Product Leadership
15+ years of building products across hardware, software, gaming, VR, payments, and loyalty platforms. Founder and CPO.
Building the function, not just the features
Product leadership starts before the first feature ships. It starts with the system — the people, the process, and the discipline that make good product decisions repeatable.
At MegaFortuna (Richie Games), there was no product function before the CPO role existed. The vertical was built from scratch: hiring, prioritization, collaboration systems, structured planning sessions, discovery sessions, and cross-functional alignment across product, QA, UI/UX, data, and engineering. The team moved from ad hoc feature requests to an outcome-driven practice with clear ownership and prioritization.
At Verifone (formerly NYSE: PAY), the challenge was different — an established global corporation with mature products but no local product ownership for the EMEA expansion. The work was repositioning an entire portfolio of payment hardware, cloud services, and a ride-hailing app (Curb) for a market that global headquarters had never designed for.
Two different organizations, two different maturity levels, same principle: build the system first, then the system builds the product.
Data as operating language
Teams make better decisions with grounded data. The role of product leadership is designing that communication with data and embedding it into how the company operates.
At Richie Games, we built an infrastructure for monthly product sync of: marketing and conversion metrics, platform engagement through D0–D14 cohort analysis segmented by platform and geography, including ARPU and ad revenue tracking. Beyond reporting, a growth model was designed around the North Star metric, established a framework, and tracked per-offer profitability to per-user economics.
It is not about the specific metrics — those change with every product. The point is that product decisions became debates about evidence instead of debates about intuition.
Protecting the business, not just growing it
Growth without integrity is a liability. In any product where real money flows — rewards, payments, transactions — fraud prevention and platform security are product problems, not just engineering problems.
At Richie Games, working closely with engineering, we built a fraud prevention pipeline: per-game suspicious user analysis, fraudulent activity detection, KYC identity verification, access controls, emulator & root detection, event validation, and security protection on every build as well as layer. PayPal's high-risk merchant compliance was navigated to keep our payout infrastructure even more robust. At Verifone, similar instincts applied — payment systems serving tens of thousands of users across Istanbul demanded reliability and security at the infrastructure level.
A product leader who only thinks about growth is building on sand.
Platform thinking
Strong product leadership thinks in systems, not features. The question isn't "what to build next" — it is "how to acquire & serve more users, more partners, and more channels."
At Richie Games, we expanded a single Android app into a multi-platform ecosystem: an iOS app with wallet integration, a web platform from competitor research through launch, and an Offerwall SDK with checkpoint-based milestones and cap management — productized for third-party distribution. All products were launched among countries & continents, from the US to Japan.
Each expansion and launch required rethinking the architecture — for local users, multi-app support, unified analytics, and a campaign management system that could serve all channels simultaneously.
Revenue optimization as a product discipline
In loyalty platforms, yield management and pricing are core product mechanisms not standard features — not finance or ops afterthoughts.
We, at Richie Games, designed a yield management system: offer ingestion from aggregators and direct partners, CPI filtering and reward scaling, RPC-based offer prioritization, and postback validation. Monetization experiments followed — opt-in campaigns with delayed reward crediting, pre-rewarding with upfront incentives, pre-reward mechanisms triggered by in-app activity. Behavioral incentive structures, not just feature launches.
Real-time systems supported this: an offer ranker, a forecast-aware cap manager, a limited dashboard model, genre-based recommendation routing, a personalization engine, and RoAS-driven optimization loops. Revenue is the ultimate north star metric you have to design for the long term, not something you manipulate for short-term peaks — it's a system you design.
Competitive intelligence as infrastructure
Understanding the competitive landscape isn't a quarterly exercise — it's a continuous, measurable practice.
A systematic competitive intelligence framework with AI-driven sentiment analysis was established at Richie Games to monitor the rewards discovery space: Mistplay, Testerup, Swagbucks, FreeCash, Gamee, and others. Automated review mining analyzed over a thousand user reviews per competitor in a repeatable setup designed for longitudinal comparison. The output was designed to be compare the progress of rival brands as well as position ourselves against them and shape the product strategy and positioning — not as a one-time report, but as a living input.
Product culture
Product leadership outlasts any single roadmap. The operating system matters more than any individual feature. My ultimate goal is always a team that makes strong product decisions whether the CPO is in the room or not.
For the founding journey — building a wearable VR company from a university lab to 50+ countries — read the Founder Story.