Benedikt Oehmen
speaker
156 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Benedikt Oehmen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'm onto something because the big three did not only work for myself at work and creating my company, but also creating this big milestone achievement of actually writing a book. And that's where I then doubled down and said, this is awesome.
This is what I want to bring to the world and help people overcome their own challenges and achieve their own goals using this framework that not only works for your career development, but also for your personal development and other goals you may have in your life.
Hello. Thanks so much for having me. I'm feeling very honored among all your distinguished guests to be here.
Okay, sure. Sounds great. So I'm born in Germany, close to Cologne and Dusseldorf, so in the western part of Germany. In 2001, I moved to Heidelberg to study physics. And did my bachelor's degree there in physics and asked myself, what do I actually want to do with this? Once like in real life.
And my brother made me aware that Blizzard, which was one of my favorite gaming companies or Z, my favorite company of all times when it comes to games at the time and still is. He said, hey, they're looking for support staff for the Game Master, for the in-game customer support. That's all.
Let's take a semester off of physics and see how the real world looks like working for a real company in France, close to Paris. And so I sent my CV, I had an interview and said, awesome, when can you come? And then basically took the semester off, started at Blizzard. I loved it so much that from the half year I was taking off originally, that quickly became one year.
Then I changed from customer support to community management and communications. And then I stayed for 17 years total, instead of a quick semester and then going back.
Okay, so I started in customer support, so basically helping players in our premier game at that point, World of Warcraft, if they had any issues in game. Then I quickly transitioned into community and communications, where the team that I worked in is the linchpin between the community and the game developers in the States. It's like they're communicating back and forth
We try to get the game closer to the players, but also understand the players' needs better to feed that back to the developers, especially for the European market and the seven languages that we were looking after. I really loved that part because for me, succeeding together, that's where my heart beats.
And it was in this position we were responsible for making sure that together with the community, we were creating the most awesome gaming experiences for all players. And that really fascinated me. I loved it. And that's why I gravitated to it so strongly. As I stayed in the team, I became more and more experienced with the subject matter.
I started training other new community managers that joined us for different games and different languages. So I naturally grew into a managerial position.
where then later on i had my own team of seven people for the seven different languages that we were looking after and i helped them do the jobs that i did in the past but for their specific language communities it was really a magical time like we couldn't believe we got so lucky to be working at the single best company in gaming and having this for a job making money with it and
basically having this second family away from home. We all felt like we found a second family in Blizzard because everybody was excited and passionate about the same things. And we spent time together doing work and then we played together after work and we saw each other on the weekends for drinks and parties and other things. So it was really our entire world together.
where the people at blizzard and the jobs that we were there there for doing and that changed somewhat over the years as blizzard emerged with activision which is a big publisher in the gaming industry and the priorities for blizzard to our eyes started to shift
going from how can we make this the best most engaging experience for our players to how can we make more money with this and how can we make this graph go up more quickly and money is after a couple of years everything that we heard in discussions which
was a strong departure from the original values that brought me to blizzard making the most epic experiences with gamers for gamers then it came in 2018 so a long way so i started in 2005 so 2018 was then 13 years in There was an announcement saying, hey, we need to save money globally and in our office here in Versailles specifically, we need to reduce our overall amount of people by 30%.
And that was a shock to us because many of us, we started with Blizzard as our first company. And as I said, it really felt like a family. And all of a sudden we were to say goodbye to a third of that family. And we didn't know if we were impacted ourselves. So a lot of different and difficult emotions came up for everybody. We felt shocked. Oh, how can that be?
Like we've been doing so well and I thought we are still doing well. And yeah, it was a really hard time for everybody involved and people had many different reactions because in France, after the announcement, it took about a year. before that reduction actually took place.
So there was a phase for about half a year, three quarters of a year, where people could volunteer to leave so that the 30% would be filled up with volunteers as much as possible. And during that timeframe, it was getting increasingly difficult because a couple of people said, there's too much pressure. I don't want to deal with this anymore. I just want to get out. And they left ahead of time.
I, for myself, decided I wanted to stay around to help my team through this process. And it turned out my team was completely gone at the end of the process because they reduced the entire community team to one person instead of around 10.
Showing 101–120 of 156 · page 6 of 8
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