Product Management: Smurfs Bubble story
Tic Toc Games worked with Sony Pictures Television on Smurfs Bubble Story, a free-to-play match-3 bubble shooter mobile game on the AppStore and Google Play Store. I worked as a Product Manager on the game from two months before geo-soft launch, until the game was about two years old. Working with my team, I managed live operations, A/B testing, and feature planning and development.
Highlights
Live Operations: With releasing 10-20 new levels each week, I had the opportunity to work pretty hands on with the leads and level designers on the game’s over 1000 levels! One process that I implemented greatly improved the weekly level tuning in particular. I worked with our outside contractor BI Analyst to create a dashboard in Tableau that was accurate, simple, downloadable. Then, I created a template spreadsheet that allowed the level design team to input each week’s new level data. They were able to see player performance—including win rates, boosters used, retry rate and more. Thus I enabled them to be almost completely autonomous in the weekly level tuning process. They were even able to use this to take initiative on other levels that they wanted to check and tune for retention an/or monetization as well.
A/B Testing: The game uses sales to boost weekly revenue. I also heavily experimented with our sales. At one point, I noticed one weekend sale (selling hearts) was underperforming regardless of conditions changed. I tested replacing it with a better-performing sale (selling boosters) to see if that would overload the economy with boosters and cause the Booster Sale overall revenue to decrease. It did not negatively affect overall revenue so I continued with the more successful sale. But I also continued experimenting on it — and other sales. With the success I saw around more ‘traditional’ holiday sales such as Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s, I also added monthly and even midweek holiday sales as opportunities to players - with good returns too.