Niantic reviews

- Micromanaged by execs and CEO - Top-down decisions, and lack of transparency - Constant fires and changes - Priorities are unclear because everything is a priority - Disagreements are shut down working with product

First of all, for context, my previous review was taken down by Niantic - everything I mentioned was true but they wanted to hide - you see how "transparent" and "honest" this company has been. ------- 1. No company strategy. Engineering leads everything all the time. Engineering wants to do things they like - hardening platform, making internal tools fancier, building cool features. And they are given the authority to do so. Such a strategy works when you are a small startup 5 years ago and you were building a simple game which everyone could have a say. However, Niantic now, with some cash in bank, needs to get rid of this pattern. They need to know their overall direction - every decision should be measured by impact and ROI instead of engineering preference. This company has a strong engineering influence. PMs are just puppets. Engineering either follows what the CEO wants personally, or they just do whatever that makes their job looking good. Look at what Niantic is doing. They bought a few startups in AR and they merged a game studio. They claimed they could give individual developers the toolkits to build AR apps and games on AR + geo. But hey come on, the success of PGO was a pure coincidence. The formula that worked in 2016 would not work again in 2023 and beyond. Everyone in this world has 24 hours a day. People played your game, then they will move on to something else, either play another game, or not play game at all. Repeating the same recipe again and again will not work. They recently released Peridot and are going to introduce Monster Hunt based AR+geo games. But again, it's the same recipe with minute changes. The pandemic is over. There are way important things people care about, other than just looking at their phones and walking around. ------- 2. Mid-management are weak - speechless. Mid management roster has been mostly promoted internally from junior roles. The directors in eng and product are way inexperienced than any other good companies out there. They feel insecure, they micro-manage, and their focus has always been protecting the faces of their bosses. This is wrong. The more senior you are, the higher your horizon is - your decision should be around how to make this company successful, making more money with the least expense. Managers are myopic, focusing on short-term details, focusing too much on 1-1s and making the culture looking alright, instead of leading their team to see whats the bright future. I've seen some nice people getting promoted to managers, and then found themselves trapped in endless 1-1s and culture developments. All of these are important, but no more important than a clear leadership and strategy. Okay? Niantic HR, you need to listen. ------- 3. Sugarcoating, hiding, no transparency Every company all-hands, TGIF, is an extremely sugarcoated version of how this company is doing. Every status update to upper management, whether department head or C-level, has to require countless rounds of rehearsal, sugarcoating, rehearsal, and sugarcoating. I've been deeply involved in these plannings. It's a total waste of time - if I were John Hanke, I would want to know the truth. If a product is a crap, just kill it. If we spend two years on an internal tool and its still not going anywhere, just kill it and buy the solution somewhere else. Everyone spent so much time on down-tuning their messages. Eventually they forget what's the most important thing - find the right northstar, bring everyone onboard, execute with honesty and integrity. What the company employees heard from corporate communication is totally different from the reality. ------- 4. Not a soil for good games It's all engineering driven. Game teams are forced to use Niantic platform tools - maps, social, analytics, etc. Every one of them are super hard to integrate and extremely time consuming. If I am a new game concept and I want to roll it out to a small group, why would I spend so much time on integrating all these tools? Shouldn't I prove my market, see market response, get convinced it's a good ROI to continue, and then move on to think about these heavy stuffs? The greenlighting process always look at stats - sure, your DAU, your cohorts, how many players return to the game. Sure, all these make sense. But also, games are creatives. As human beings, we play games to entertain ourselves. Game creators have to capture that intuitive and spontaneous part before they think about the hard numbers. Niantic executives, please don't kill a game just because the number is bad. Even if a number is right, it may not be a good game. Be open minded. More importantly, you gotta have the soil, the culture for invention, creation. You gotta encourage folks to think outside the box, beyond these hard stats. Numbers are arbitrarily invented, but inspirations cannot come from numbers.