Product level
Reduce friction, improve clarity, and strengthen player motivation across key moments — starting with the Lobby, a product crossroads where navigation, monetization, events, and feature discoverability all compete for attention.
Bingo Blitz
Changed how six designers make decisions in a live product.
UX leadership at scale in a live game — building the conditions for better design decisions across a team of six, a 13-year-old product, and a constantly shifting roadmap. Publisher NDA — visual deliverables not shown.
Scale
Team & product
6
Designers led
100%
Team retention
3
Promotions to lead roles
Millions
Active players
13+
Years live in market
NDA
Screens & flows confidential
The challenge
Better decisions come from how the team works together, not from the design itself.
Bingo Blitz is not one flow. It is a living product ecosystem: core gameplay, retention systems, monetization, progression, events, social mechanics, and a constantly evolving roadmap. In that kind of environment, UX quality depends not only on screen design, but on how decisions get made, how the team works, and how consistently player needs translate into product priorities.
That made the challenge broader than feature execution — and broader than any single redesign.
Team level
Create better ways of working: clearer PLC alignment, stronger pre-concept thinking, better collaboration with PMs and taskforces, and more reliable design ownership across multiple product streams.
System level
Build shared standards (templates, documentation, design guidelines) that let any designer maintain consistent quality without me in the room. Less visible than a feature launch, but with long-term impact.
Workflow level
Improve how the team works by integrating AI tools in practical ways that support better thinking, faster iteration, and stronger output — not for novelty, but for real improvement in design judgment and execution.
Reframing the role
Stayed hands-on in product work while building the team and process.
I work as a hands-on leader — helping shape team direction, process, and design quality, while also staying close to the product itself. That means moving constantly between levels:
- Leading and developing designers
- Aligning UX work to product KPIs and studio OKRs
- Improving process and documentation
- Enforcing consistent standards across all concurrent product tracks
- Stepping directly into key design missions when the complexity or importance calls for it
- Improving the way the team works through practical use of AI tools
In live products, leadership loses value if it sits too far from the work. To influence quality, speed, and clarity, I need visibility into both the team system and the product reality.
The key decision
Treat UX leadership as product infrastructure — and AI as part of that infrastructure.
The default approach
Improve UX feature by feature — better screens, tighter flows, stronger individual craft. Each designer owns their mission. Quality depends on who is in the room.
The reframe
Build the conditions for better decisions — shared process, clearer PLC alignment, stronger templates, AI-enabled workflows. Quality becomes a property of the system, not of any one designer.
That shift changes what leadership produces. Rather than improving one feature at a time, it helps the team generate stronger UX work repeatedly — across people, features, and phases of a live product that keeps changing.
Principle
"In live products, better work comes from how the team operates, not from individual design skills. The process determines the outcome."
Design & leadership moves
Six moves. Each one shifting how the team or the product works.
1. Build clearer structure around how the team works
Reinforcing the PLC structure, strengthening Pre-Concept and Concept, aligning design reviews with taskforces, and creating clearer expectations around documentation, presentation, and design ownership. The goal: reduce ambiguity and make design work more visible, collaborative, and strategically grounded.
2. Create shared systems that scale quality
Reinforced shared tools and standards: Figma templates, presentation structures, and the ongoing UX Bible. Less visible than a feature launch — but it makes the team faster, more consistent, and better able to scale design quality across multiple product streams.
3. Stay hands-on in key product missions
Leadership in a live game means stepping directly into high-impact design work. That includes feature-level missions, cross-moment UX thinking, and the Lobby redesign — helping frame the problem, identify opportunities, guide direction, and connect the work to player motivation, product needs, and business constraints.
4. Push UX closer to evidence
Strengthened research, usability thinking, and UX measurement. Identifying where the product needs more player understanding, connecting design questions to research and testing, and helping the team think beyond taste or intuition alone. The goal is not research for its own sake — it is better design judgment.
5. Use AI to improve workflow and design leverage
Integrating AI tools into how the team works — structuring ideas, sharpening product framing, supporting design exploration. ChatGPT agents, Figma Make, Cursor, and Claude improve clarity and speed without replacing design judgment.
6. Develop the team, not only the output
Managing six designers means helping each team member grow in ownership, product thinking, communication, and craft. Assigning missions intentionally, giving feedback, creating clearer expectations, and helping the team build stronger habits around player lens, process, and collaboration. A stronger team improves the product through better judgment, not only better execution.
Spotlight
The Lobby: where navigation, monetization, events, and progression all compete for attention at once.
The Lobby is not just a screen. It is the first thing a returning player sees — and it has to answer three questions in seconds: what's new, what's worth my attention, and what should I do next. In a 13-year-old game, those questions are answered by a surface that has grown layer by layer without a complete rethink.
The redesign work addressed overload, wrong-click risk, notification inconsistency, and the clarity cost of new product layers stacking on top of old ones. The challenge was not to clean up the screen — it was to create a better decision environment for players while holding the business constraints of a live game. Screens remain under publisher NDA; the full scope and approach are available to discuss directly.
Outcome
The team now produces stronger work consistently — because the process improved, not because of a single feature.
The team works with more structure, shared language, and clearer product alignment. Design work is more connected to the PLC, taskforces, and documentation standards. UX decisions are more consistently grounded in player motivation, usability evidence, and business impact. AI tools are part of how work actually gets done — reducing friction in exploration, writing, framing, and execution.
The Lobby became a reference case for high-density product surfaces, and the process improvements rippled across all concurrent feature tracks — six concurrent design teams now work with shared standards, clearer PLC alignment, and more reliable design ownership.
Reflection
What stayed with me.
Better outcomes come from team process, not individual skill. The design that reaches players is shaped by how clearly the team frames problems, how consistently they maintain standards, and how reliably they connect design decisions to what actually matters. The screen is the last step, not the most important one.
Leadership loses value if it sits too far from the work. To influence quality, speed, and clarity in a live product, you need visibility into both the team system and the product reality. Managing from above means your influence arrives too late, or not at all.
AI tools are only worth using if they help us think better before we design. The value is not speed or novelty — it is helping the team think more clearly, frame problems better, and make stronger product decisions before the design work begins.
Early on, detailed specs created bottlenecks instead of clarity. I tried to maintain design quality through comprehensive documentation and review gates. It worked for predictability, but it slowed the team down and created dependencies on me. The lesson: at scale, quality comes from the system and the people, not the documentation. That shift — trusting the team to own quality, investing in how they think instead of how they document — changed everything.