UX Team Lead · 2023–2026 · Playtika
In a live game played by millions, better UX could not come from better screens. It had to come from how six designers make decisions.
Design UX decisions for business impact.
- My role
- UX Team Lead
- Platform
- 3
- DAU
- 1M
The stakes
One designer improves one feature. The team improves everything.
Bingo Blitz is a live product, not a single flow: core gameplay, retention systems, monetization, events, progression, social mechanics. All of it ships in parallel, on a roadmap that shifts constantly, to millions of active players. At that scale, one strong designer improves one feature. The only thing that improves everything is how the team works.
The key decision
Build the system, not just the screens.
The default job description was feature-by-feature UX: better screens, tighter flows, quality depending on who is in the room. I treated the role differently, as product infrastructure. Shared process, clearer connection to the product lifecycle, common templates and documentation, AI-enabled workflows. Quality becomes a property of the system, so any designer can hold the bar without me in the room.
In practice
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Structure
Strengthened the pre-concept and concept phases, aligned design reviews with taskforces, and set clear expectations for documentation and design ownership, so design enters product conversations early, not as a delivery step.
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Shared standards
Figma templates, presentation structures, and a living “UX Bible” the whole team designs against. Less visible than a feature launch; it is why six concurrent product tracks stay coherent.
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Evidence
Connected design questions to research and live behavioral data, so decisions rest on player understanding rather than taste alone.
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AI in the daily workflow
ChatGPT agents, Claude, Cursor, and Figma Make, used for sharper framing and faster exploration. The bar: the tool has to improve the team’s judgment, not replace it.
Spotlight: the Lobby (in progress)
The Lobby is the first thing a returning player sees. It has to answer three questions in seconds: what is new, what is worth my attention, what should I do next. After years of stacked features it answered none of them cleanly. Lobby and BCS are not launched yet, so there is no outcome metric to publish.
Product frames from the practice. Screens stay under NDA; the framing work is what ships week to week.
Outcome
- Designers
- 6
- Promoted to lead
- 3
- Concurrent tracks
- Shared standards
Design decisions grounded in player motivation, evidence, and business impact, whether or not I am in the room.
How the approach evolved
Early on, I tried to protect quality through comprehensive specs and review gates. It worked for predictability, and it slowed the team down and made them dependent on me. At scale, quality comes from the system and the people, not the documentation. Trusting the team to own quality, and investing in how they think instead of how they document, changed the work.