One thing I will add to the crunch conversation is de-scoping. The Sunk Cost Fallacy feeds heartily on gamedev hopes and dreams and a big part imo of crunch is less the strategic “bleeding the people dry” and more the tactical “not being responsive enough to warning lights”. 1/8

We kid ourselves that the orange light won’t become a red light and then we’re surprised when it does and we’re immediately on the back foot. When you as any kind of lead see a warning light you need to assume it’s worse than it looks; 2/8

People - esp direct reports - want to put a good spin on things. It’s not malicious it’s just nature. So a good portion of your orange lights are closer to red lights as soon as they light up. 3/8

A very small percent are going to resolve themselves (“well this bit took way longer than we thought but now all the hard work is done, we’ll get back on track easy” — wishful thinking most of the time). Most are going to stay bad or get worse. Probably get worse. 4/8

So you have options - you can hope things get better, or you can be proactive. Descoping means you figure out which warning light you are just gonna ignore. Pull all support from that piece/system, deploy it against the ones you choose to save. 5/8

Yes it means you lose a piece of your puzzle, but importantly you might have a chance of changing the trajectory of other pieces. The earlier you make this call, the better odds you have of succeeding here - and the less effort you are wasting in the long run 6/8

Crunch is often framed as “biting off more than you can chew”. And it often is. But it’s also an efficacy problem - effort put against stuff that doesn’t make it to ship is wasted effort. The sooner you can see that coming and course correct, the more effective your team is. 7/8

And yeah this means “sacrificing the artistic vision” when you still might have other options. But that’s the sunk cost fallacy talking - better to make that tradeoff early rather than risk sacrificing the team’s health later. 8/8