From 6 people to 30+, and more than 90 games in four years.
My role: Design Director, 2011 to 2015. Built and led the creative department across design, engineering, and QA
The starting point
VINCI Education was building a new category: game-based learning for young children, delivered on its own tablet hardware. When I joined in 2011, the creative team was six people. An engineer, a 3D artist, a game designer, a level designer, a sound designer, and me. There was no production pipeline, no QA function, and a product roadmap that assumed all of it already existed.
The first lesson was the ratio
On paper the founding team looked balanced: one of everything. In practice, games are software. We needed far more engineers than artists, and we needed QA as a real discipline, not a final glance before shipping. Within about a year I had rebuilt the composition and grown the department past 30 people: engineers as the largest group, then artists, then QA and project management.
Three teams, nine games in flight
The structure came from a business constraint, not an org-chart theory: we had to produce at the pace sales could sell. I built three cross-functional teams and staggered them, each carrying three projects at different stages at all times: one in concept, one in production, one in QA. That meant up to nine games in motion on any given day, and it's how we shipped more than 90 of them in four years. At full speed, a new game shipped roughly every two weeks.
How a game got made
Every game started with curriculum, not art. I worked with an educational curriculum specialist to map each game to US learning standards, then with our game designer to turn those goals into interactions a young child would actually find fun. From there: paper prototype testing, production, which I oversaw directly, and a strict QA pass. The last gate was a review by the head of every department. Any error found sent the game back, and the cycle repeated until it passed clean. Nothing shipped on a promise.
The mistake I'd fix
We paper-tested our early games with staff instead of children. Adults turned out to be the wrong proxy for almost everything. When we finally put prototypes in front of kids, they performed far better than we expected; in some math tasks they beat our own engineers. Testing with the real user, no matter how young, became non-negotiable after that, and it changed how I've approached research ever since.
Flying the plane while building it
We were creating content for a tablet that did not yet exist. Our offshore hardware supplier wanted software specs before committing to the device. We wanted hardware specs before committing the software. Neither existed. I made calls along the way with incomplete information, trusting our partners to deliver the hardware at cost while the pressure from sales to deliver kept building. It was the entrepreneurial reality I knew from founding companies, playing out inside someone else's.
What it produced
More than 90 mobile educational games. A SIIA CODiE Award for Best Game-Based Curriculum, a CES Innovation Award, and an EDDIE Award. Coverage in The New York Times, USA Today, CNBC, ABC News, and Parents Magazine. And the thing I'm proudest of: an organization that could keep doing it without heroics.