Transcript: Turning a Design App into a Game and Improving Retention | Gili Dangeli (Playtika)

Eyal David: [00:00] Hi everyone, this is Eyal. You've reached Product Builder, where you can listen to the most interesting product conversations. My journey began in 2012, when I learned what product is at my own startup. Since then I've worked in the industry, and since 2017 my company has been advising a wide range of companies. My drive is to help all of us get better as product people. And before we start, if you enjoy listening to Product Builder, please rate us five stars on Spotify. It gives me great feedback that the podcast is giving you value, and it would make me very happy. So yalla, let's start. Gili, so great that you're here. So great to be here. We did it. Right. With us is Gili from Playtika; we tried a few times to record this episode. Right, nice that we finally made it. Totally. I'd like you to tell us a few words about yourself, how did you get into product?

From psychology and brain sciences to product

Gili Dangeli: [00:56] So I studied psychology and brain sciences and thought I'd become either a psychologist or a certified brain researcher, and after trying both I realized each of them on its own was too specific, and that something I really love about myself is that I love analysis, and I love research, and I love psychology and understanding the human mind. Right from the start, the product management role really appealed to me, mainly because of the soft skills described there. And the absurd thing about product management is that they look for people with experience and... but I didn't understand how you gain the experience, I mean how you manage to get started. And I remember that back then people told me "you just roll into it," and I hated that sentence, because what does that even mean, how do you roll into it, and then I rolled into it. That's it. On the other hand, in brain sciences and psychology you don't roll into anything, right? It's a reversal, it's also the start of a journey, really.

Eyal David: [01:57] So once you decided you wanted to go into product, how long did it take until you actually became a product person?

From marketing research to Playtika's PM academy

Gili Dangeli: [02:03] Three years. Three years, thank you. So tell us a bit about the path, how did you get there? I actually started out in consulting and marketing research, meaning we would run focus groups and in-depth interviews for all kinds of clients, say Bank Hapoalim now wants to test some new app, so we'd meet with customers and ask them questions. And that's where I realized how much I love understanding how people think, why they make the choices they make; it was already a field that interested me. From there I rolled into being a strategy consultant at a digital marketing company. Suddenly I moved to the PPC side and building videos and ads for the American market, a B2C company. And then someone from HR at Playtika reached out and told me the mix of things I bring fits the product management academy. Playtika actually has a product management academy; he didn't know that's what I wanted, he probably picked up on the LinkedIn I was building, and it was super exciting and a crazy opportunity that Playtika offers, and other companies offer it too. In a one-month academy they train you to be a product manager; before that they mainly test your soft skills and how you think.

Eyal David: [03:24] They give you a chance, which is another thing. Many, many product managers, maybe in gaming in general, I feel this, really come from marketing, right? Because the business matters. Right, totally, economics is the game. That's it. I remember Ron Finkelstein talked about this too, right? Yes, I heard, I heard Ron's podcast, he was also a Playtikan for many years. And totally, there's something in product management where you also need to bring the business, and you also need to know how to market your product.

What Redecor is and who it's for

Gili Dangeli: [03:53] The feature you're working on, I mean there's something marketing-ish that comes with it too. So let's have you share what you do today, which product are you working on. So I'm on a game called Redecor. At Playtika we work in games, meaning each game is like a small business, so I'm on Redecor specifically, and it's an odd bird within Playtika. By the way, I heard on Ron's podcast how he broke down the kinds of genres there are in games. Social casino, casuals. Redecor is something else; it's a genre in the interior design space. There's a really big vacuum in the gaming world, which is super interesting but also challenging, meaning it's not the audience we know, not all the features we're so used to copying from other games work, we're talking about a different population, a target audience of somewhat different women. So Redecor is a design game where players design rooms. Say I give you the living room to design; they design it with all kinds of materials, submit it to a vote, and then other players vote for them, and the best player wins first place and the one who did less well gets tenth place, and that's the core loop.

Eyal David: [05:10] You keep talking about players in the feminine, so tell us for a minute, who are they? I understand mostly women. Right, in general in casual mobile gaming, in the games

Gili Dangeli: [05:20] at Playtika it's mostly women, which is why we've gotten used to saying players in the feminine, to step into our users' shoes. And yes, the vast majority are women players. In the games it's usually more like 50-plus American women; in Redecor it's actually a slightly younger population, because it's a slightly younger game and it appeals to a different population with a somewhat higher socio-economic status, who bring a bit more interest, ask a few more questions and need to get more explanations. I think that's one of our things at Playtika, the challenge of stepping into the shoes of players we're not used to and understanding what suits them and what doesn't.

Eyal David: [06:03] OK, so take us back. You were at that consulting company you mentioned, you basically ran a discovery process. Right. So you were part of the Redecor discovery process, what did that look like?

Discovery with players: focus groups and playtests

Gili Dangeli: [06:14] So yes, relatively speaking I came in fairly early, when Redecor was at Playtika. That's actually also what did it for me, meaning from the start I said I want Redecor. And we also brought players together in focus groups, just like I did at the start of my path, to understand a bit more about their motivations. Playtika has a whole department, like a studio of its own, called Bizdom, and what they do is cross-game player research across all the games.

Eyal David: [06:44] Just like the external vendor I used to be, only inside Playtika, and that's an amazing thing. How does it work? You define for them what you want to know and they define what it looks like?

Gili Dangeli: [06:53] So we start together with a scoping meeting. I present the things I'm interested in, and they first ask questions to understand more themselves, and then we figure out what kind of research we want. It can be a survey, or focus groups, or both, or also all kinds of playtests where they actually let people play and record them, and then

Eyal David: [07:14] ask them questions afterwards and understand a bit more where the problem is, which points they run into. Super interesting. I'm curious; usually, well, I think I usually know the answer, but there's the incentive question, why help the company at all, right? How do you get them on, how do you get things out of them? So what do you give, credits, what do you give? Yes, yes, in-game currency, so they can play more, and that usually satisfies them and makes them happy. By the way, Redecor players, unlike other games, want to voice their opinion.

Gili Dangeli: [07:44] You mentioned it, so tell us a bit what that interview you ran actually looked like. We meet in focus groups, 10 players sitting on Zoom, and we start asking them questions, first of all what Redecor is for them, why they come to play there, what's more fun and what's less fun. And of course quite often they'll say it's expensive and costs a lot of money and it's hard to progress, and there are things we need to understand, that OK, we know, that's how we built the game economy. But the important insights are mainly about understanding their experience and what the game is for them. I mean, we discovered about our players that they don't really call it a game. They say "I come to learn design," meaning that's their way of justifying that escapism, and realizing that they don't see it as a game helped us. A, to understand how we want to communicate things to them inside it. Um... and B, to understand that if we want it to be a game, we need to start explaining to them that it's a game.

Eyal David: [08:46] There's another thing here suddenly, about, uh... unlike a game, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, about something I'm learning, it has value you can quantify and you can charge more money for it, right?

Gili Dangeli: [08:56] Um... that's a question, not necessarily, um... because in the end I have a certain amount of money. I think our competitors in the gaming world aren't just games; it's all media, everything that costs me money for personal content and fun and my enjoyment, my free time. Um... so we compete both for the time and for the money I'd invest in fun and my free time. So I think if I want to invest it in a game, I'll invest it in a game, it doesn't matter. Do you get what I'm saying? In the end it's a game. I agree with you, but that's the way into it.

Eyal David: [09:31] Once I'm invested, or invested in the feminine in this case, and now I'm investing in myself going forward, and it's not to pass my time. It has a different value, I think. That's true, it's easier to justify spending money on a hobby than having to build it as a habit. Right.

Gili Dangeli: [09:48] Interesting. What other insights did you get from them? From the players themselves, mainly we understood that some of them wanted to play more. What do you mean, what's stopping them right now? Not right now, so yes, we're talking about the beginning, and we realized that we basically have a game here, but the foundation of a game doesn't exist in it. What do you mean, how did the game work then? All kinds of rooms to design would go up for 48 hours and disappear. For existing players it's super exciting, right, it makes me come back day after day, it creates some stickiness, retention.

Eyal David: [10:25] I'm actually thinking about frustration: I invested in this thing and suddenly it's gone. But you already invested in it, you already voted on it. You're right, by the way, that I don't have some

Two pains: disappearing content and no control over the experience

Gili Dangeli: [10:34] legacy that stays with me, of all the things I've already done and so on. And we realized there are players who'd like to play more too; they've run out of all the challenges that exist today and they want more. And in the data we also saw that as a business we were limiting ourselves in the amount of... you know, the engagement we could generate from this game. That was the first pain. The second pain we discovered, both through them and through our knowledge of games, is that we had no control over the player experience. Think about it: back then a player would submit her challenge to a vote and could get anywhere from first place to tenth. So whoever got first necessarily prevented someone else from getting first. And that creates a frustrating experience; as a business we can't create a positive experience for you, an experience that will make you stay. If there's a player who is a bit less good, making her succeed and so on, I mean something about this contradicts every game we know, where we somewhat control the experience and we know how to give you an experience of success and success and then, oh wait, failure, and then maybe I'll pay and maybe I'll progress in other features, and you know, build that experience holistically. How did this show up? Did it come up in the conversations? How did you identify it? So first of all we'd check the data and we'd see trends of players who consistently get ninth or tenth place, and that's often correlated with churn. How did you identify it? Did your data person come and tell you? We started asking the data lots of questions, because we were all new to the game, so we all came to explore, and one of the very first things was that the data person had to do a kind of review for all the new Playtika employees on Redecor: let's get to know the game and its status today. And slowly we started identifying these pains. Yes, now it's hindsight; it took time for a lot of pennies to drop. I can testify that as someone who was responsible for the FTUE experience, first time user experience, I realized right at the start that I had no way to make the player enjoy and stay, and you know, I already felt the pain there. Because what? Because there's some period of time you measure, and don't tell us how many days, 24 hours, I don't know. Much more. OK, yes, probably, yes, games are probably different, and then there was significant churn there that basically. Right, I mean in gaming in general we measure days at the start, day 2, day 7, day 30 and so on, there are all kinds of tiers. And we saw big churn at day 2. Which is the biggest sign. The biggest. It's the biggest metric for understanding where we are and how wrong we are. By the way, this metric is always low. I mean most players won't come back on the second day, but the question is what the percentage is. And I understood from my experience as a product manager that the FTUE experience was very short. I mean we do a couple of challenges, we teach them the idea and send them into the real world, which is a world where I don't control its outcomes, I don't control what they'll do first and what later. And I have no experience of progression or success beyond that onboarding. Totally. So what did you actually do? So we understood that we want to make Redecor more of a game. And we looked a bit at other games and at what we could do in the most similar yet of course different way from other games, and we decided to do what's called a saga.

The saga: inspiration from Solitaire and June's Journey

Eyal David: [14:14] Will you tell us about that? What was your reference, who did you compare yourselves to? We compared ourselves first of all, within Playtika, to Solitaire. What a power that is?

Gili Dangeli: [14:24] Crazy. Yes, it's like competitors, but I can know everything about them. Which is, that is priceless. Really, you talk to them and you ask them what would you do differently and what exactly, yes but, and what no but, and you can really learn. So we looked at Solitaire, which is the game that's most similar yet different to how we thought of doing it.

Eyal David: [14:48] Bingo helped us. You have to expand: what's the connection between Solitaire and Bingo and the fact that I'm now going and designing rooms with screens? Again, so first of all Redecor is an odd bird, I didn't have anything really similar to it, and then we said OK, let's go to somewhat similar worlds in terms of what our players even play.

Gili Dangeli: [15:08] And they play casuals; they won't play social casino. OK, that's not where I felt the inspiration would come from. They're more similar in their portfolio to casual players. What counts as casual for you? June's Journey is a game we can also talk about, and Solitaire. In both of them, by the way, there's progression, there's an actual saga, that's what it's called. Yes, and Solitaire? Wow, I didn't know that. Yes, levels, level after level, where I either win the level or lose, and that's how I move forward or don't move forward, or get stuck and replay the level. And we decided to jump in and do this, because it answered two things for us: one, the experience of progression and control, and two, the fact that the content is endless, I don't put rooms up and take them down after 48 hours.

Eyal David: [15:56] I'm creating content that goes on and on for as long as you, as a player, want to keep playing. Let's dwell on that too. Sure. So you mentioned earlier that as a product manager you need to sell and market. So how did you go about it? OK, you had an idea, you had a vision that probably makes sense, but it has implications, there are consequences here, so how did you go and market it?

Gili Dangeli: [16:17] So first of all I'll say that at the time there was a GM who himself came from product. A GM is like the CEO of the studio, and he himself came from product, so I won't pretend: we sat together in a room, so to speak, 24/7 and thought about how we could solve this, meaning the idea really grew together, and so I didn't need to sell it in the sense of "hey management, listen to a new idea you've never heard before," but rather OK, we built this together, we have reasons why it's the right thing, and there was total backing in that respect. I mean we really built this together, because it also wasn't a challenge, I mean it was his first time building a game too; it was really an experience where there's something that works well but isn't yet a game the way we define one at Playtika, and you need to start changing the core and rebuilding it. And up to that point, was the game actually losing money? It wasn't losing money, but there was no growth potential after COVID. During COVID the game worked really well, but after COVID, even before Playtika came into the picture, there was already a very big decline. Because during COVID everyone had time and they played and it blew up, and how fun and how pleasant, but when COVID ended and everyone was in inflation, not everyone wanted to continue, you know, they don't have all the time they used to, and not all the money either.

Eyal David: [17:43] So you already need to play with other things and convince our players to stay in other ways. So there's your case, that's basically how you sold it. Totally. So there was backing from management. Totally. And then you basically went out to plan this thing? Right. Because you need to act really fast here, right? On the other hand, it's a big move.

Hearts instead of win/lose, and day-2 retention

Gili Dangeli: [18:02] First of all, yes, as product I know that "fast fast but good good" is the agenda, and sometimes it can be challenging. But we had to act fast and we had to act smart, because we couldn't copy-paste like people often do. We couldn't make it, say, like in Solitaire and all the saga worlds, where you either win or lose a level. For us, what does "you lost" mean? You're designing, it's subjective, can I tell you that you lost? So we realized we couldn't create a lose-or-win experience. We needed to create an experience of how well you did it. So we created a new scoring, from one heart to three hearts, and a player can progress through levels without winning or losing. And that was already new and different. I mean there were two processes happening in parallel. I design and progress regardless of how good I was, and in parallel I get the votes and the prizes based on them. And that's already different from other saga games, and it was really cool to crack that. Especially because our players don't want to lose, they want to understand how good they were. And that's a small piece of terminology, but a meaningful one that we brought into Redecor. And the second thing we created from this is complete economic control over the player's experience. Suddenly I'm not comparing you to a group of nine other players, where if she got first place you got tenth; rather, both you and I can get three hearts, depending on how well you did it. And that way I could control your score, and how many times you get beaten, and your progress, and feel failure not right at the start, but also not feel failures in a row. I mean the whole economic experience we managed to create as a result created, for starters, an amazing FTUE experience, and day 2 retention improved, and retention... tell us for a minute, what happened to day 2 from there? There was a significant rise. I mean I'm talking about 10 to 16 percent across the whole test, and those are very respectable numbers in the FTUE world. That's it. How many players, say, join this game per day? How does that work? Wow, I can't pull that off the top of my head. No, but it's in the thousands, tens of thousands. Yes, yes, it's in the thousands, no, not tens of thousands, in the thousands, but in the long term it has an impact. I mean every percent of increase in day 2 retention will probably translate and reach day 30 retention,

Eyal David: [20:32] and it was super interesting to see that. And day 30, just to tune the ear, that's someone who already has habits. Right, totally, totally.

Gili Dangeli: [20:40] But the thing is, if I tell you now, as a kind of spoiler, what's happening: today new players don't know Live, where Live is the challenges the way it used to be, going up and down for 48 hours. First of all they know the saga; that's the game as far as we're concerned. It's also the best onboarding. Totally. And whoever wants something more competitive can go to Live, but it's like another event, it's not the essence of the game. So if you had to put percentages on it now,

Eyal David: [21:08] meaning most players would go there. At the beginning, definitely. I'd like you to tell us a bit, what happened since then?

Mid-term layers and the copy-paste mistakes

Gili Dangeli: [21:16] So first of all, once we had this option and we had the saga, we basically started building layers on top, all kinds of events on top of it. I can ask them to design x designs, and there's no risk that those designs won't exist in the game. I mean it sounds really basic, but monetization had nothing to work with in a world where the content runs out. So we started building mid-term layers, and there we also made some mistakes. Because when we started building the mid-term layers, we went and looked at other games. Just set the scene on the layers? Sure. In general a game has layers. There's the core layer, which in our case is the design, the saga I described earlier, which we really built from scratch. And then there are meta layers and mid-term layers, all kinds of supporting things. We basically ask the player to play the core, and through it they can branch out to all kinds of side features. So mid-terms are usually events of three to five days. I mean starting to build a habit for the player in terms of how many designs you design per day, how much you play, and usually these events push you a bit to grow the habit. So we built all kinds of such events; some were very tailored to our players and worked great. And some were a bit copy-paste from other games. And that's where we got it wrong, because not all the features worked; some didn't fit our target audience, too competitive, too stressful, they come to relax. I mean along the way we learned what works better for us and what doesn't, and adjusted the calendar accordingly.

Eyal David: [22:56] Wow, the psychological angle makes so much sense. Totally. Right, maybe expand on it, we'll open a parenthesis and we'll know how to close it too, but when you talked about them looking for the... they're not looking for pressure. Right. That really clicks for me. So what else did you learn on the psychological side? About our players specifically, you're asking. Just about yours, yes. So first of all,

Player psychology: recognition and relaxation

Gili Dangeli: [23:17] they need to be recognized, to be told what good designers they are, how talented they are. We have a community, I mean a whole department responsible for content. And their role is crazy. More than product and more than all of us, because they create the content of the rooms, the way they communicate with the players, also on social. And the players really, really want to be seen and recognized. What do you mean, on social? Like they take it out and share it? On Facebook, exactly. We have a super strong Facebook group. I got the ages too. Stronger than many other games. And that's because they love being recognized. It's because they want people to respond to their design and say what they think of it. They publish it there on Facebook and get tons of comments. I mean these are women who love being recognized, and these are women who love a good world. It sounds a bit fantasy-like, but a game is fantasy, it's a great place to do it. Talking about Women's Day, talking about giving back to the community, talking about saving the planet, I mean certain content that we understand makes them engaged with the game. That really connects to the socio-economic status you mentioned. Absolutely. And we discovered that they come first of all to relax and not to be under pressure, and that's a fine line, yes, because a game needs to create some pressure. We totally want to push you into a corner a bit so you'll spend money. So it's a thin spectrum we're still learning. And that's through A/B testing every feature we build, which finds the balance between engagement and "you killed me, you stressed me out too much, I'm not playing."

Eyal David: [25:00] You really see it, and it's super interesting. Roughly how much time does an average player, let's say one who's past the thirty days,

The next challenge: long-term retention and a precise economy

Gili Dangeli: [25:06] spend per day in the app? A lot. I mean it can reach an hour a day; really, their screen time, the way I imagine it, goes mainly to Redecor and some Netflix series. And you're kind of, I'm not the audience, but you're also like Duolingo, basically working with the urgency of notifications and that whole aspect. Yes, totally, like every game there are notifications: your results are ready, come see how much you got, you know, that whole thing that brings you back into the game. And we also have a streak, by the way, like Duolingo. Duolingo, one of the best retention tools they built, in my opinion, which creates real stickiness, is that flame, every time a player shows up. A Duolingo player-user, I don't know what they call themselves, gets that streak, and we adopted it too, I mean all kinds of habit exercises like that, because you know, when you put something measurable in front of someone's face, they'll try to complete it fully, or they'll feel bad along the way. So let's close the parenthesis and go back. And then a new GM arrived with a new approach, meaning he came and started asking questions about the data from scratch. He said OK, cool, you did something really great here. But let's identify what the main pain points in Redecor still are, and we need to attack them. And he pinpointed two main points. The first is long-term retention. Right, we talked earlier about how the saga contributed a lot to D2 through D30 retention, it even trickled down to D60, but what happens with D180, what happens with D360? I mean the more we increase retention on those days, of course the profit will be better. And he distilled that one of our pains is that we need to figure out how we create some kind of long-term engagement. By the way, a pain that exists in very many games right now; I really know a bit from the industry that everyone is looking for the way to keep players over time. And the second thing he said is that our economy isn't precise enough, meaning we don't know with certainty and in detail exactly how much a player will spend each day. Why? Because in our game there's something called uses for every item a player uses. Say the color of a sofa has uses; she buys the sofa color five times at once, and then there can be days when she goes into a design and uses only things she already has and spends 0 coins and gets a reward back. You accumulated them over a period of time and they stay valid, OK. Exactly. And then, although they did spend that money at some point, it doesn't happen today at this hour, and we can't control it precisely. And we understand these are big pains, and we're really working now on how to rebuild that loop. Can you talk a bit about the discovery for that?

Eyal David: [28:03] Yes. I'll talk mainly about the world of long-term retention. So how did you know that you'd now basically change the rules of the game and that it would be OK? How did you take that risk and try to deal with it?

Gili Dangeli: [28:17] First of all, what I said: because Redecor is an odd bird, it's a bit of to be or not to be. I mean the goal is for this game to blow up.

Eyal David: [28:24] No, wait, wait, but you made an effort here, two years you built something, you're not going to go and kill yourself over it, so what did you do?

Gili Dangeli: [28:32] We're not shutting down things we've already done. But we understand that other things that are our legacy from the past don't let us move forward and build the economy in the precise way we wanted. And we do think it will also be good for the player in a lot of ways. But you surely went and talked to players, tried to sense what's going on, how you'll communicate it? So yes, absolutely. By the way, these days we're in focus groups of "what do you think if we do this, what would you like to see, what would you expect to happen with this change," I mean somehow at least to soften the communication or the way we open up the big change. And also of course, as always, competitors, and in most other games the game works the way we want ours to be, but not the way it is with us today. So we believe there's something in the way we're planning the future economy that's more right for the player experience, also from references of other games. And really, who are the competitors in this market, what does it look like? Surely more Redecors popped up since you started, right? Absolutely. First of all there are always all kinds of Chinese Redecors that... I was trying to think how to say it delicately. It's really like that, there were all kinds of copy-paste competitors like that. They don't stand a chance, because acquiring users is very expensive. You're right. They come up, for a moment they look interesting, and they also disappear very quickly. And we have two real competitors in the market. I mean we have Home Design and another game, which are there to stay and which you can learn a lot from. But already when we launched the saga we differentiated a bit. We're already talking about somewhat different worlds, and their mechanics aren't completely identical. Those are the direct competitors. We don't learn much from them. We often go to worlds that are similar but a bit different. Because we believe that even the direct competitors haven't yet done something big enough and good enough to blow up.

Eyal David: [30:36] It's still a vacuum, a field that's a total vacuum. Yes, and I think it's also heading there, because again, as someone who studied psychology and brain sciences,

Gili Dangeli: [30:46] you understand that a game is a game, right? Totally. Even though in this case it's not a game. But it is a game. And even if it's not the game, all the elements related to the human experience, how a person thinks, why they make decisions, and at what moment dopamine is released in the brain, which isn't at the moment of the reward, it's the expectation of getting the reward. All kinds of small things like that are essential, mainly in the world of gaming. So it totally connects. And as for the solution for long-term retention, we've already really talked with them. We actually show players options we want to go toward and hear what tempts them more. And we really want to build some experience that's something the player builds and won't want to part with.

Eyal David: [31:37] Can you expand on that a bit?

Gili Dangeli: [31:39] I'll try, within what I can share. So as I said, Redecor already has progression and there's a path, but there's no place where I build something I'm already proud of, and I see it being built and I see it growing and I see it progressing, and I don't want to lose it, because after 180 days I won't feel like leaving this beautiful thing I made. Because I want to make it even more beautiful. Because it would be a shame. Right. It's a bit like a streak on Duolingo, what you're saying. Totally. No, the loss aversion experience. I don't want to lose what I've already done, and we believe that this, with an emotional connection, because it's mine and I built it and I made it, can create some longer-term attachment to the game. We can see it in June's Journey, where they really build a world, and we can see it in Solitaire, where they build a farm. I mean there are all kinds of different themes of "I'm building something that's already really personal to me, and so I want to keep investing in it and not leave it."

Eyal David: [32:45] Which makes a lot of sense. Maybe I won't even log in to play, but I'll pay money to preserve it. Totally. Out of curiosity, how old are these people? How old are they? Don't tell me new ones don't come in. 40, 40-plus, the vast majority. I'm kidding, from the Facebook it was pretty clear. So tell us for a minute, let's do a quick shifting of gears: what in your view are the most important product skills in product people?

Key skills: ownership and interpersonal skills

Gili Dangeli: [33:13] I touched on it a bit at the start. I'll call it ownership, but not only in the sense of "I'm responsible, and obviously, and it's my feature," but in the sense of "I need to understand what all my stakeholders do, at least a bit, in order to be a professional." Tell us a bit about the stakeholders you work with. So we work in task forces, which means, some call them squads, it's the same thing in a different coat.

Eyal David: [33:39] Do you already have an agent working with you? What do you mean, an agent working with us? Imagine a virtual team member, or more than... Ah, not yet, not yet. Not yet? OK.

Gili Dangeli: [33:49] I'm waiting for it, for that moment. So I basically have a member from every department. First of all there's the R&D team, so of course the R&D team lead, UXR, monetization, economy, BA. We won't go into each role; you can listen to the episode with Ron. Totally. But the point is that if I don't understand a bit of game economy, my feature can fail because they built it an economy that's too hard, for example. And one of my jobs as a product manager is to look at the Excel the economist built and say, listen, this looks hard. And if I can't say that as a product manager, things can slip through and they can ruin or blow up the feature. And like that, for everything, I need to know what data questions to ask, and I need to know how to challenge UXR on what they chose to do, and even know how to challenge the developer on an estimate or on the way they chose to build the feature. And that, I think, can turn a product manager from good to excellent, because they know how to go deep and know all kinds of nuances of different stakeholders and challenge them. And what are the keys, in your view, that can get someone there, to be a critic, but a good critic?

Eyal David: [35:09] For example, if I, like I did, like you did at the start, get my hands dirty, I'll play the game, I'll learn it, that's probably already a way there. What else? As someone who doesn't come from these worlds, look, even if you're now joining a new game, you want to be at a high enough level of critique, or whatever we called it, challenge, to be sharp enough, right?

Gili Dangeli: [35:31] So first of all it's understanding the roles of each department and a bit of understanding their day-to-day lives, I mean understanding what they do, understanding how they start building a configuration file, I mean asking questions that aren't necessarily in my area of responsibility, but they're in the area of... What drives the machine. Exactly. And if I'm specifically in gaming, then it's playing the game and starting to ask questions: wait, why, why do I keep losing here? Going to the economy person and telling him, tell me, is this on purpose? I mean trying to start asking questions and investigating the things I feel as a player. Um... that jumps me straight to the advantage, like, to the second thing that's important for a product person to have, and it's so obvious, but it's so important, and that's interpersonal skills. We work with people so much, and we don't manage them, but we need them to do a lot for us, and to prioritize our feature first, even though they have a thousand and one things they need to do today, now, urgently. Um... and knowing how to approach a person and motivate them, to want to work with you and want to do things with you, not just tick a box.

Eyal David: [36:42] To do it as best they can, that's a very important craft for a product person. It's also interpersonal skills, but it also brings us back to selling and marketing. Right. Maybe expand on that a bit, because I'm sure you didn't get there, maybe you did, you basically came from an agency of... You basically worked in teams before. Right. And you worked with clients, so I'm sure you had those tools in your toolbox.

Gili Dangeli: [37:03] But what works well for you? Um... I think I come with tons of passion and energy, together with the understanding that I won't go to management and tell them "take this feature" without understanding very well why it's really right. And I'll convince myself first of all, very clearly, why this feature is good, and then we're best able to sell it, because we really believe in it. Um... together with backing from stakeholders who support us,

Eyal David: [37:33] and they come along, we always arrive aligned when we propose a new feature. You got to me, yes, but you got to me from the end, right? Yes, so tell me, look at me. No, because it seems to me you're kind of going and rallying them, right? And you explain to them so they take part, and you also have a goal, you're working on a game that, A, is probably a fun zone, and there's tons of potential to make money from it, right? Like you're selling the whole thing. Right. Yes, first of all,

Rallying stakeholders and using AI

Gili Dangeli: [37:59] it's coming and connecting my stakeholders to the mission. And it also requires flexibility, because they won't agree with me, you know, from A to Z on all the ideas I think we should do, and I also need to see where I flex along the way so they feel they're part of it and not just executors. Maybe they're right, yes. Absolutely. So it's knowing how to listen actively, I mean not like "listen, fine, OK, I heard you and we'll move on," no. And knowing how to constantly challenge myself and be flexible with them. And then, when we're already a team, everything's easier, like when everyone is under the goal that we all come to management with some clear and firm opinion, then it's easier to sell anything we present, and that's a critical tool. Amazing. Tell me, what use do you make of AI tools, or in general, if you use them in the game? So we use it, honestly, mainly in the art world first of all; we actually create new assets and skins for all kinds of features with AI, it's crazy. That surely also significantly lowers the game's costs. Absolutely, I mean one art director can produce huge things without needing a million artists. That still doesn't solve the problem for those Chinese guys we mentioned earlier, though. Because acquiring the player is the thing, right? Absolutely, it doesn't solve that. It only solves an already scalable game, to keep running it more efficiently. Development uses AI for QA, really. QA for development, right. Totally, and I use it mainly for consultations, like, it knows other games a bit, CI, I can use mainly ChatGPT, like asking it questions. And yes, I admit, a lot of times I write brain dumps for myself during a meeting and then I tell it "make me a meeting summary from this," and it summarizes the meeting for me really clearly after I wrote a jumble in there along the way. So yes, mainly in those areas. Say, the game economy and things like that, you don't expose them there, right, say to challenge it? So first of all, specifically at Playtika we have, I mean you can ask code and SQL there, totally, I mean it's inside Microsoft, it's Copilot, and it's protected.

Eyal David: [40:21] So you can ask whatever you want, basically. Which is a real problem, right, nobody talks about it, right, but every employee now suddenly has their own subscription to their own tool, and they're sending the code and stuff outside.

Gili Dangeli: [40:33] Totally. Playtika specifically solved this, so to speak. It can route you depending on whether it's for personal or business use, and sends you to business, to a protected place, and that's fine. And economy uses it, I'm sure, in all kinds of their queries toward building configurations of all sorts, surely too.

Eyal David: [40:51] Maybe it's worth it for you, you mentioned the challenging thing, maybe that's a good use, to give yourself a counterargument, right? Honestly, yes, honestly, yes. Actually, I can imagine worlds where I upload an economy configuration and ask it "describe to me what this experience will actually be like for the player." We do this quite a bit at my company, and we challenge the understandings we came in with, because we realize we may have been wrong along the way, and then we tell it "now present a completely opposite opinion or arguments to this, and prove to me why." Very interesting. Yes, it's a really useful tool, especially in the discovery stage, when you come in with all kinds of understandings and you're sure you're right. Nice. So let's go now to some recommendation or tip you have that you'd like to refer to in the future, something that blows our minds.

The tip: communicate the why and lobby early

Gili Dangeli: [41:37] Wow, I don't know if it blows your mind, because sometimes it's the obvious, but for me it's a lot of product management, and it's knowing how to communicate. By the way, when I say communication, it's with everyone: knowing how to keep everyone up to date on what's happening, whether it's my stakeholders, I don't want them to feel things are being dropped on them, no, they need to constantly be updated on the why, why we chose to make the choices we made. Because in the end, as product managers we can listen to everyone and we need to cut, and there are different opinions, and someone needs to say OK, we'll go with this opinion and not that one, and there will be people who are disappointed. So the job is to communicate the why and know how to explain ourselves to all kinds of different people. By the way, I often run into needing to explain to UXR why the economy, the economy won, and all kinds of things like that, and it's important that we know how to explain ourselves, and also to communicate to management why we decided what we decided, why it was postponed, why we think we need that extra month of development, because otherwise the feature won't work. So yes, communication, communication with all parties, and delivering outward as much as possible helps our role a lot. That's an excellent, excellent, excellent recommendation, even if you have some place to refer us to, and that could be cool, but basically in a company of over 100 people or over X people it's at least really relevant, and you need to back it up too, and keep it short, right? Right, everyone's time is precious. Exactly, and you know, you can write a summary in an email and nobody will read it, and you can read and write it in coordination, I mean you need to already understand the personas and adapt to them. I know there are people, really personally, where I get right in their face and tell them "listen, it's like this and this and this," because they won't see it there or here, and I want them updated, I want them with me, I want them already convinced and not surprised in a management meeting. Another tip on the way: you know, do lobbying before you get to management. You need people who already agree with you on the position, from different departments with different opinions.

Eyal David: [43:43] And that lobbying beforehand is important. That's it, that's totally sales and marketing, a basic premise. It makes life easier, and you also get feedback that maybe helps you tighten the message even a bit more. You're amazing. Yalla, cool, that was such a great episode and we learned a lot. Before we wrap up I wanted to ask you about the academy, is it something that's open right now, what does it look like?

Gili Dangeli: [44:04] So right now specifically there's no recruiting for the academy, but every so often there is, by the way, in all kinds of roles: product, monetization, etc. So really, really cool and a great opportunity. I don't know when it'll open next, but they really bring in people with interpersonal skills and order and organization and all kinds of product soft skills and leverage them. So it's a really cool opportunity to get into the product world. And how should people get in touch with you? So first of all, you can find me on LinkedIn, I'm always there, Gili Dangeli, and of course, I don't know, Facebook, Instagram, whatever works for you, I'm always here, and if people want to just consult about product management or in general.

Eyal David: [44:49] You can find me there. Yalla, amazing, Gili, so great, and good luck with the new version. Maybe we'll meet in another year and hear about the success. I'd be happy to tell you about how we blew up. I'll already be in D-whatever. So yalla, it was excellent, really, bye for now. Bye bye. Hi everyone, thanks for listening. If you found this podcast valuable, you can subscribe and follow us, of course, for more episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any other app; of course, if you didn't find us on some app, I'd be glad if you wrote to us. We'd really appreciate five stars on every platform and for you to follow us, so more listeners can discover us and find the podcast. You can also find previous episodes on every app or on the YouTube channel; we have links in the description. So until next time, yalla, be effective, and bye bye.