Operations / Design at Outcome
Viggo Gudmunds
Led operations for EVE Online ($1B+ lifetime revenue). Co-founded Radiant Games and built a coding game that millions of kids have played.
Questions & Answers
What's the story behind your company?
My story to co-founding Outcome started when I was leading operations for EVE Online at CCP Games (~450 people). “WHY are we SO F-ING SLOW!?” It quickly became clear to me that leaders and teams were frustrated with how slow things had become. Teams were spending an awful amount of time on coordination meetings, waiting for approvals, being blocked by other teams. Everybody could feel the complexity, but no one could really see it or measure it. The tech director & I gave it a proper effort to stitch together data from different collaboration systems (Jira, Perforce, etc) as an attempt to reveal bottlenecks in the value network across teams. But it was fragile and lacked much better foundation to visualize on a consistent basis. When Antoine, Gudrún, Sveinn and I started talking, it became clear that 1) this is a fundamental scaling problem and 2) we believed technology has been and still is underutilized in solving this problem so that companies become better as they get bigger.
What's a memorable 'aha' moment you've had while building your startup?
When it became super clear during our kickoff last year with Supercell as a customer that in order for teams to provide access to valuable data sources (e.g. private slack channels, team work boards), we had to sell them on a use case that would remove a pain for them on a daily basis. This is why the first thing we rolled out with them was our Slack app to help platform and support teams manage incoming requests from other teams more easily.
