First step: get real user feedback. Duh.
I ran unmoderated video tests via PlaybookUX, with a focus on positioning and product-market fit. The feedback on our premium accounts was brutal—and exactly what we needed. I made the whole team sit through it together. It stung, but it broke the bubble.
From there, we sprinted. New UX and UI updates rolled out with each release. Joe, a good mate of mine and our new CPO, came on around this time, and we flew—digging into user feedback, Amplitude data, and even meta adwords trends to guide iteration.
I kicked off monthly NPS surveys at the end of each season to gauge sentiment and spot patterns. We also spun up a private Discord group—XP Insiders—where I had open conversations with our most engaged users, power-user insights that often shaped upcoming changes.
I created the 3D concept of a battle pass to help ground the concept in reality
Conceptual art of future state of a customisable battle pass
A big push went into improving the mobile experience, since most of our funnel traffic was coming from Meta ads. I even dipped into ad creative myself—yep, another product guy yelling about marketing. But hey, one concept halved our cost per acquisition by reframing the value prop as a simple “effort vs reward” binary.
Outside of core design, I also worked on future-state concepts: web3 interoperability, cross-game identity, and how XP.GG could evolve into a broader ecosystem. A lot of this work helped shape our later shift into blockchain, covered more in the Cutthroat Chaos case study.
I created a seperate discord group for power users to provide feedback
We experimented with different rewards to get survey feedback
This was hands-down one of my favourite builds—mainly because the team clicked and we were able to respond to live data across the entire funnel.
We built something players actually enjoyed, with a strong community and a truckload of prizes handed out along the way.
Biggest misstep? Locking in the premium model too early. Once money started coming in, it became hard to experiment. Balancing free and paid tiers while maintaining reward economics takes time and iteration—and we just didn’t have enough of that runway early on.
For how we approached that challenge later (and moved the platform to chain), check out the Cutthroat Chaos case study.
Next projects.
(2016-25©)
