Looking to TikTok For Trends and Product Madness' Alex Haley On Live Ops Made Simple

[Music] thank you hello and welcome to pg.biz our podcast again another surprise because my cat is upstairs I am down in the depths because this is well it was a dungeon it seriously looked like a dungeon because we did have a cauldron in the corner but now it has become the studio this is it this is going to be the studio where if all goes well in time for Gamescom we will have live guests here maybe even hell singer who knows but in the meantime yes I am alone Brian is off at The Fringe and he tells me he's getting some great guests there so I'm looking forward to that and of course here in my studio I have to show it off I just have to show it Off acoustic paneling this is going to be a serious place to have

interviews speaking of interviews we have Alex Haley he is principal games operation manager over at product Madness and we catch up we distill his very Punchy presentation from pocketgamer liveops Made Simple we distill it into a very short crash course just for you and following that well I catch up with Patty Toledo you may know her as the creative Mastermind who curates all the content at all the Pocket Gamer events will catch up with her as well but first with Alex we kick it off let it roll [Music] please Alexander Haley talking about live Arts at product Madness and that was the topic of your talk but more importantly it's your bigger message because it's not just that they are very critical now it's how you approach them how to get started how to keep it simple it's time yeah absolutely

um Cashman Casino in the past year uh we've Scout operations by a twofold um we've got half of our team and new starters over the past year uh yeah we'll still be managing to churn out um over 600 activities last year um of what we call in live Ops events oh activities um other Industries or other companies all seem to have slightly different definitions of what liveops is and we've called it any kind of short-term event effectively which is a communication to a customer set challenges and offer boosters time limited content things like that uh and really my whole speech this morning was about how to keep stuff simple how to get the ground running and eventually start to begin to scale your live Ops operations and evolve the experience for customers um but but by making sure that you're beginning with the fundamentals yeah you set it up for a question I have to ask what are some of those fundamentals for a short-term event

if you want to increase the amount of Engagement that you're going to get from your players and for your event you need a short learning curve people don't want to take on a very difficult complex thing to understand in a short time frame so enable yourself to make that engagement um as much as possible and ultimately make the most revenue from your campaigns by keeping it simple giving it simple that enables you to add a lot of variety Into Your Arsenal you spend too long configuring one complex thing and Your Arsenal is gonna strain because you've spent so much time trying to build the one big event the focus on those small little things you could do quick adjustments make a five day event two days and give people another an increased reward for it or something like that um those kind of things just like little tweaks that don't take too much configuration time but keep things fresh third one out of the four is to make sure everything is well documented and I

couldn't stress that enough um I've come into a team where everything isn't well documented people have left the business and knowledge has been lost and it's really pushes us back to foundations and over the last year we've been building everything up to where we need to be again and then the final thing if you do all of those things well you can then start to collaborate with your product team with your game economists or your data scientists uh and then you can start looking at your infrastructure as well and reviewing your tool set but it all comes from having all of those core foundations in motion before you start looking at things like other talks here are about Ai and machine learning all these kind of buzzwords that are around in marketing at the moment but you can't do them unless you've got your foundation set what are some of the events that you've found that maybe marketers aren't thinking about you know I was talking to people at other companies they're telling me something just as simple as a little bit of a

different type of reward a little bit of random uh rewards yeah mixing it up tell me one way you're mixing it up what we've been starting to do now is now that we've got to a single offering for all people with it's come from the segmentation more than it has the offering and we started there at the very beginning so we're now thinking of who are we targeting with what instead of what is going to be the one size that fits all we've got responsible gameplay to think about and we don't ever want to be seen as pushing people beyond their limits so the offering has to be different for those type of players to keep them engaged you are making certain to make that match between the events and the audience and the type of player what does that require in real terms I mean you're lucky over at product Madness you have your own data Department you've been doing this in-house but yeah people here at Pocket Gamer here you know they don't have that so is there also a way to keep that simple yeah um and this

goes so when I started in product Madness five years ago the game was a year old uh and the department was handed over to me in an Excel spreadsheet and said here's your flows off you go uh so it was Ground Zero um that we got told you are making any campaigns your art teams board what are you gonna do well I don't know um and that's where we started setting up all these simple campaigns one size fits all um and start rolling those out but again we didn't run before we can walk it started off slow and built up the Arsenal of things and as we then collaborated with data science and product we started slowly building up those tools over time and here we are five years later still keeping those same core principles of keeping everything simple but it's still a struggle to get there you know you don't have to be perfect but as long as the revenue's Rolling In from your activities that's all that matters at the end of the day and if you can keep

incrementing on what you've been doing every year you've hit your goals in targets is there a frequency for live UPS is there how often you change it up or how often you offer it seasonality is an easy one you know it's a certain season put a certain type of cartoonish character in it boom you're set for the season that's an easy one what are the others you only really want to be giving people like an extra couple of things to do on top of the core Loop otherwise then you're starting to build a different game entirely on top of what you're doing and you're taking people away from the core Loop which you want to keep people engaging and giving people opportunity to make that extra purchase so keeping it simple it's not just for yourself and your own understanding it's for the player as well oh I can see I've got my daily set of challenges to do over here and a one-time event for the year over here uh or I can just go and play the same game that is enough for most players you and so when you add in

seasonality and things like that um keep that in mind that you might want to run loads and loads of Christmas campaigns but people only got two arms don't pull them in three directions it's simple and that's on a t-shirt actually yeah you think about Alexander two arms not three directions yeah what about when you're looking at the events themselves and what you're offering because some marketers are saying I don't worry so much about that because I'm really getting the data I'm seeing the behavior so it's almost as if even even losing is winning in a way everything you should do should have a goal uh and whether your goal is retention um which it sounds like the person that said that kind of that quote it might well be we're churning out campaigns and we're keeping people attending the game we're not necessarily making more money that is a goal if you just want to keep your players in game and keeping your engagement metrics up but if you want to start making more money you need to think about

um what levers you can pull um and what mechanics you have to certain type of players to drive that extra Revenue it's a low value player as I said it comes back to segmentation of what offering you given to those players and what targets do you want those players to achieve and how will you do that and did you do it you talked about it before the types of events but I love hearing though like the weird the wild the wild successes like you wouldn't expect it and um there's got to be one product Madness that says it in the name there's gonna be some mad and Wild event or success that you can share yeah I've got a good one um it was a really simple one and this is why I love it so much um and three years ago I spent uh about four weeks on a single campaign um I was bored with the limitation that my tool set gave me um so I I pushed the boundaries I ended up having other people come and help me with my configuration uh with my

campaign design people querying it and everything and we rolled it out it's pretty average all of that work for something you know very average and it was really frustrating um and so then on the other hand these little tweaks and this is why I said they're so important one we did for new players uh instead of giving them a set of coins um after they go low on coins for the first time we gave people a choice um new installs only we said do you want the free coins or do you want to pay a dollar for like five times the amount of coins and this campaign was designed to be a an onboarding challenge for a new member of staff so that he could learn how to do a b testing and configure the tool and everything but what we were doing there is we'll give them people that fear of missing out and targeting a player at the right time and you'll hear a lot of people in their tool sets talking about doing that and that's what

makes their tool set so successful it's about targeting the right people at the right time we got lucky with that one um and so now we're looking at what else do we do with our onboarding journey uh and how do we carry on targeting people in that right way rather than spending all of that configuration time on that previous campaign I've described that's sinking in you know that is so super smart because if I'm a new player I'm like well I don't know how I'm going to be able to handle this so maybe I want more coins right now just in case I'm going to need them later I'll get for a dollar I get five times the amount I'll play longer even if I'm stupid I'll figure it out really really smart so what does that tell us about this because normally liveops was about keeping users engaged this is about taking advantage of that onboarding yeah that moment of not quite knowing what's going on and that yeah as you said fomo not quite confusion but things are vague yeah what does that tell us now about the

opportunities for liveops because now that changes the game like almost literally yeah so um we're actually called game operations let's put my title uh we were used to be called CRM and we rebranded because we felt like we were doing more in-game as well as external Communications which traditional CRM teams had focused on um so that's the whole reason for the Rebrand um but we did it with our in-house tool which allowed us to churn out events without any extra development provided to us by the product team so it allowed us to be really agile um and be able to try out these things quickly and I think that's the key there's sometimes you know campaigns you think are going to work really well because you put the effort into it and other times things aren't but that agility gives you the I the time to shotgun so many ideas out there test them quick learn from them and move on to the next thing and you can start getting small incremental Revenue gains over time by making those quick changes so that's the future is providing you with the tools

to be able to do things quickly and keeping things simple and collaborating with other teams so you can slowly evolve so you've got your own team very lucky you've got your own saw which probably people here would want to buy sure no no not gonna happen let's talk to people who building the teams looking for the tools not any particular vendor but what it does say is no matter what you're doing make certain that it allows you to be flexible fast adaptive yeah it's the unreactive um you want to be you want the ability to turn things on and off quickly change things quickly and ultimately be more engaging um and you may eventually hear a step in the road where you're reviewing your in-house tools and looking at the market and thinking I'm behind and it's something that we're going through at the moment is reviewing all of our tool sets and finding that there's big gaps and we're about to take on another provider now for some of our um some of our Communications channels and we're really looking forward to it

because the Leaps and Bounds that it should make from saving us time and turning us away from my live Ops managers spending anywhere between 30 and 70 percent of their time configuring things hopefully down to something maybe about 20 of the time and they can start prioritizing ideas properly coming up with new campaigns analyzing things in more detail and ultimately evolving their live Ops Alexander this has been a great and really helpful podcast interview for people who are moving down this road because we're hearing so much about live Ops you call it game UPS because it's CRM in it tell me just as a final note the team the team has to be behind it the team has to be a part of it building that team is the science tell me a little bit about your team who's on it what's on it um in in my direct team I'll say uh two senior managers and a manager who then manage everyone else a pair of nice pyramid structure forms um hiring those senior managers first off and making sure that you've got them

back to basic stuff like good Management training um enthusiastic people that are quick Learners and then hiring other people then that don't necessarily have to be brainchilds in uh a lot very heavy live loss experience especially when you're learning in-house tools previous experience that goes out the window but you need people that are going to be analytical and enthusiastic um and able to listen to and ultimately people are going to want to work with you and that you can understand you and that's been a challenge me with a bit of an East London accent working with people from Spain Ukraine Israel I've had to learn to slow down my speak just so that we can communicate properly because they didn't understand me for the first couple of months but getting those good Senior Management places those good management practices to proper personal development plans uh proper goals set Vision documents to align everything we're doing and making sure that we're all going in one clear Direction and focusing on all of our

documentation is really the key to making a good teamwork and then we have sub teams as life support so we have like the um our artists as well they don't report to me but they work as a kind of service desk and our partners we have the QA team after all are reporting to a central function as well um and then a lot of other functions are also kind of loan to us that we work with and it really enforces the kind of need to build good relationships with other teams uh instead of just one person deciding what the future is because I'm not going to be able to sit here and tell you what our perfect strategy is going to be but give me a little while and I'll talk to the entire team and I'll be able to articulate that back to you eventually um because I think the key to building a good roadmap is for a start it needs to be realistic and not just some idea of someone's cut out at the top of their minds for you to understand the full team capacity and then be able to have that good conversation says this is what I can deliver with my current team and tool set this is what I could do with

more like that you said it's about communication East London an accent although I'm American didn't knock me out so you've been doing really well working on that thank you so much for sharing and above all for keeping it simple this is something that everyone can act on so thanks again for your time all right thank you very much good to meet you [Music] and we move on to the next segment just wrapping up the show and also wrapping up the work as I said it was once a dungeon and now it is becoming a fantastic studio where maybe I will be interviewing you at some point but in the meantime yes I interviewed Patty Toledo creative Mastermind she is the woman who curates all the events for Pocket Gamer and she tells us how she has become and remains a top trends Watcher in the industry tells us a little bit about her background and gives us some tips about how we can

connect with some great minds in the industry as well and build that community so take it away Patty [Music] this is a great opportunity not only are we at an awesome show but we get to sit down and I've always wanted an excuse to speak with you and find out more about you this is perfect timing because I see you've got uh you've got your own agency man Patty for president that is pretty awesome I'll vote I'll vote but we know we know you as being like the woman with the energy the connections I mean the driving course one of the driving force is behind the events let's talk about you Patty so I mean you've already got a fan club where you come from anyway Patty tell me that story um I'm Brazilian but I haven't lived in Brazil for over 20 years now I lived in 14 different countries I did everything that you can imagine we could make a list I I did everything

and but I have been working with creative industry for the last 30 years and mostly because I love it I love music I love games I love films I love the creative force behind it and how much hard work and and sweat tears blood that goes into it and I like being involved in it I have to say I did see you it was I think maybe Helsinki where it was not just that you were moderating a panel I mean like you really put yourself into it and I thought you were a roadie and your bucket list is is like there isn't much on it right oh but that the funny ones that everybody goes like holy is um I used to be an MMA fighter I did pro wrestling I have uh I used to be I did all the courses to be as stewardess or flight attendant as we call nowadays and

and then I have a ton of tattoos so I couldn't be a flight attendant but I learned I had the license so I I have been a curious person that tried to learn as much as possible and get involved in as much as possible in my life but I mean it is amazing to curate an event like this because I've been to a lot of sessions and I think it's time to tell the pocketgamer.biz you know the whole Community what goes into something like this I mean what is it you are a trend Watcher you nailed it here some great sessions I love the inclusion in the metaverse my perfect my favorite personal um and some other cool stuff like how to make ads that audiences love so what is it how are you getting in touch with these Trends oh he eats a lot of research one of the things is that you have to never be afraid of learning new things and always be very humble in the fact that although I know a lot I know very little in comparison to The Experts

so it's always looking what is going on out there who are the trend setters and try to engage with them so they can share their knowledge I think this is the bottom line of everything is being always very open-minded about what is going on and pinpointing who are the most important people to be talking about that and sometimes the most important people are not necessarily the CEO or CEOs of the biggest companies they might be a programmer in an indie development company small behind the scenes but you have to really have an eye to see who are the the people like the key people that can share knowledge the most what I love about these events new names and new faces right so you got a different crowd here now you say you research them you do connect with them maybe you could point out just a couple gems because I mean we'll be seeing some of it in the coverage about the event in

the video videos from the sessions but give us your pick you're you you're a connoisseur you know who's Cole like this is the hardest question ever because we have about 300 people I will feel so guilted who who I pinpoint um I did a fireside chat with audio the CEO from sanglo and sunlo is a new company that I thought it was really interesting easy investment I know people think investment is dry but I thought it was really interesting that they tried to make a different point of view from the VCS and enjoy investors I really enjoyed uh the talk from space ape about what they are doing with the music verse just because music is so close to my heart and how they are playing with games and music at the same time I I thought it was extremely interesting I love the indie track I like I always love the indie track but I would say the

third one I'm gonna tell you was the AI track just because AI has been such a groundbreaking technology this year and I think we're just scratching the surface still there is so much that is gonna be doing it'll be done in the AI scene I'm really looking for for example for the next event of where we can tackle how AI makeovers and game development is all connecting each other that would be an interesting thing to see especially when people already realize that uh chat to pay can you can create a whole app with the AI you don't need to program anything this is going to be groundbreaking for a lot of developers so we had a really interesting talk in AI with Ludo about how they are using technology but also how Indie developers are using AI to change their marketing and making marketing more accessible and getting um art and and

it is really interesting to see how technology is playing with game development at the moment you're curating the event for Seattle as well right I do it for all the events but seriously you curate these events and you're like oh well I just read a lot and I connect with people that is an understatement man um give me an idea of what you're reading other than of course Pocket Gamer but you know there's got to be other places where should they be looking to find the cool people that you tap into normal things of course you have to be reading a Pocket Gamer you have to be in gamma sudra and and which is anymore but hey I'm old it was still going [Music] I like doing something that most people would go that's weird but I like seeing for example Tick Tock influencers what are the games that they are talking

about and the trends that they are finding um content creators in different social media they can be quite amazing for you to see what is not only what they are talking to the players but what the players are talking back because I think because we want to to educate game developers bringing them closer to the community is really important and they won't be brought to the community unless they listen to what everybody is saying including content creators um I try to watch as many talks from other conferences as well I think the key to be original is to know what the competition is doing if you don't know what everybody else is talking you tend to fall into the same traps all the time oh so I do that too and mostly I was also talking to people I think networking is key I talk to developers all the time I try to listen

to their concerns and then work that on on schedule as much as I can so tell me what your average day looks like because to connect with these companies these Trends this stuff which is you're right all the companies here have to be doing it I was in sessions where it was like well if you want to find out the creative that really works what you need to do is look at what people are doing on Tick Tock and what works there and what the influencers are talking about so absolutely finger on the pulse but that is like what is a day like that look like I mean you're going to be watching everything everywhere it's Marco it's Marco coffee yeah because besides that I have two other jobs so I I literally have three jobs I I do the content first to meet um the marketing director of a technology company and I do consultancy for a creative agency that's why you're so happy about AI maybe you can offload just a little bit I don't know I don't know no it's all time organization uh

it's trying to be as effective as possible uh with your time management so I work a lot but I try to get a really good balance between work and and relaxation over the years I learned what works for me how many hours I can do in which topic I'm very careful about having different jobs that have different uh mindsets so they don't compete to each other so doing one work uh relaxes the the others it's it's almost it's a Play Between the work but I end up working a lot there are some Secrets but I'm not gonna you could tell me later though right because I'm like I want to be like you man no seriously because you have put together obviously it's a team effort right but when I think about the topics here and where this is going what's up in Seattle give us a little look into Seattle one thing is not only knowing

what are the trends around the world is what resonates the most with that region uh and even though it's an International Event all the time you want to serve the community that you are offering the event at so a lot of things that are for example in the US there is a lot more focus on investment blockchain and nfts because that's really hard there and then you try to balance that with also a lot of talks about the Indies because you have communities like Seattle Indies and uh IGG Seattle that are very strong in that area and then you balance with also Triple A MPC because then you're talking Seattle you have gold you have Microsoft you have to be able to nurture the talents that are working on those companies as well so I always try to focus on what is it happening in the region what do they need and then do the

balance between both parts we need to know who is behind the scenes so here I am I purposely said Patty Spotlight on you now everybody knows about you are you like open to still more communication can everyone listening or watching say hey yeah you're right I want to get in touch with Patty or maybe vote for her right because it's president here this is serious this series here another another dimension that another dimension where we both belong but seriously do you ever say to yourself no I'm done I know enough people or hey this is like gonna open up new doors oh no there is never a thing like I know enough people or I know enough I think the moment you turned into I know enough you died if we learned anything from the pandemic is that we're nothing without our Network that's why I wanted to meet up with you I mean Patty you really are the real deal may I just put down the microphone give you a big hug

[Music] this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games market and all its wonderful complexity and strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at podcast pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter at pgbiz and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocketgamer.biz forward slash podcast and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows and we've got you covered on all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio

podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube if you want to read hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on thepocketgamer.biz website tune in again for the next edition of the perfectgame adult face podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future until then I'm Brian baglow I'm Peggy Ann saltz and that's a wrap until next week [Music]