Victoria Tran, community director at InnerSloth, thinks that the best lessons come from failure. Here’s how she explains the importance of mistakes and what companies and employees can learn from them.
On March 17, Victoria Tran spoke at GDC Showcase on a very important topic: “Making Marketing Mistakes.” The community director shared a lot of valuable insights from her own experience that people from the game industry could find really useful.
Here are the key points from Tran’s talk, according to a Gamasutra report.
- Success is actually “built on trash,” says Victoria Tran. While the success of Among Us might seem effortless, there were a lot of mistakes that forged it.
- You can learn from every failure and mistake, no matter how huge it was. It’s important to not look at it as something embarrassing, but find a way to make it useful. That’s why Tran tries to make it invigorate her and make her a better person.
- “I want my trash to become a resource that feeds into the roots of my success and have it grow into an entire garden… that attracts cows. And then I can literally milk failure for all it has,” she explains.
- Instead of blaming someone, including yourself, for the failure, it’s better to find the reason behind it. “Accountability means we’re asking what and not who,” Tran says. “We need to ask the what in order to be able to learn better from our failures.”
- The culture around failure is also important. Someone always creates an environment, where making mistakes “feels like a death sentence.” It could be the studio’s management, or it could be you if you are in a powerful position.
- There are many types of failures, but it’s crucial to get information out of every mistake and identify steps to prevent it from happening again.
- You should realize what your advantages and disadvantages are. Every failure can give you insight into what skills you should improve. “We’re not born to do everything and I have my own weak spots when it comes to marketing. Being able to acknowledge and know where we are in our Skill Tree of Life is very important,” Tran says.
- It’s important to understand what you expect from other members of your team, and what they expect from you. It will help minimize the catastrophic failure and give every project the proper attention.
You can read a detailed version of Victoria Tran’s talk here.