Hey everyone, I’m not sure where the best place to share this is, but I’d really appreciate some feedback.

I’ve had this idea in the back of my mind for a while. I have about five years of experience as a coach/trainer, working with industries like telecommunications, mining, and others. I’ve always wanted to break into the game development world, but I haven’t had the time to fully pursue the technical side.

So I started thinking, what if I combine my professional experience with my passion? I’m considering starting a business where I work with development leads, helping them build stronger interpersonal, leadership, and training skills so they can run their teams more effectively.

From what I’ve seen and heard, this is a real challenge in the gaming industry. Highly skilled developers don’t always have the communication or leadership skills needed to manage teams smoothly.

As a starting point, I’m thinking of offering my services for free so I can test the idea, see how teams respond, and figure out how effective it actually is.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Does this sound valuable or something studios would actually need?

Do you have experience coaching software development teams? If so, I imagine transitioning into coaching for games people would be relatively smooth. If you don't have software experience, you might not be taken seriously, though. (Full disclosure, I am only a hobbyist game dev but I am a professional software developer and have received some coaching in the past.)

You should also be aware that you're unlikely to find people who lead large commercial game dev teams on this forum. I'm assuming you're also doing market research elsewhere.

at the moment im holding off on large commercial game dev teams and focusing a little more on indi teams, pitch my service for free to see what needs to change, what works and what was attractive and then move up. i do have experience in coaching software development teams, but not a huge amount, the coaching techniques ill be leaning more towards are on a personal scale, not specifically the industry, but on how that person leads, delegates, teaches and disciplines  

I'd assume that the problems indie teams face are very different from the problems large corporate teams face, so getting experience in indie teams may not necessarily scale all that well. At least in the IT industry at large, leadership styles and just the amount of leadership that needs to happen differ wildly between boutique and corporate environments.