There are a fair few people behind the scenes that you've maybe not heard from or about, so we wanted to start a new 'Get to Know Us' series, where you can learn more about members of our team on a more personal level, not only about our roles and what we're working on, but our interests and passions.
To kickstart this series, I sat down with Greg, our Product Team Lead. Many of you may know him as Iluviel and might have spoken with or seen him on Discord, or in our forums and comment sections.
We hope you enjoy getting to know Greg and stay tuned for more from the team!
Hey Greg, would you mind introducing yourself?Yeah, sure, my name is Greg, also known as Iluviel. I’m the Product Team Lead at Nexus Mods. Previously, it was just me as Product Manager, but now we’ve hired an additional Product Manager, so I’m heading up that team. We’re also expanding our QA team, so I’ll be looking after them until we scale it up and find a dedicated QA Team Lead.Can you tell us a bit about yourself? What things do you enjoy? Tell us your interests and hobbies.
Yeah, yeah, sure! I’m quite active, so I really like running, cycling, and swimming. I usually do that five times a week. I’m in a running club and I go running with them twice a week. I try to go cycling twice a week and try to swim once a week as well. I do a lot of open water swimming, mostly in the sea, and in the summer, the rivers as well. Cold water swimming over the winter months, stuff like that. I quite like doing races, half marathons, 10ks, 5ks. I did my first Olympic triathlon in May and I’m going to do another one in September.
I really like reading, I read a lot. I’ve got way too many books at home, so I do probably have a bit of a problem. Mainly sci-fi and fantasy, so yeah, if there’s a fantasy book, there’s a good chance I’ve read it! My favourite author is Robin Hobb, and my favourite trilogy is the Farseer Trilogy, I’d highly recommend that to anyone.
Other than that, in terms of interests and hobbies, obviously playing video games, I play a lot of video games. I also have a cat called Bee, like a bumblebee. She’s tiny and black and very cute! I like various types of music, I do listen to a lot of music, and my favourite band is Pearl Jam. I enjoy cooking, as well as making (and then drinking) co*cktails. A Singapore Sling is my favourite. I also read Military History and Politics at university, so am quite interested in both topics. Yeah! That’s about me, to be honest.
What would you say a typical day at Nexus Mods looks like for you in your role?
BUSY. Very busy! My job as a Product Team Lead is chiefly to own the success of the product, and the success of the business, to make sure things are working. How we make that work with a small team, in a relatively small business, is you end up wearing a lot of hats, you end up doing a lot of different jobs. So it’s not strictly me just sitting here going, ‘Oh do this, do that!’ or ‘This would be great, this is what we need to do!’ A lot of the time, I’m helping the developers sort out their processes, getting the right processes in place, and solving their pain points. A lot of things that in a bigger business would belong to a different person or a different role. So my day-to-day generally can be pretty varied depending on what problems are presenting themselves.
At a really high level, my job is basically to look at all of the problems we have in the business, whether they be our problems, the developers' problems, the designers' problems, the community teams' problems. The problems of the users, and those users could be the mod authors, the people downloading mods, the collection curators, the tool makers, etc. Aggregating ALL those problems at a high level into a list and then prioritising them and feeding those problems through to the development teams, then getting those development teams to develop solutions that work for each of those problems.
Now, there are HUNDREDS of problems, hundreds of issues, and things that we have to do. Because we’re a small business, a small team, there’s too much to do and not enough capacity to do it all. Which is something users, you know, maybe they don’t see the whole scope of it. So when they’re passionate about one particular topic, it can be hard to communicate why we might not be working on it, and basically, I’m the person making the decisions with Dark0ne and MrMason about which of those things we’re actually going to work on and fix.
So essentially, I’m decision-making a lot of the time. I spend an awful lot of my time telling people ‘no’, which can result in some difficult conversations. I say ‘no’ a lot, to a lot of people, a lot of the time, because you can’t do everything.
What was it that drew you to this role when you first saw it?My wife and I moved to Devon during COVID, because she got a job in Plymouth, and we took the opportunity to move. I was working remotely and I HATED it. So I wasn’t specifically looking for this job, but I was keeping an eye out for the right job. I wasn’t looking to urgently leave my old job, it was an okay job, but I hated being at home by myself, it’s not fun. So, when this job cropped up, it looked pretty perfect, and it is perfect. It’s the best job I’ve ever had, in every regard.
Off the back of that, how do you find working at Nexus Mods? Do you enjoy it?There’s no micromanagement, if you want to take the lead on something you can take the lead on something. There’s tons of work to do and it’s good work, you’re solving real problems for people. You’re working in a great industry, the benefits are great, everything about the office and the staff, and the way Robin runs the business is amazing!Have you always been into gaming and modding?
Always been into gaming, less so modding necessarily. The game I’ve sunk the most hours into over the years would be World of Warcraft. I don’t play the latest expansions, but for the past three years, I’ve been playing the classic expansions with the same bunch of friends I originally played with in 2007-2008. I’ve stepped away from it at the moment because they’ve moved on to the fourth expansion, which I don’t enjoy very much. But probably literal years of my life sunk into that, I definitely did worse at school because of it.
In terms of modding, there is some exposure, some kind of modding through World of Warcraft because you do use a lot of extensions, and you have things like WeakAuras where you write your Lua scripts and get things to run in the game and stuff like that. So I’ve definitely had a lot of exposure to that. I definitely don’t use the default UI in WoW, I can’t play it without installing ElvUI first.
My favourite game of all time would be Morrowind. I never modded it much because I could never afford, when I was younger, a PC that could run it, so I played it on Xbox. I’ve always played video games though, my first video game was on the SNES, it was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I absolutely loved it and I’ve been playing video games ever since!
Yeah Morrowind, I’ve got good memories from it…ahh to be fair, World of Warcraft is pretty good as well. Classic WoW. It’s probably a tie between the two I would say, classic vanilla Warcraft and Morrowind, purely for the good memories from those games. But it’s so hard to pick a favourite, there are a lot of other games I’ve sunk an outrageous amount of time into. Like Counter-Strike 1.6 or Counter-Strike: Source. Lately I’ve really enjoyed Elden Ring, it’s good, it’s so good, it’s probably one of my favourite modern games that has come out in the past couple of years.
Yeah, I’ll be playing that too!
Is there anything you’re playing at the moment?Oh I’m playing Mass Effect Legendary Edition, I’m playing through all three, I’m on the first one. Most of the way through the first game at the moment, and then I’m gonna do 2 and 3 as well after that. I played them when I was younger and I haven’t played them in a long time, so I’m going back through and having some fun with that.
Just to follow on from that, are there any games coming out you’re looking forward to playing?The new Doom, Doom: The Dark Ages, yeah that looks phenomenal. They’ve just announced it. The last two Doom reboots they’ve done from 2016 onwards have been just phenomenal games.
Finally, is there anything you’d like to say to the community?Yeah, we have the feedback board, forums and Discord where anyone can send us their ideas and suggestions. I’d highly encourage people to engage with telling us what they want, or finding things and upvoting them. If they can’t find the right thing, don’t worry, we’ll merge it and sort it out. Keep giving us feedback, as much as you can, I promise you we read it all. Without validating what people want, we’re not going to deliver the right stuff, we’re not going to solve the right problems, so we just need to know what problems people are having. We don’t necessarily need everyone to give us the answers, so don’t let that put you off. Stay classy, Nexus Mods.
A big shout-out to Greg for being our first interviewee in the 'Get to Know Us' series. We hope you've enjoyed this first instalment and learning a little more about him. We’re excited to share more personal stories from our team with you in the future, and as always, your support means a lot to us. We look forward to bringing you closer to the people behind Nexus Mods.
See you in the next interview!
