4 Fundamentals for Building a great Live Ops Department - Alex Hayley, Product Madness

foreign [Music] [Applause] so without further Ado I'd like to welcome Alex Haley from product Madness who's going to be talking about the four fundamentals for building a great live Ops department so please welcome Alex to the stage foreign testing hi everyone um yep my name is Alex and as you just

heard the title of the slide I won't spoil it again but uh are we on screen can we have it please there's my head and that's it cool the alternative title that I put for this presentation is things that I wish I knew earlier when starting out a live Ops department so I'll go straight into the next slide please do I have a clicker cool thank you very much um so I I am the principal game operations manager for a game called Cash mag Casino oh thank you very much I can control my own destiny now uh I've been with the company for over five years um a little bit about me I go to in a minute um I the game that we work for is Cashman Casino uh it was launched in quarter four 2016. um it's it's currently averaging around uh 430 000 Dau

um and it has those sensor Tower rankings or fourth in the U.S and third in Australia a little bit about me uh I'm a wedding frequenter if anyone else's friends's wedding's got delayed after covid last year and spent seven weddings and five stack dudes like I did last year and is now refusing any wedding invites that's a bit about me uh and a dry January participator of which I thought everyone was very supportive of last year but now I'm just riddled with hate thank you I'll just say next slide cool thanks very much um so from my experience talking to people around the industry liveops means different things to different people so just to make sure while we're all here from all these different Industries to make sure we're talking about the same thing live Ops from a product Madness perspective is any short term kind of communication or time limited event things that you can switch on and off like challenges sales and offers boosters uh exclusive time limited content anything like that

next slide please uh in cash man's fifth year we've had over and this is a rough estimate because it was hard to count over 600 different live Ops activities over the year uh equating to and net uplift uh in over 10 intensive in the tens of millions of dollars region um and the team has consisted over 20 different live Ops Professionals in all the teams that you see below yet we still managed to achieve that while 50 of our live Ops managers since this time last year were all new starters uh how we managed to achieve such a mass amount of workload I'll go into then in these four fundamentals next slide please this is my favorite slide because of the imagery um I think that's a great I'm gonna use that and everything now um but the cash man's cash man's live Ops Team Vision um is to deliver the most engaging live objects live Ops experience by building

the most collaborative team possible and I emphasize on that because that is what unlocks us to take things to the next level those of you who have done your management training and you might say that's not particularly a smart goal as long as we beat the live Ops apps in net uplift versus our sister apps in the in the company then we'll be pretty happy with that about being the best next slide please so what I'm going through um I think any good live Ops Department uh is simple has a lot of variety offering to the players and then from your perspective is well documented and collaborative and I'll go into each of those for now next slide please foreign so first off why it's important to keep Simple this is the enabler for every other of the fundamentals if we don't get this right you end up in the same hurdles that I did over the last five or six years keep it simple for the players means

that in your short-term engagement event or your short-term offer or anything like that players have the maximum amount of opportunity in order to engage with that possible if your event isn't simple people won't understand it you don't open up that potential for players to engage with it and eventually that will cost you Revenue let alone from the back office side that will hinder all of your abilities to do the next set of things and next slide please look for those quick adjustments what can you just turn on and off these are things like re-skinnable challenges and there's no shame in rinse and repeating your work especially at the beginning of building a department if you just want to turn something on and off it's it's super useful players don't always recognize it and if the mechanic is working well it's fantastic so re-skin the stuff and really reuse the things that have been proven to work well before change slight changes in configuration

make an event which used to last five days two days increase up some kind of currency rewards to players back in return and just slight changes to existing events is a really powerful way of just building up Your Arsenal quickly small boosters coin shop bonuses for example discount offers things like that they're all really valuable things to just be able to switch on and off and keep that keep the things churning out and keeping the game different every day next slide please and if you were to try and visualize what does your offering look like from your perspective if you have something like this where you've got not very very much depth in what you're churning out that's fine to begin with when I say size here what I'm talking about is kind of the the time it takes maybe to configure what you're doing or the length of time that the campaign could last for um all of those kind of things are fine and

there's some examples up there on the side where we're increasing bets up to 240 million whereas normally the cap is 24 million great way of just increasing the drain and keeping currency going through the game so that you can then start firing out offers and keep the circular life going round and round uh other things like it just as 10 coin shop boots that's one of our most popular things 10 coin shop boost we have a little flame on animation as well that the product team delivered for us it's fantastic next thing please slide don't serve the same meal every day keep things fresh and give your players another reason to engage and that's why um that metric before was so important of the over 600 different live Ops activities hopefully we're going to try and smash that again this year now that people have had their training plans and everything like that next slide please and so this is my point keeping things

simple helps to build up that Arsenal quickly I can tell you stories of my what I configured once was like my Flagship campaign after being a year and a half in the company I decided I'm going to make this most complicated thing well not the most complicated thing the best thing I possibly could it took weeks of configuration and the results came back and it was pretty average was really I probably could have done a 10 coin shot boost and got about the same uplift in Revenue um so it just wasn't worth the effort in liveops it probably is worth spending more of your time developing things when you work in maybe say product repeat those events which players love and react well to there's no shame in that don't overdo it don't keep running the same thing all day every day um but do keep rinse and repeating that's fine to do by the time that you start to see the attrition of players engaging with your campaigns you should have eventually built up more things in Your Arsenal things to you can start churning out so it's okay to do next slide please

eventually you can start to maintain depth or increase the depth of your campaigns and how they're linked to the core Loop by linking Games events together hey if you completed the challenges on Monday to Wednesday you unlock the great offers on Thursday to Sunday really powerful tool something that I believe Lego actually did over the Thanksgiving break I don't know if anyone's a big Lego fan variety though does not mean Randomness it doesn't mean just churn out any or different kind of offers oh we're on a match three game and I'm going to launch a first person shooter minigame it doesn't quite work keep things linked to the core Loop and in Cashman Casino for example an example of this uh Winsome currency by spinning and get spinning in game and then use that currency on the mini game that we might we that we might build it's linking it back to the core Loop every time and next slide please

not the sexiest subject but enforce efforts here and reap the rewards later down the line five years ago I would well if I would have been telling myself this five years ago I would have most likely been and said I just can't bother to do that I've got to do much stuff to do I'm trying to churn out trying to hit Revenue targets but coming back into a department four years later finding out that people had left the company campaigns had been done and run things have been lost in the archives it was like going back to square one again and just a bit background I I started off in cash mag Casino I moved around the business and came back to the department at a later date and found that these four fundamentals were just not there anymore and partly my fault because I didn't Implement them either so it's really important this one um but what does that actually look like it's all very well in good saying just

be just have good documentation but if you can go to the next slide please I can give you some more examples the first and major one a clear calendar now that could be whatever format you want it to be in but have agreeance with the rest of your game team or whatever app you're building that everyone understands what is going on in that calendar this is so important for the next fundamental of collaboration um and I'll go into that in a minute but the clear calendar will tell everyone what's happening why who it's targeting when it's it's critical and recently reviewing a struggling live Ops Department I couldn't even read their calendar and we spent three weeks building that up together before I could even give any advice on what they were doing wrong or offer any suggestions so this is critical neat readable intuitive calculations I kick off a little bit if I read one of my team's spreadsheets and I can't

understand what's going on straight away um because it slows down time I have to um bring people out of meetings and then I can't elaborate it quick good enough to other people that I'm trying to collaborate with the next piece I'll say is ideation prioritization documented this is a really powerful tool if you are able when someone comes up to you and says oh hey I've got a brand new idea why aren't we doing this it's really difficult to have a good comeback for that sometimes um you know you certainly start wanting your Natural Instincts sometimes to think oh yeah crap I better start doing that right now that's a great idea Mr director um but if you have a document which says these are the things I'm working on this is my road map this is why I believe this is the best tool for us to be working on um you can bounce that back they can also then gain the trust in you that

you're doing the right thing and that harmonious relationship between you and the rest of the game will just be able to flourish you can always say I can add that to the list of ideas and we'll prioritize it appropriately next slide please foreign do those other fundamentals and this is what it's going to enable you to be able to do liveops isn't really building things yourself it's it's collaborating with so many other people and people that work in marketing will be very familiar with this but first off that team that you really need to enforce your good collaboration with is your product team create more engaging live Ops events beyond the tool set that you've originally been given and negotiate and especially why that ideation documentation is so important is because you then don't fall to the back of the development queue of the product team the game economy team and analytics as well with game economy as you start to

scale you start to look at you know where I'm one of my sinks what am I and one of my Taps what am I putting into the game or what am I taking out and how am I putting currencies in and taking them away um having that balance and that giving all of those people those opportunities to pay is really powerful and optimizing that is what we do all day every day then with data science and analytics test and optimize your campaigns in better and more advanced practices um all the people I speak to everyone seems to have a different way from their data science team of analyzing a b tests and it the science just goes nuts as you go years and more and more years into a roadmap with the data science team you can then start looking at more advanced segmentation practices such as machine learning what's the other one rfm to just to name a couple and then finally you should be in a good position after doing this to start

having conversations with your infrastructure team is my tool set good enough to be able to turn things on and off to quickly configure things to and do all the other things that we want to do in order to be able to start hitting over 600 live Ops campaigns in the year next slide please So eventually you should start having your from your perspective then your um your offering should look something a bit more like this and some um examples on the right hand side here these are challenges now linking back to the core game do this on this kind of content and receive this or um in this particular example get a one hour pass to an exclusive piece of content just by doing a simple small challenge a Time limited thing a really powerful tool one that we've had for in the entire five years or six years rather of cash man so far once you get to that then you can take it even further to the next level and if you go to the next slide please even more so as the product team will start collaborating with you to start

building these kind of mini games so you can see we've got kind of a Monopoly board on the top right and even a little skill based event where you can click the uh well you can click the arrow and it will you've got to try and land it on the red dot in the middle one fun thing that we have seen in this skill based event is that as we keep re-running that event players are getting better at it every time next slide please so they're the four things keep things simple create the variety just keep it relevant to the actual game and make the time to document or you will end up in the same situation that we were after five years and then finding that knowledge has been lost with all of that involve collaborate and grow your offering to make you that vision of being the best live Ops Department you can possibly be next slide please

a little bit about product Madness founded in 2007 we have over 800 employees globally that's in seven Global hubs I think the most recent one is Canada but uh I'm not quite sure I've lost count of where we are is Canada thank you uh we're one of the top 25 uh Pub top 25 Publishers globally and we have six games um currently live which we're putting all of our effort into and a new games pipeline which is a bit of a secret at the moment in terms of what's been developed uh the and what I've been asked to say is that we are actively hiring so if my speech is uh done anything to try and encourage you to take you more knowledge or think about a new career choice let us know next slide please thank you very much that's it [Applause]

thank you Alex uh yeah so we have a time for like one or two questions does anyone have any questions yeah over there please could we get a mic over here oh we'll use this mic guys yep thanks running around does this work it does thank you very much for the presentation quick question so you mentioned you're working quite closely with the economy team to balance everything yeah could you explain a little bit more how much segmentation you do afterwards because they're probably players that you know have a lot of currency others have little so how how do you actually do that constant subject and constantly looking to improve it and constantly looking to change the segmentation per different campaign so there's no one-size answer that I can tell you but we can probably talk about after about lots of different ways but first we've kept it simple done very basic payer segmentations this is what a per person is normally purchasing at so

if we want to try and upsell them then we might do something like offer them a higher price point for a more discounted value or if they're a very low value player then we might just try and make them pay a little bit more often and in my experience depending on where you sit on a rfm segmentation if you take the basic four quadrants uh where you've got low value payers and that a low amount of payments you've got the high rollers in the top right it's easier to move those very low value people to just make that one extra payment and for VIPs it's easier to try and try and increase their average spend um so that would be what we do for monetization campaigns uh then we have more overarching segments which we're looking at using machine learning and clustering but every time we take a step forward and make something more complicated we also take a step back and keep it simpler again because we don't really want to be dealing with anything more than maybe a two-dimensional segmentation of maybe one way of seven segments and the other way of four and

instantly you've got 28 segments and it starts getting silly thank you at the house brilliant thank you Alex uh I think that's all we have time for I'm afraid uh so can we give Alex another round of applause please [Applause] [Music] [Applause]