Leadership Day 2020 by IGDA Finland

There were no dedicated games leadership conferences in Europe... so for the second year we organizing one! Leadership Day by IGDA Finland is an international event about how we build companies, teams and working cultures to build better games. This year the event took place fully online due to COVID-19 pandemic.

#cultureofsharing

Games companies, their inner workings and cultures are some of the least documented aspects of game development. Yet we and our work are all defined by these choices every single day. Join us in learning and challenging the cutting edge of leadership in games from some of the brightest minds in the industry!

Like all things IGDA Finland, the conference is free to attend and non-profit, made possible by our volunteers and partners.

Less, but better

This one day event is designed around a thought provoking speaker track and ample room for networking with industry peers, including an IGDA Mentor Cafe to help you grow your professional network!

Joakim Achren / Elite Game Developers

Joakim Achrén is the Founder and CEO of Elite Game Developers, a Helsinki, Finland, based company that helps gaming entrepreneurs in starting their first games company. Joakim is an entrepreneur, with fifteen years of experience in founding and running two venture-backed gaming startups, including Next Games, the company behind The Walking Dead: No Man’s Land and The Walking Dead: Our World mobile games.

Miloš Jeřábek / Redhill Games

Miloš has over 15 years of experience in game development working in both creative and production roles. He has worked across Europe in multicultural teams and environments on major blockbusters such as World of Tanks, Quantum Break and Mafia 2. In 2018 Miloš co-founded Redhill Games, a team of seasoned industry veterans based in Helsinki, Finland. He is the Executive Producer and hard at work on their first title, a tactical free to play shooter on PC.

Having lead both small 10 man teams up to large teams of over 500 developers, Miloš has unique insights on the industry and how games are made.

Olesja Marjalaakso / Next Games

Olesja entered the gaming industry in 2007 and it was love at first sight. She currently works as a Product Owner at Next Games. Prior to joining Next Games she ran her own gaming company, Polka Dot Studio, and worked at Digital Chocolate in HR.

Jukka Laakso / Sampo Games

Jukka is former CEO and co-founder of the late Rival Games. He built it from scratch with no prior experience to a 20 people strong gaming studio, that shipped games like Thief of Thieves and Alien: Blackout.

Stella Wang / Dazzle Rocks

Stella is a creative visionary in developing social MMO mobile games, having formerly served as Executive Producer at Rovio Entertainment where she developed new games and IP, led R&D teams and (with her Co-Founder, Joonas Jokela) launched new gaming services globally. Stella brings not only the creative vision embedded in the company’s gaming metaverse but also a deep understanding of the differences in gameplay among key Eastern and Western mobile gaming markets.

Anna Salomaa / Resistance games

Anna is the co-founder and CEO of Resistance Games, a PC strategy game studio located in Oulu, Finland. With 8 years of experience from the industry she has also worked in game start-ups, run gaming business development projects and lead the Oulu Game LAB, the game education program of Oulu University of Applied Sciences. She fell in love with digital gaming in the 80’s with The Great Giana Sisters, and never looked back.

Teppo Soininen / Next Games

Teppo has spent most of his career building gaming and tech startups such as Ministry of Games, Mountain Sheep and Umbra Software. During his career he has worked with AAA console & PC games, premium mobile games and free-to-play mobile games. He currently works at Next Games as a Product Owner managing one of Next's game teams.

Laura Smith / ErgoArgot 

Laura Smith is a freelance consultant and researcher with expertise in scaling tech companies. A human advocate, she examines the effects of internal structures, communication, and practices on employees and their output, recommending more inclusive and empowering ways of growing organizations. She’s currently piloting Pluuro, a peer-based approach to building inclusion in scaling games companies.

More information on Pluuro can be found here.

Katya Dolgova / Redhill Games

Katya Dolgova is a Human Resources professional with 20+ years of experience in Financial, Consulting, IT and Gaming industries.

A lawyer and Chartered FCIPD by background, Katya has been working in the HR field since 1995. From late 2018 Katya is a co-founder & COO of a Game Development studio in Finland - Redhill Games and an HR Consulting company in Cyprus - It Starts With You. She works with leaders and employees to foster culture and create creative environment where people are happy to do their best and strive for excellence. People make and play games so everything is HR-related.

Elina Arponen / Quicksave

Elina became serial entrepreneur when she co-founded Quicksave in early 2017. Quicksave is on a mission to define the emerging gaming platform on social super apps.Elina has been working in the gaming industry for 15+ years. Her previous startup created an innovative Dramagame technology that combines chatting and gameplay. This company was acquired in 2015 by the British chat app Palringo where Elina worked as Head of Chat Games.

Salla Hiiskoski / Futureplay Games

At Futureplay Games Salla Hiiskoski makes games look great by creating, concepting, outsourcing and art directing. At WiGFi (We in Games Finland), Salla has taken an active role as a mentor, coach, facilitator, project manager and initiative lead. In 2020, she ran the WiG Virtual Mentorship Program, and kickstarted the WiG Inclusive Leadership Program, an accessible eight month leadership training that aims to catalyse positive change in the way we lead, engage and retain our industry's diverse talent.

Salla values co-creation, inclusiveness and empathy, and her biggest strength is her daring to step in the discomfort zone. Her passion is to learn, connect people and make things happen.

Partners & Sponsors

This event wouldn’t be possible without help from our partners.

Volunteers

We’ve been pushing since 2018 to make this event happen and held our inaugural event in 2019. There’s still room to grow and more things that need doing. Drop us a line via firstname.lastname@igda.fi to join the fun!