Why copying best practices won’t help your company grow

• Copying best practices from successful studios can fail because companies only replicate visible processes instead of the underlying system that made them work.
• Managers and leaders don’t underperform because of skill gaps, they fail when company structures and incentives prevent change.

Nikita Guk is founder and CEO of GIMZ.

The number of successful new releases in mobile has dropped hard.

These days, getting something off the ground that actually makes money easily costs $1M+, and even that doesn’t guarantee anything.

At top studios, maybe 1 out of 12 projects shows real traction - and even then, it usually takes years of iteration before it becomes a reliable hit.

At the same time, blindly copying “best practices” from successful companies is working less and less. Teams lose focus fast. Product metrics stall. Managers burn out and leave every year without hitting targets.

So what’s going wrong? Why doesn’t borrowed culture stick? Why do people hired from top companies fail to replicate their previous performance?

Spoiler: the answer is pretty simple. The hard part? Actually doing something about it.

Copying the shape, not the substance

Behind the decisions at companies like Supercell is a culture built over years of trial and error - including knowing when you screwed up and why. Ilkka Paananen once said it directly in his Comfortable Feeling Uncomfortable keynote: “I had failed as the lead of my team.” That kind of mindset takes years to build.

If you look at companies that actually made this work, you start to notice a pattern:

• They understand what actually made them successful in the first place.

• They scale those strengths across teams doing similar work.

• And they clearly distinguish between building products and operating them, along with the very different skill sets required for each.

Now compare that to what often happens in practice. A founder says, “We want decision-making speed like company X.” But won't touch the leadership structure, stakeholder dynamics, or how decisions are actually made.

What you get is burned-out managers who leave at the first opportunity. Then new people come in - and the cycle repeats.

Sometimes you hear: “But we gave them full freedom, and they still failed.” Sure. But did you actually give them time to fix the system? Because that’s the part that usually gets skipped. Results are needed yesterday, and there’s “no time to ramp up.”

The environment grinds managers down

Even a strong CPO can't fix the system on their own - not without time, resources, and the skillset to drive organisational change. What usually happens instead is pushback from the inside:

“We already know how things work, and this won’t work here.”

Combine that with leadership that isn’t ready to change the underlying system, and you're just banging your head against the wall. No visible impact from process changes → people stop trying → initiative dies. End result: no performance, and eventually, people leave.

There’s a deeper paradox here. You're putting leaders into an environment where they're set up to fail from the start. Core parts of the business end up working against each other.

And on top of that - pressure. Deliver results fast. Deliver them at the level of Supercell or Zynga, but without having anything close to the same resources.

Onboarding and motivation in a new system

Before onboarding even starts, you need to understand what kind of impact a new manager can realistically have. Based on that, you decide how much support they’ll need from founders, the CEO, and other C-level stakeholders.

When setting onboarding tasks, don't just throw a list of expectations at them. Accept upfront that the process itself is part of the problem

A useful way to think about it is to run each initiative through a simple filter:

• Does this require a culture shift?

• Or just operational changes?

• Can we cut the old process and replace it entirely?

• Is this a local optimisation?

• Do we need to rethink decision-making?

• Do we need different people in key roles?

Each of these paths requires a very different approach and is heavily shaped by the company’s financial situation and investor pressure.

If you're in crisis mode, you might go for hard, fast changes, knowing they’ll create other problems - more on that another time.

If you’re doing a more stable transition, you need to be realistic about timing. Selling the idea alone can take months. You need to explain why things have to change, and why there’s no alternative.

Then comes implementation, which has to account for previous failed initiatives. If the team has seen too many “transformations,” fatigue kicks in fast. For a 200–600 person org, this is easily a 3+ month effort - often more, depending on how well teams are connected.

A lot of managers ignore these basics. That's why everything they try gets shot down before it goes anywhere. To the team, it just looks like another idea that won’t stick.

Be ready to lose people

It's easy to blame the talent market or blame it on the lack of good people out there. In reality, the issue is usually elsewhere.

Companies try to implement external models without changing how decisions are made or how responsibility is distributed. In that setup, new processes - and new hires -  just can't perform.

Fixing this isn’t about hiring better people. It’s about rebuilding the system itself, from decision-making to what actually gets rewarded around here. And that comes with consequences: roles change, KPIs shift, influence gets redistributed, and yes - some people will leave.

A major red flag is hearing: “We don’t know exactly how this will work yet, but we’re not willing to lose anyone, regardless of performance.” That’s how you end up in a long, dragged-out transformation where change takes years instead of months and the same people eventually leave anyway.

And during that time, don't expect any sharp revenue growth. There are no quick wins that suddenly add +20–30% to profit. New ideas only start showing up well after the system begins to change. And meaningful growth comes later - not because a new producer came in and single-handedly shook things up, but as a result of consistent team effort across design, marketing, analytics, and other decision-makers.

Without accepting these trade-offs, the transformation stays on paper. Or gets killed halfway through with the “it’s been three months, and we don’t see any results.”

Before moving into practical advice, it’s worth actually internalising all of this. Otherwise, you’ll end up right back at “we’ve tried this before, it doesn’t work.”

In part two, we'll get into the actual steps.