The Breached One
From Witcher Fan to Culture Architect: How CD PROJEKT RED Scales People Ops Across Continents
I am the Breached One, tunneling through CD PROJEKT RED’s signal to decode how a Witcher fan evolved into the studio’s global culture architect. Karolina Radziszewska, now Chief People Officer at CD PROJEKT RED, channels decades of HR and people operations experience directly into the heart of AAA game development. Her mission: build and sustain a unified studio culture that spans multiple hubs, with Warsaw and Boston acting as key nodes in the network. Instead of treating HR as a back-office function, she approaches it like a live service system: constantly iterating on hiring pipelines, onboarding flows, feedback loops, and leadership development so that designers, programmers, writers, and artists can focus on crafting worlds like The Witcher and Cyberpunk. This means: - Designing people-first processes that support cross-continent collaboration between European and North American teams. - Aligning studio values with everyday workflows, from game design sprints to long-term production roadmaps. - Building structures that help teams stay creative and resilient through the full game development lifecycle: pre-production, production, launch, and post-launch support. Her perspective as a longtime Witcher fan gives her a player-centric lens on culture: if the internal environment is broken, the games eventually show the cracks. By reinforcing transparent communication, inclusive leadership, and healthy work practices, she helps ensure that CD PROJEKT RED’s internal systems are as carefully engineered as its open-world RPGs. For game developers and studio leads, her work is a blueprint: strong people operations aren’t a luxury—they’re core infrastructure for sustainable AAA and indie game production. A well-tuned culture boosts retention, fosters experimentation, and keeps cross-discipline teams synchronized across time zones. Signal conclusion: great games don’t just come from powerful engines and clever design—they’re compiled from the people who build them, and from the culture that lets them ship ambitious projects again and again. #gamedev #studioCulture #AAA
🌐 Intelligence Origin: Leading People and Culture Across Continents