all work as best we can. It’s a creative environment and Blizzard is fueled by people’s passions. It is very important that people are motivated and excited. And that’s the only way we can all do this magic is by developing games where you just do something out of the air.
And that leads to my dinners, which are usually also one-on-one dinners. I’m going to have lunch with someone and we’ll talk about career development, games, or the big problem we’re facing at the moment. This is a deep understanding of the essence of the problem. And production is a lot about solving problems: just solving a problem, focusing on the right things, and finding your own way to solve them.
We have game tests every day. So for a part of my day I’ll be doing testing with either the design team or our UI team, just get a snapshot of something tangible that I can test and give feedback to make sure it feels like we’re on the right principles. …
And then I do a lot of strategic work with external leaders, talking about the overall course of the game and all the content that we focus on. We have a lot of meetings with PR, marketing and publications about how we did all this great work with the game, and now how we want to talk about it. At what moments do we want to shout from the rooftops and where do we want to evoke this expectation of the next step we are striving for?
What apps, gadgets or tools can’t you live without?
There are all kinds. At Blizzard, we use Confluence a lot for many purposes. Whether it’s meeting notes, or setting up a scene for a big conversation that we want to have direct with people, or showcasing things for our entire team that they can influence – whether it’s art or design, our planning is all built into [Confluence] so that we can share information and have a mechanism to track and comment on it.
We have many proprietary tools that we also use. One of the biggest is a tool called Play Tester, with which the development team can create a list of all the things in a given build that they want people to test and play, focusing people’s attention on certain areas. the game.
This tool not only gives us this information, but also allows us to quickly download and play the correct build in the right environment so that we can actually connect, play a game, and test these things.
How is your workplace arranged?
I do a billion things in Excel, even with the larger tools at my disposal. My real workspace is an office with a bunch of chairs. Usually, when I am in the office, and not on the way to a meeting, there is an endless stream of people. My door is usually open and people just walk in and talk to me about random things.
We have whiteboards and they are pretty crazy. Now there are a lot of things on my board that I did not erase, because it was very chaotic. I thought, “I don’t know what we just did, but it’s beautiful and scary at the same time.”
My work overlaps with the production of the game, so I use Excel for a lot of tracking and visualization operations, but my work also overlaps with the business of the game, so I analyze a lot of data about what comes from Tableau, for example, data about the game itself or game business data. For my own curiosity, or to answer the questions I have at any moment, I do a lot of number manipulation and Excel can usually help with that.
What’s your best shortcut or life hack?
My world is very chaotic and there are many things in it, so I go back to a very simple to-do list. When I talk about sorting, I mean sit down and prioritize. There are many things that will be brought to me in a day, and it is very important for me to define what I do not want to give, so that I make a conscious choice of what I give up. and I focus on the things that matter most to me today.
So, something as simple as a simple to-do list is the only thing I write on paper and physically. Everything else is digital, except for this to-do list, so I go back to something tangible and physical, which ultimately leads me to the fact that if I don’t do anything today, I have to do it.
What’s your best way to hack emails?
For a very long time, I was guided by the rules. I receive a lot of emails; I am copied a lot. So I didn’t just have a lot of rules, literally thousands of rules, I had rules for 17 years because I never took them away. They mostly just piled up. But I got to the point where my rules started to interact really badly and I was losing things and I was actually killing every rule I had.
Now, even though I am getting literally thousands of emails, I am manually filtering my mail again. It was weird to go back to that, but it got better in the end, and it also made me more disciplined about what I respond to, what I read and what I want to push back – that I make a conscious choice to push them away, and not some 2003 rule that did it.
Tell us about an interesting, unusual, or challenging process you have at work.
Heroes constantly makes patches and releases. There could be three, four, or five releases at any given time in simultaneous parallel development, and we’re getting to the point where we want to block these things as we get closer to actually launching them to the public. To do this, we begin to close the gate.
A lot of developers do this, but we used to have a thing called the Silver Ticket, which was the path to the Golden Ticket. Once you upgrade to a golden ticket, nothing will change without approval. Like: “I have a golden ticket, now I can change that.” However, we had to extend this because we weren’t very disciplined sticking to the golden ticket, so we created a silver ticket.
Today this process is very, very closely monitored. At any time, we aim to block the build so that we can release it. And since we are not changing the dates in any way here – mainly in game patches with a regular frequency – the question arises: “What will be in the patch? Did everything we wanted to do succeed? Or did we take out a whole bunch of them because we didn’t have time for them? “The game is still being patched, the only question is what is inside this patch.
The process by which we arrive at our final release candidate, which is the build version that is actually going to go public, is insane. A lot of people argued constantly about making sure we locked ourselves and shut off every tap that flows into it in order to release it in time.
It never ends. We’re doing this process today, and we’re going straight to the golden ticket mode for the next one, because the Heroes sets are very close to each other. Our Live Operations team is constantly in the final stages of release. It’s not fun to live in this state for anyone who completes releases, but they master it and are really very good at it.
Who are the people who help you achieve results, and how do you rely on them?
You need a village to make a game. I rely on everyone, from my management team to the other directors on my team, to every producer. Again, as COO, I end up in control of the game’s pipelines, our structure, and the strategy of how we actually develop it. I have a team of producers at all levels, from associate producers to lead producers, who I trust to follow the schedule as well as support something special for Blizzard. We do not ship items until they are ready.
The heroes move really fast, so we have this weird alchemy of how we keep the quality of Blizzard at the same time that we move incredibly fast and release all the time. But for us it was completely different. We had to change our mentality, our workflow and our tools, everything had to change around this concept. And the production team is truly the glue that holds everything together and keeps people honest,
Manufacturing at Blizzard is not like an authority that comes in and says, “You have to do this, and you have to do it now.” I kind of call us “opportunistic helpers.” It’s about finding those moments when we can help, that we can speed up work, that we can remove obstacles, we can unblock people, make communication easier, whatever we can do to keep the car moving. So manufacturing is the biggest part of it.
What’s your favorite side project?
It’s not really a side project, but it feels like a real gear change to me: Blizzcon.
We create moments where we want to talk about a lot of things for our game, and it’s really a celebration for me because we are working on all of this, and a couple of times a year we get the biggest platforms. that we can talk to them.
We’re now physically here at Blizzcon on Friday, and it’s a magical time to meet players, talk to reporters, and watch esports, and it all becomes real to us. This is no longer work, this is the result of all this work, and this is a really special time to celebrate.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
I grew up with parents who were very passionate about their work. Their job was not money, but the fact that they liked to get up every morning and walk on it.
My veterinary path was trying to say, “Well, I need to be a professional. So it’s professional, and I love animals, and that’s good, everything will work out. ” But there was a moment when I had a turning point: “Should I take this video game path or continue it?”
I talked to them, and they kept repeating to me, “You need to follow your passions. We have always done this and we urge you to do the same. ” And at that moment, I had to make some difficult life choices in order to change my path. I started from scratch, and there were no guarantees that all this would somehow work out. But having that support to just say, “You have to go for these things, this is important,” it changed me.
What problem are you still trying to solve?
There is nothing we do to make me say, “Cool. We’re done with that. Check this box, we’re done, and let’s move on to something else. ” The question always arises: “What if we try this?”
I like it. It’s a fun job. I think I would get very bored if I mastered game development. This challenge will never go away. On the one hand, you will never get a permanent sense of satisfaction, such as, “I got it over with! I did it! ”But this drive to get better and see constant improvement is so satisfying.
What are your Heroes of the Storm player skills and do you feel like you have to support them because you kind of control the ship?
As a producer, I’m not in the business of balancing, and my job is to balance the game against the competition. I lean a little towards this because I’m by no means the best Heroes player in the world. I play Heroes of the Storm a lot; I’ve played about 7000 games. I play almost every night for a couple of hours. I sacrifice sleep to play Heroes . I really enjoy the game and have a lot of fun out of it, but I’m a very average player.
I had an experience at Gamescom, only in August, where I was put on stage with the professional Team Liquid and members of another professional team, Dignitas. And so I was, and it was terrible. I apologized to them so much, and they said: “No, this is cool, we will play with you,” and I was like: “Oh, don’t do this to me again.”
I think there is such a thing as, “Hey, you’re not good at the game, since you can do that,” but for most of the things I do, how good I am has nothing to do with it. … It’s more about looking at the game as a whole, thinking about what’s important, and hearing player feedback.
Do you have a favorite Heroes of the Storm character?
In January, we released a character named Blaze. I usually play as a new hero until the next hero comes out and I’ll bounce. I’ve been playing Blaze almost nonstop since January, which is a bit crazy. I just fell in love with his kit, the way his abilities interact. It also has a lot of sustain, shoots and stuff, so it doesn’t die many times. In Heroes, one of the best things you can do to become a better player is to stop dying.