In 2018, I made the jump from working full time in game development, to working in web as a Product Manager. The difference was not as immense as I’d built it up to be, and would later quip that the only difference between a Product Manager and a Game Designer is that my Jira cards just read “User” instead of “Player” now.
Elo Entertainment
In 2018 I was hired at Elo Entertainment to work as Product Manager on Dotabuff, the most popular community site for Dota 2, a game which I’d spent countless hours engaged in as an active community member, and semi-pro player. They were looking for a subject matter expert, and got it. In total with Elo, I managed 1 existing property, and took 3 new projects from ideation to launch.
Reach.gg – While my first few months were dedicated to helping grow the feature set of Dotabuff and Dotabuff+, I would eventually get tasked with developing a semi-pro ladder system to help ESL surface the next generation of pro players. Myself and a team of expert developers and designers curated a website that allowed users to queue for Dota games, and would track their scores and statistics, which would later be used for for the “ESL Academy” draft. The draft had pro players hand-selecting a team of top players from the ladder, and coaching them to play in a side-tournament along side a Dota Major. While this Academy tournament never took place due to Covid decimating the live event circuit for Dota, I’m extremely proud of the product we produced, and the amount of prize money we were able to inject into the Tier 2 Dota scene.
TrackDota – After the Reach project concluded, I moved onto a relaunch of TrackDota.com. The original website had been acquired by Elo some time before, but was a stagnant site with outdated UI and broken widgets. I was tasked with reworking the match pages to be more modern, and to begin creating a hub for following Dota 2 that rivalled HLTV.org for Counter Strike. While I believe we achieved some of the primary goals of refreshing the site from it’s previously broken state, I felt we missed the mark on a few key pieces of value that were obvious from our user research. In our retrospectives, we identified a few key places where we should have stuck to our initial intuitions, rather than speculating on what our end users wanted on our own down the line.
Dotabuff App – After TrackDota launched, I was moved to working on a Dotabuff-branded companion app for Dota 2. This app can be used as an overlay or on a side-monitor to provide helpful tips during the game’s draft, and live during the game. It’s primary value is in assisting newer players in playing the game faster and smarter, and simplifying the process of gathering statistical information from Dotabuff when you’re in a live-game scenario. The app launched quite successfully, and currently has over 150,000 downloads with a 4.5 star rating on Overwolf.
Swarmio Media
In 2021 I joined Swarmio Media as a Sr. Product Manager. I currently work as the primary product manager in charge of feature developments for the Swarmio Hive engagement platform. We deploy Hive to teleco’s around the world as a value added service for their internet and phone subscribers. Users can log into the sites and participate in curated amateur esports events, influencer face-off challenges, and join community watch parties and in-houses. Users can earn points for their participation in these activities, and use the points to redeem for game currencies and pre-paid gift cards.
Since joining Swarmio, we’ve deployed this white-labeled platform to 4 different teleco partners and have continued to bolster it’s value and feature set for users.
Currently my position has me maintaining a roadmap of feature developments, working with developers and designers to implement new engagement features, analyzing our UI/UX flows to find ways to improve, and developing long-term, high-level strategies for company direction in the product space.