Tamsin O’Luanaigh
Wise Cat Strategy
Tamsin O’Luanaigh is a people and leadership strategy advisor supporting founder-led and growth-stage game studios as they scale under pressure.
She is a co-founder of nDreams and was part of the leadership journey through significant growth and a successful exit. That experience now informs her work supporting studios through the complex realities of scale, leadership strain, and increased investor scrutiny.
Through her Strategic Advisory consultancy, Wise Cat Strategy, Tamsin works with founders, senior leadership teams, and boards to identify leadership and people risks that quietly undermine delivery, and to design systems that protect both teams and long-term value. Her approach combines commercial realism with human insight, helping studios grow responsibly without burning out their people or themselves.
Tamsin O’Luanaigh is speaking at the following session/s
Scaling Without Breaking Your Studio
As game studios grow, the biggest risks to performance and long-term value often shift away from the product itself and towards leadership capability, decision-making clarity, and how pressure is handled across the organisation.
This session explores the predictable pressure points that emerge as studios scale, and why many challenges attributed to hiring, process, or delivery are often symptoms of deeper leadership and system strain.
Drawing on experience across multiple growth-stage studios, the talk explores the inflection points where execution risk, attrition, and leadership overload tend to increase. It looks at why leadership capability often lags behind headcount growth, how decision bottlenecks and unclear accountability quietly erode value, and the hidden cost of pushing for growth without strengthening people and leadership systems.
The session also shares practical leadership shifts that support resilience, clarity, and sustainable performance under pressure.
This is a grounded, experience-led session for founders, studio leaders, and investors who want to reduce execution risk, protect long-term value, and support studios to scale responsibly in uncertain conditions.
Session Takeaway
Recognise early leadership and people risks as studios scale
Understand how leadership systems affect delivery and execution risk
Apply practical shifts to support sustainable performance
Session speakers
