Why Do Most Teams Fail When Learning from Supercell's Small Team Model?

Deep thoughts on AI and aspirations —— ByteDance Deep Thinking Circle

Supercell is one of the most studied companies: founded in 2010, a Finnish company with around 300 employees, generating $1.56 billion in revenue in 2019, with per capita revenue contribution exceeding 36 million RMB. Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, and Brawl Stars all came from here. The “middle platform” concept that was once popular in China’s internet circles also drew inspiration from it.

What people typically learn from it comes down to two words: small teams, empowerment. CEO Ilkka Paananen repeatedly says that decisions should be made by the teams most capable of making them, and his goal is to become “the world’s least powerful CEO.”

But I’ve always had a question: this story has been told for over a decade, so why hasn’t there been a second Supercell?

After reading Paananen’s tenth-anniversary retrospective, my answer is: most people see the empowerment but miss the prerequisites; they see the organizational form but not the expensive decisions behind it.

Behind Empowerment Are Three Prerequisites, Each Expensive

Let’s look at the prerequisites first. Supercell’s empowerment works because three conditions are met simultaneously.

The first is talent density. Supercell has a hiring principle passed down from its first chairman: when considering whether to hire someone, imagine the company’s current average talent level—only hire if the new person would raise that average. After this filtering, what remains are people who can be completely trusted. Empowerment is given to these people. Without sufficient talent density, empowerment isn’t trust—it’s neglect.

The second is cash and patience. Teams have the authority to kill projects, even good projects—both Smash Land and Rush Wars received positive feedback in early testing, yet the teams judged they weren’t games that could be played for many years and killed them themselves. This freedom requires an extremely patient capital structure to support it: able to withstand repeated restarts and entire quarters without new product launches. The Clash of Clans team once spent over two years paying down design and technical debt, prioritizing foundational issues over chasing short-term metrics—something that simply couldn’t grow in a quarterly-target-driven company.

The third is long-term signal. Supercell’s teams judge everything by the same measure: how many years will players play it? This signal is more stable than revenue and more honest than DAU. Without such a measure, empowerment loses direction—teams don’t know how to self-check and can only turn back for the boss’s ruling.

These three conditions add up to one sentence: empowerment is a luxury—you must first be able to afford the price.

Culture Is Defined by the Most Expensive Decisions

Now let’s look at this company’s true core. Paananen has a view I strongly agree with: culture is defined by the most difficult decisions, not by slogans on walls or slides.

The most典型example is Boom Beach. At a crucial leadership meeting five months into development, 9 out of 10 people thought the game should be killed. From a business perspective, killing it was rational. But management thought of another dimension: if they vetoed what the team wanted to do today, the culture of independent teams would end right there.

They chose to listen to the team. It turned out the team was right this time. But Paananen emphasizes the point that follows: even if the team had been wrong, the company’s decision would still have been right.

This statement is worth pondering because it reveals the mechanism of trust. Trust isn’t a slogan—it’s a promise redeemed with real money. Only trusting when you’re confident isn’t trust—it’s consensus. Teams dare to take risks, dare to kill their own projects, dare to speak truth because they’ve witnessed firsthand: the company pays more for culture than for any single project.

There’s another small detail. Over the years, several team managers at Supercell voluntarily stepped aside, giving their positions to people they deemed more suitable, with no one requiring them to do so. Others chose to kill their own projects and shift to helping other teams launch games. Such behavior can’t be produced by performance review systems—it can only come from a shared understanding: this company is playing an infinite game, not competing for next quarter.

Two Easy Pitfalls When Learning

To truly learn, first see clearly the two easiest ways to fail.

The first pitfall: adding rules after every mistake. This is human instinct, and Supercell fell into it themselves. They once mandated that all new games must reach a playable state within 3 months, intending to accelerate validation. The result? Developers secretly started development early to meet the target, spending mental energy on circumventing rules rather than making good games. This rule was later deleted, returning to the original principle of “trusting each team to make the right decision.” The mechanism is clear: rules optimize metrics, people then optimize rules—whatever you write down will be gamed.

The second pitfall: treating survivorship bias as methodology. Paananen himself says at the beginning of his retrospective: our success has a large luck component, don’t learn Supercell’s culture, build a culture that fits your own company. This isn’t modesty. Behind every surviving Supercell, there are numerous companies that also did small teams and empowerment but quietly died—no one writes their retrospectives. Empowerment without talent density and cash backing is chaos; killing projects without long-term signals as basis is capriciousness.

One more observation for the current moment. Stories of small teams in the AI era are increasing, and those three prerequisites are actually being quietly rewritten by technology: AI has taken over massive amounts of execution work, tools have replaced part of coordination costs, and companies that couldn’t afford to maintain or empower before now have some learning space. But one thing can’t be replaced—the ability to make expensive decisions. Whether to kill a project, whether to listen to the team, whether to withstand this quarter—ultimately it’s still human judgment.

Before Learning, Ask Yourself Three Questions

If you want to try small teams and empowerment in your own company, first do three self-checks.

First, talent: Can your direct reports function normally without your approval? If not, solve hiring first, then talk about empowerment—reversing the order is abdication.

Second, cash and incentives: Can the company afford for a team to be wrong once? If one failure leads to performance review collapse, no one will dare take responsibility for decisions, and empowerment is just for show.

Third, signal: Do teams have a universally accepted metric that can be viewed over ten years? With only quarterly numbers, teams will naturally only look at quarterly numbers.

Only after passing all three gates should you talk about empowerment; if any gate hasn’t been passed, supplement that one first. Supercell’s story is compelling, but its true value isn’t in providing a template—it’s in clearly marking out the template’s price tag.