Dynamic Reteaming in LiveOps: Adapting Live Service Teams for Success
Building resilient teams to navigate the challenges of live-service game production.
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Dynamic reteaming helps live-service game teams stay adaptable, innovative, and resilient in constant change.
Effective leadership, robust onboarding, and flexible team structures ensure smooth transitions and sustained productivity.
Embracing reteaming fuels growth drives problem-solving and keeps games relevant despite industry challenges.
Managing teams in live-service game production is a unique challenge. Unlike traditional game development, where the project wraps up on launch day, live service teams constantly iterate, update, and evolve to keep players engaged.
This constant need for adaptation makes the concept of dynamic reteaming especially relevant. Introduced by Heidi Helfand in Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams, it shifts the focus from avoiding team changes to embracing them as an opportunity for growth and innovation.
Why Reteaming Matters for Live Operations
Live-service games thrive on adaptability. Your teams must be flexible and resilient to respond to player feedback, address technical challenges, or launch new content.
Dynamic reteaming acknowledges that change is inevitable. Team members will come and go, priorities will shift, and roles will evolve. The key is to treat these shifts as opportunities rather than disruptions.
This means creating a culture where change feels natural and productive for game developers, not chaotic or threatening.
How Teams Change in Live-Service Game Development
Helfand outlines five common patterns of team changes. Here’s how they apply to game production:
One by One
Members join or leave a team gradually, often due to shifting priorities or personal career moves. In live-service games, this might mean bringing specialists for a new feature or losing a pivotal developer to another project.
Why it works: Maintains continuity while introducing fresh perspectives.
Challenges: Requires thorough onboarding and knowledge-sharing to avoid losing critical project details.
Grow and Split
Teams expand as projects grow, then split into smaller, focused groups. For example, a sizeable live-ops team may be divided into sub-teams for new features, content updates, events, and player support.
Why it works: Keeps teams focused and efficient.
Challenges: Risk of disrupted workflows or overlapping responsibilities without clear planning.
Isolation
A small, focused team is created for a specific task, like launching a seasonal event or revamping a game mechanic.
Why it works: Allows intense focus on critical deliverables.
Challenges: Can create silos, making reintegration tricky once the task is complete.
Merging
Teams combine when projects overlap, like when a content team works closely with a technical team to deliver a significant update.
Why it works: Aligns efforts and consolidates resources.
Challenges: Requires clear communication to avoid role confusion and culture clashes.
Switching
Team members temporarily move between groups to fill gaps or share expertise—for instance, a UI artist might support another game team during a crunch period.
Why it works: Encourages knowledge-sharing and cross-training.
Challenges: Can disrupt team cohesion and individual focus if not carefully managed.
Viewing Teams as Part of a Cycle
Teams aren’t static in live-service game production. Dynamic reteaming aligns well with the cyclical nature of this work.
Birth: A new game or feature team forms.
Adolescence: The team begins experimenting and refining its processes, navigating early challenges while building its foundation.
Growth: The team develops skills, improves efficiency, and establishes consistent workflows.
Maturity: Teams hit their stride, delivering regular updates and maintaining a high level of performance.
Creative Destruction: Challenges such as player churn, technical debt, or shifting priorities demand a reset or reorganisation.
Renewal: Teams adapt, evolving into new forms by splitting, merging, or adjusting to meet fresh goals.
This cycle reflects the ongoing nature of live operations. Disruption isn’t a failure—it’s a necessary part of keeping your game relevant and your team engaged. Recognising where your team sits in this cycle helps you anticipate needs and guide transitions effectively.
Avoiding the Traps
While dynamic reteaming is beneficial, two key traps can derail this process if not carefully managed:
Rigidity Trap: Teams resist change, sticking to outdated processes, roles, or structures. This leads to stagnation, making adapting to evolving player needs or business goals harder.
Poverty Trap: Constant resets and a lack of sustained investment in team development prevent teams from reaching maturity. This can result in burnout, diminished productivity, and low morale.
Navigating between these traps is crucial to ensuring your teams remain effective. Strive for a balance that allows for necessary changes while preserving stability and fostering growth.
Strategies for Producers
Producers must balance leadership, communication, and team structure to manage dynamic reteaming in live-service game production effectively. It’s not just about reacting to change but creating an environment where transitions feel seamless and beneficial. Here’s how you can approach it.
Lead with Clarity and Confidence
Team changes are inevitable, whether due to shifting priorities, team member growth, or the evolving needs of your game. As a producer, you must embrace these transitions and approach them confidently. Be open about the reasons behind changes, whether they stem from business goals, project demands, or career opportunities for your team members. Transparency builds trust and helps team members understand the bigger picture.
Your leadership should set the tone for how changes are perceived. By framing adaptability as a team strength, you create a culture where shifts in roles, structure, or focus aren’t feared but embraced. When people see change as an opportunity rather than a threat, they’re more likely to approach it with enthusiasm.
Support Transitions
Robust onboarding processes are essential to ensure new team members can contribute quickly without disrupting the flow of live operations. Comprehensive handovers, clear documentation, and a defined support structure make transitions smoother. It’s equally important to focus on those already part of the team. Pairing new hires with experienced mentors accelerates their integration and facilitates efficient knowledge transfer.
Another key responsibility is maintaining team cohesion during transitions—planned team-building activities—whether informal social sessions or structured workshops—can reinforce a sense of unity. A cohesive team is more resilient to the disruptions often resulting from dynamic reteaming.
Design Flexible Structures
In live-service game development, rigid team structures rarely meet the ever-changing demands of players and projects. Flexibility is key. Cross-functional teams, where members from different disciplines collaborate closely, can help bridge gaps and encourage innovative solutions. For instance, pairing a monetisation designer with an analytics specialist can align their efforts and lead to more effective results.
It’s also crucial to keep teams focused and manageable. Oversized or overstretched teams often lead to inefficiency and burnout. Thoughtful structuring ensures each team has a clear scope and realistic workload. To preserve knowledge and avoid repeating mistakes, invest in tools and systems that allow your teams to document processes, insights, and outcomes effectively. These resources ensure continuity even as teams evolve, whether through retrospectives, shared wikis, or task management platforms.
By leading with clarity, thoughtfully supporting transitions, and designing flexible team structures, you can manage dynamic reteaming to strengthen your live-service teams. It’s about ensuring your people and processes remain adaptable without losing sight of your game’s goals.
Why Embrace Reteaming in Live-Service Games?
When managed well, dynamic reteaming can be a game-changer (pun intended) for live-service teams:
Fuels innovation: Fresh perspectives lead to new ideas for events, features, and monetisation strategies.
Improves problem-solving: Diverse skill sets and experiences help tackle complex challenges.
Supports growth: Team members gain opportunities to upskill, cross-train, and advance their careers.
Builds resilience: Flexible teams adapt better to player demands, industry trends, and technical challenges.
Challenges to Keep in Mind
Of course, reteaming isn’t without risks. Resistance to change is common, and transitions can temporarily impact productivity. Cultural alignment across changing teams also becomes trickier, especially when working with remote or distributed groups.
Another challenge is maintaining continuity for live-service games. Players expect seamless updates, even when your team is undergoing shifts. Precise planning and communication are essential to keeping projects on track.
Dynamic reteaming offers a robust framework for managing live-service game teams. By embracing change, you can build teams that are adaptable, creative, and ready to tackle the challenges of keeping players engaged in a fast-moving industry. As a producer, you guide these transitions, turning potential chaos into a source of strength.