I used to spend hours playing Age of Empires 2 (AOE 2) on my PC every day during my pre-teen years. Upon some reflection, I recognize how that experience was my first introduction to the operations role. Yes, it hardwired me for operations (in addition to teaching me 119 ways to break the password on Windows XP my father set to stop me from playing it). Don’t agree? Think it was a strategy game? Bear with me.

Broadly speaking, a business has three core functional areas: finance, marketing, and operations. Finance looks into obtaining resources at favorable prices and distributes those funds to the operations and marketing arms of the business after budgeting and evaluating investment opportunities. Marketing (and sales) focuses on the demand side of the business while operations (and supply chain) falls on the supply side.

In other words, operations is concerned with the most efficient conversion of factors of production into goods and services. Now, creating maximum efficiency is peculiar to a company. Companies sell anything from online courses to Wolverine’s claws. So, as you can imagine, day-to-day operations would be distinct for every company.

But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any commonalities. In early-stage companies with few employees, operations can include several functions of the business such as putting systems and processes in place, choosing technology and equipment for the company, HR management, day-to-day office operations, IT-related activities, accounting, and others. These activities only develop into specialized roles as the organization grows. So, the first common feature of the operations role is versatility.

Versatility

You never know what an operations role may demand from you. Likewise, in AOE 2, you need to handle several things simultaneously and be prepared for anything. For example, if you:

• Want to construct an Archery Range, you need more wood first.
• Want to reach the Imperial Age, build a castle first.
• Just diverted your military units to attack a castle, your town center is being attacked by another enemy.
• Want to train gunpowder units, do Chemistry research at the University first.
• Have an idle villager, put him to work.
• Have your scout idle, send him to explore.
• Discover a sheep on the map, get it immediately to your town center before an enemy lures it away (maybe after exploring the map with it).

AOE 2 had wired me to be able to handle multiple tasks comfortably. It had set me up for what was to follow in the coming times. Years later, when I was building my farm project, a normal workday looked something like this:

• Wake up at 5 AM, do the morning chores.
• Exchange pleasantries with my new neighbors and villagers I meet en route to the farm, reach the farm by 6:30 AM.
• Update all the excel sheets related to accounts, task management, attendance, production, etc.
• Allocate tasks to different farm-helps and oversee their output.
• Oversee the construction activities on the premises. At times there were 2-3 different contractors working at the same time.
• Contact a range of suppliers and delivery persons for all the raw materials required for the various activities.
• Drive to the markets in case of any emergency need for a product.
• Delegate leadership roles to others to check if someone can be trusted.
• Educate myself and google a lot on a range of subjects and activities that we had undertaken such as rearing chickens, goats, ducks, pond construction, prefabricated building construction, land leveling, composting, building a nursery, constructing mud houses, multi-layer cropping, no-till agriculture, etc.
• Learn Santali language and Santali cultural nuances.
• Physical work on the field and learning practical skills such as bamboo cutting.
• Doing all the paperwork related to the property, utilities, etc. that took enormous time and effort due to the bureaucratic work culture of local administration.
• During the first few weeks, I was simultaneously working on our SaaS startup.
• The day would usually end by 10 PM. I worked almost throughout the day.

Despite a packed schedule punctuated by numerous meetings with curious locals, I loved what I was doing. I could see things taking shape and the tangible difference we were making. The scope of the tasks made the project even more interesting.

Organization

Given the assortment of tasks that may decorate the table of an operations specialist, it is a no-brainer that they need to be good at organization. Even if one has a reliable memory, good organization can only help them handle even more complexity without having to deal with a burnout.

In AOE 2, the placement of buildings makes a lot of difference to your defense as well as offense. Where to place the bombard towers, or the castle, or a second town center are key questions during the gameplay. Which units should you position next to the gate? Of course, ranged units, but you need to remember that mangonels can destroy your own units. So, should you keep the gate open or closed? Organization is key to executing any winning strategy. For example, to execute a turtling strategy effectively, you need fortified walls at the right places. For winning any raid, formation is important.

The same is true for businesses. I realized that when I joined our startup team. We were a bunch of talented individuals who had identified a solid market gap and had a long-term vision. But, I couldn’t see an organized system to execute that vision. In fact, there wasn’t enough clarity about the ideas that our main founder had. Things had to be systemized. 

We started with organizing our Google Drive. Next, we focussed on synthesizing the hundreds of research reports we had amassed into usable ppts and excel files. I realized we were not following the same standards while encoding data. We standardized that. We started using Trello and divided the tasks amongst ourselves. We could now quickly identify the tasks that were within our skill sets and what needed to be outsourced. We started meeting every evening to discuss the progress. We further started interviewing industry experts to triangulate the data we had. And that was just the beginning of building an efficient machine out of chaos.

Attention to detail

The job of the operations role is to move the countless pieces of the chaotic system to create an efficient whole. Hence, the third common trait necessary in an operations role is attention to detail. In other words, a thorough understanding of the company.

Not knowing your strengths and weaknesses is wasteful in AOE 2. Spending loads of gold on an army of archers only to get wiped out by a handful of cheap skirmishers is foolish. AOE 2 offers innumerable features and traits of the multitude of units and buildings. A good player simply cannot ignore those details and expect to win a game. You must know that Pikemen have an attack bonus against cavalry, or that Byzantines have bonus hit points for buildings, or that Vikings with cheaper warships are a great bet for a water map. For a true grasp of how deep the details go, check out this video.

Likewise, attention to detail plays a key role in good operations. In a business, labor-management involves humans, hence, a lot of complexity and variability. During the initial stages of an organization, it is a part of operations. My own experience on my farm taught me that understanding human behavior requires a lot of attentiveness and patience. What attention to detail meant in my farm:

• Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each farm-help and creating teams and assigning tasks accordingly.
• Doing a cost-benefit analysis to decide whether to purchase a machine for a task like weeding or to continue with manual operations.
• The farm-helps were more efficient during the first part of the day. Any critical activity had to be scheduled during those hours.
• Is there any free-riding in any task? If so, reallocation of tasks.
• What motivated and demotivated the team?

Communication

Related to the last trait, if you’re responsible for your company’s operations, you need to constantly engage with the other functional teams and understand the problems they are facing. You need to constantly inquire what their ideal work-situation should be like? How could they maximize their own productivity?

In Age of Empires, you play with allies. Understanding their strengths and weaknesses is key to formulating your team’s winning strategy. What are their locational advantages? Which resources do they lack? Is there any technology their civilization doesn’t allow? Are they better poised to take care of the economy or the military? If you have a higher line of sight, then do the exploration for the team. If your ally has a bonus attack against buildings and structures, ask them to destroy a fortification that’s troubling you. The end goal is to make it easier for everyone so that the team wins.

Same with business. I found out that my farm-helps had traditional solutions to the problems I was studying from books. Imposing the bookish methods overriding their practical experiences was unwise. It was of utmost importance that I received constant feedback about all the activities. At times, I tried creating measurable checks and balances about how much work a hired contractor was doing when in fact a simple engagement with one of my local farm-helps was enough for them to outperform the terms of the contract. 

On many such occasions, local knowledge saved me a lot of money in constructions. On the other hand, locals are wasteful in utilizing water. There, a proper water network and rain water management techniques coming from the internet and books saved us water-related expenses.

Drive for constant improvement

Next, an operations role demands a constant drive to always improve things. There is always scope to improve efficiency, even when everything is relatively well.

My first encounter with AOE 2 was a demo version which only had one mission from the campaign ‘Montezuma’. The goal was to collect all four sacred relics and place them in the four sacred shrines. Simple. However, the first few times I played in easy difficulty, it was all chaos. My entire city would be obliterated by a handful of militia and archers. Disappointing! But things improved. I started discovering the different facets of the game. I realized I needed more villagers gathering food initially so that I could create more villagers for collecting other resources. I realized the importance of spending resources on the military wisely. I realized the importance of doing ‘researches’ to enhance gathering rates or improving the weapons. Eventually, I could win the game easily at expert difficulty. But, that was a journey undertaken by a strong willpower to crush the Mayans. And I tasted success.

Business operations require such a penchant for constant improvement. When I started the farm project, I did almost everything myself. It was physically exhausting, but initially important as that conveyed the message to the locals of its seriousness. But, that wasn’t tenable. We started hiring on a daily basis. I realized it was more cost effective to have some individuals on a permanent basis. Eventually, I divided the responsibilities and communicated the KPIs for higher productivity. Instead of relying on our own team for specialized work, we started leveraging the employee’s networks to get special tasks done cheaply. The long-term goal and the possible paths were constantly communicated and discussed with the team. Not just the field, I was also constantly working on the excel models to reflect the ground-situation as accurately as possible.

Sixth trait – Good with data

If you’ve noticed, I’ve been talking about Excel a lot. It is said that the ability and keenness to work with numbers or data is a litmus test for suitability in an operations role.

I don’t want to ruin it for you, but yes, statistics do play a key role in your performance in AOE 2 too. In the earlier part of the game, tracking score can tell you when your opponent starts an age advancing research or even give you an idea of how many villagers they have. Whether playing against AI or a human player, knowing the opponent’s strategy is key to formulating your own. Especially in an infinitely repeated game, knowing a player’s reputation is helpful. Not just that, knowing how your own timeline looks gives you insights to enhance your game.

Same is the case with business. Whatever I have worked on always involved models that replicate reality. If I tell you that I have the dates when every single chicken laid an egg, you might argue that it is more data than necessary. However, it does help me decide which chicken to sell when a buyer comes. It’s important that you know which crop was planted at which date with which seeding technique on which plot of land for better insights on successful harvests. It is important to know what the prices were last season. I rely on well-functioning models for accounting or personal finance as well. Data is incredibly valuable to a business.

“The ability to take data – to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it – is going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.”

Hal Varian, Chief Economist, Google.

Conclusion 

I’ve drawn countless lessons about operations in a business from my AOE 2 gaming experience. It has made me comfortable working on contrasting roles simultaneously, taught me the value of an organized approach towards life, trained me to notice the nuances, improved my communication, instilled a drive for constant improvement within me, and made drawing insights from data fun for me. Nonetheless, no matter how much simulations prepare us for real life, there remains a key difference:

Business doesn’t allow you to restart the game. You only get one shot.