The Art of Making Yourself Obsolete
Thriving in Chaos and the Hero Trap
Starting out in game dev, we joked that the ultimate goal of a tech artist was to make yourself obsolete. That meant having all the pipelines automated, processes documented, and tools so advanced and flexible that the studio would have no need for us. We’d work ourselves out of a job.
But the reality was, we never got close to that. We were one of the most sought-after resources on the team. And honestly, I loved feeling needed.
There was something deeply validating about putting out fires, staying late, pushing a little harder, and avoiding a crisis. I thrived in the chaos. I drew value from those moments—moments where I could prove my worth as a developer. Any time my confidence dipped and impostor syndrome crept in, I could count on the chaos of a sprint demo, milestone crunch, or last-minute release panic to remind me: you belong in game development.
But over time, things changed.
As my career progressed and I started taking on leadership responsibilities, I began to realize that constant firefighting wasn’t a badge of honor. It was a warning sign. I had been burning the candle at both ends for years, and the returns were diminishing. There are only so many hours in a day. And when you’re the linchpin in every critical moment, you become the bottleneck too.
The Hidden Risk of Indispensability
I started noticing a pattern. As my leadership responsibilities grew and I began working at a higher level with other disciplines, I realized this didn’t just happen in tech art. The same dynamics played out across the studio: engineering, design, production, QA. In every area, there were key individuals who had become so central to operations that their involvement was required for even the smallest decisions. Their presence kept things moving, but their absence brought everything to a standstill.
As a manager, I even felt this myself. I would walk into a packed meeting room of stakeholders, answer every question, unblock entire teams, and make directional calls on the fly. It was the same high-stakes rush as pulling an all-nighter to hack together a deployment fix. I was playing the same song, just on a bigger stage.
And then it hit me: the bigger the venue, the more everything grinds to a halt when you're the only one who can perform.
If everything stops when you’re not in the room, you're not indispensable. You’re a single point of failure. And in a studio where knowledge is still primarily stored in “meat containers” (aka people), that’s a risk you can’t afford.
Async Leadership: From Performer to Enabler
As leaders, our role shifts. It’s no longer about doing the work ourselves. It’s about enabling others to do it better, faster, and without us. It's not about being the solution. It’s about building systems that find solutions on their own.
"Better, faster, and without us" is what I believe is the promise of async leadership.
I like to use a crude metaphor to illustrate this, using the difference between how a CPU and a GPU work.
CPUs are great at taking even the messiest, unoptimized instructions and brute-forcing their way to a solution. You can optimize, refactor, and squeeze a lot of power out of them, but you’re still working with a handful of cores. When one locks up, everything waits.
GPUs, on the other hand, require a different mindset. You have to design your instructions differently. But once you do, you get access to hundreds of thousands of smaller cores working in parallel. Each individual thread might be weaker, but the collective power is massive and scalable.
Async leadership is writing instructions for a GPU, not a CPU.
The first step is the same as that old tech artist joke: make yourself obsolete. But this time, it’s not about removing your value. It’s about embedding it into the systems, culture, and direction you set. Your goal is to build teams that move without waiting for you. To become so effective at leadership that your absence doesn’t create a vacuum.
The work doesn’t stop because you’re not there. It keeps going because you already showed it the way.
That’s the promise of async leadership.
That’s the power of making yourself obsolete.
