From working at a giant megacorp I can see three gamification trends:
1) Everything is slower at a big corp than a startup, so they're laughing and onto the next big thing whereas level 7 middle manager at megacorp inc is just implementing it at megacorp inc because they've just caught up to where everyone else was 10 years ago. There's still money to be made, but to slow moving non-tech billion dollar companies not million dollar companies and other tech startups.
2) Managers hate it because employee reward should continue to be based solely on golf games and kissing up and physical attraction and socioeconomic class, just like it has been historically. Having some app decide who's doin it right and who's doin it wrong smacks of replacing that manager with a tiny little shell script, and oddly enough managers don't like the idea of downsizing themselves. Never sell gamification to the manager of "mere resources", sell to the manager's manager or higher.
3) Someone's 3rd party tool is hard to game and manipulate, but something home grown can be screwed around with so the "right" people win, both preselected peons and preselected lower level mgrs. This is crucial. Don't sell an incorruptible black box, nobody wants that. Sell a toolkit, something where you can pick the winners ahead of time and then generate the "proof" you were correct. In other words emphasize customization of algo and ability to run tests on historical data so the customized algo produces the predefined result. This also means gather a lot of data so its always numerologically possible to generate the predetermined result, even if you have to do something weird like divide the coffee budget by the internet bandwidth consumed multiplied by the number of ceiling tiles in the department, this is also called "data mining".
#3 is a very interesting point to be made and something that I (as Ambition co-founder) think about a lot. We've tried to make our product powerful in a responsible way but there's definitely the fine-line of "what's best for the company" and "what's best for the person paying for the product". We receive requests every day from managers asking for the ability to manually manipulate the (objective) data that we're automatically pulling in from CRMs, Phone Systems, Spreadsheets.
I remember talking to PG a couple months ago about how Ambition could potentially decrease office politics and thus "optimize work". Maybe it's a fool's errand given a company of X size or Y age.
Are you sure you want to spend your life catering to corruption? It seems better to resist corruption than to profit from it, both for your own personal life and for the lives of those your product would be influencing.
Someone's 3rd party tool is hard to game and manipulate, but something home grown can be screwed around with so the "right" people win, both preselected peons and preselected lower level mgrs. Don't sell an incorruptible black box, nobody wants that. Sell a toolkit, something where you can pick the winners ahead of time and then generate the "proof" you were correct.
On one hand, this is something people clearly want, and YC's mantra is "make something people want." On the other hand, your life would be subservient. Indeed, you'll be directly subservient in that you'll be answering to the will of those who are corrupt, and indirectly subservient in that you'll be perpetuating corrupt systems.
1) Everything is slower at a big corp than a startup, so they're laughing and onto the next big thing whereas level 7 middle manager at megacorp inc is just implementing it at megacorp inc because they've just caught up to where everyone else was 10 years ago. There's still money to be made, but to slow moving non-tech billion dollar companies not million dollar companies and other tech startups.
2) Managers hate it because employee reward should continue to be based solely on golf games and kissing up and physical attraction and socioeconomic class, just like it has been historically. Having some app decide who's doin it right and who's doin it wrong smacks of replacing that manager with a tiny little shell script, and oddly enough managers don't like the idea of downsizing themselves. Never sell gamification to the manager of "mere resources", sell to the manager's manager or higher.
3) Someone's 3rd party tool is hard to game and manipulate, but something home grown can be screwed around with so the "right" people win, both preselected peons and preselected lower level mgrs. This is crucial. Don't sell an incorruptible black box, nobody wants that. Sell a toolkit, something where you can pick the winners ahead of time and then generate the "proof" you were correct. In other words emphasize customization of algo and ability to run tests on historical data so the customized algo produces the predefined result. This also means gather a lot of data so its always numerologically possible to generate the predetermined result, even if you have to do something weird like divide the coffee budget by the internet bandwidth consumed multiplied by the number of ceiling tiles in the department, this is also called "data mining".