Embracing Change, Taking Calculated Risks, and Disrupting the Mobile Gaming Industry ft. Peter Hill, SVP of Engineering & Chief Product Officer @ Wildlife Studios
Authored by Nicole Kaylor
The global pandemic served as a catalyst for a “new normal,” as the world began to mold and adapt to these circumstances in unprecedented ways. There was a massive shift in industry standards, redefining what it meant to be a business and employee in today’s economy. The result was two-fold: pre-existing industries began to merge with new ones, injecting innovation while adding massive value, and talent as a whole, specifically executive-level operators, exited their traditional corporate career paths at FAANGs and chose to embrace a new chapter at generation-defining startups transforming the technology ecosystem.
Peter Hill, former longtime Amazon Executive, now SVP of Engineering & Chief Product Officer at Wildlife Studios, embraced this evolution both within his industry and his personal career. He fills us in on his perspective and key learnings around leadership, the intersection between crypto and mobile gaming, and what the future holds for Wildlife Studios as it fully adopts the new world of Web3.
Peter, give us the Reader’s Digest version of who you are, your journey, and how you got to where you are today.
My path to Tech wasn’t a natural or linear one by any means, there was no master plan. It was a combination of luck, taking advantage of opportunities, having a passion for the space, while simultaneously having fun along the way.
As for my journey to Amazon, it was pretty serendipitous. I met and networked with several Amazon employees during my time in college, which landed me my first job there as a help desk technician at the Amazon bookstore. That snowballed into me securing a role as a network engineer, then a database engineer, then a hardware engineer, and then a software developer.
Over the years, my team was at the forefront of a lot of brand new technology such as electronic books with Kindle, voice-activated computing with Alexa, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). I was extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to play a role in the massive scaling of Amazon and create one of the first service-oriented architectures, none of which would have been possible if I didn’t have an incredible group of talented people around me to learn from.
The next push along my Amazon journey was becoming a manager. While I initially resisted it, I found that people are a lot like a puzzle — once you discover where their strengths and gaps lie, it becomes a fun challenge to figure out how to create a cohesive team unit that can produce more than the sum of the parts. And as I continued to move up in the ranks, I was able to expand my purview and work on even more exciting projects such as Amazon Connect, Workspaces, App Stream, Chime SDK, and the rest of the Productivity Suite. It was a very exciting time to create these new businesses within the AWS umbrella.
My position eventually pivoted from an engineer-based role to a strategy-based role as a category owner. My responsibilities shifted to where I now had to think about the long-term viability of our products, and it was up to me to chart the path, create and develop complementary products, think about portfolios, and predict customers’ product perceptions in market.
You spent 24 years at Amazon and have now joined Wildlife Studios, one of the leading mobile gaming companies in the world. Why now and why Wildlife?
It’s hard to answer in a broad brushstroke. I thoroughly enjoyed my time at Amazon and would have been happy to stay as it is an incredibly fun place to work and grow. But after so many years, I needed to be challenged in a different way. I wanted to be able to learn from different patterns, see different schools of thought and contrasting views, understand a different type of business, and be challenged by a new, refreshed group of people. The opportunity at Wildlife was about growth. When I thought about what was next for my career, where I wanted to grow as a leader, and what I wanted to work on, I felt like those pieces would be difficult to accomplish at Amazon.
The interesting contrast here is that at Wildlife, we have a laser focus on the player, whereas in the Amazon universe, the laser focus is on the customer. There are many consistencies across the two companies, but being able to learn a new business with new challenges, while continuing to have a laser focus on the primary benefactor was an intriguing opportunity for me that I couldn’t pass up on.
In the mobile game space, most people don’t know who the creators or artists are behind their favorite games. Creators are not given the freedom to design the games they want to bring to their audience, and they are not treated as owners in this process. The intention behind Wildlife’s platform is to reinvent this industry to free these creators in a meaningful way and put them first.
How did Amazon prepare you for this role?
Amazon at its core has a relentless focus on the customer and has an extremely long-term view. These two pieces heavily influence the way I think about products today — the point is not to try and solve one tactical problem, but to think about solutions for the long-term.
Additionally, I was exposed to a ton of emerging businesses such as online, ecommerce, e-readers, Alexa, AWS, and a million things in between. As these new platforms were emerging, I was expected to quickly come up to speed, and then execute promptly. This pattern of being able to deal with ambiguity and then focus on it in a new space has been a critical point in my training.
You’re a top player in our ecosystem and known as one of the legendary operators in Tech. You’ve also worked closely with great leaders like Andy Jassy. In your opinion, what makes a great leader?
A great leader is someone that is incredibly good at both attracting talent and retaining talent. It’s a competitive market, and as an old manager used to say, “you either have a hiring problem or a retention problem, and if you think it’s neither of those, then you have a management problem.”
A big component of good management is being able to have an in-depth understanding of the different pieces of the overall business and your team, and then honing in on them. Keep your eyes and ears open for problematic patterns and important opportunities. Utilize performance reviews as a time to search for key learnings. And foster a culture that really embraces those learnings, celebrates the opportunity to learn, and then do it at scale.
When it comes to building a great team, you as a leader need to be humble and transparent about your own strengths, know how to hire for your weaknesses, or at least be able to organize around them to make up for those blind spots. Once you have that, take a step back from what your team is doing, peek around corners, plan for the long term, and align your team and priorities ahead of time.
But the most important piece is passion. Nine times out of ten, passion is going to be the best indicator of success. If someone is truly passionate, they’re going to figure out how to get it done. My old boss Charlie Bell used to say, “there is no compression algorithm for experience,” and that quote really stuck with me. I have learned through experience that you need to make some of the big mistakes and fail hard in order to learn and grow as a leader, and it’s really the passion behind what I am doing that has pushed me along the way.
In the last 24 months we have seen an unprecedented amount of venture dollars being pumped into Tech, with a considerable amount of venture dollars funding companies like Wildlife. With the rise of mobile during the pandemic, and as we embrace this new world of Web3, how will Wildlife Studios shape the future of gaming?
An example I always like to use is this: think about your favorite movie, actor, director, or singer. Can you name them? Of course you can. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for game creators. Billions of people play games, yet they don’t know who produced or created them because the artists have historically not received the credit they deserve, nor have they been given the freedom to design the games they want to bring to their audience. Rather than being treated like owners in the process, they are treated like small cogs in a big wheel, and that is where Wildlife Studios comes into play.
We’re on a journey to put game creators at the center of the industry, giving them ultimate freedom and creative expression, while promoting their work in ways that closely align with their vision and values. We’ve built this platform to elevate and amplify their voices through technology and help them reclaim ownership over their creations. By doing so, everyone wins — creators get the recognition they deserve, and in turn, create better games for users. If we can continue to highlight, elevate, and amplify our artists and build brand loyalty between the artists and users, that to me would be a huge success.
Where do you see the world of Web3 and crypto fitting into Wildlife?
Web3 represents a new era for gaming, and we’re continuously doing a ton of experimentation to see where we fit within this new space. We recently implemented NFTs and tokens running on the Avalanche blockchain into our flagship title, Castle Crush. We expect this expansion will elevate the overall experience for our users by creating a more exciting and engaging player atmosphere through new upgrades to the game functionality. This has been a great test balloon for Wildlife, and I fully expect us to continue to experiment and leverage those technologies in our games.
