Product Leadership

Tugra Sahiner — Chief Product Officer, founder, engineer.

15+ years of building products across hardware, software, gaming, VR, payments, and loyalty platforms. Founder and CPO.

Megafortuna - CPO chapter, in specifics

Concrete outcomes from the most recent chapter — Feb 2024 to today, at Richie Games. The sections that follow explain the systems and principles behind them.

  • Built a cross-functional product organization from zero — product, data, UI/UX, and monetization — establishing biweekly sprint cadence, quarterly Demo Days, and OKR-driven planning where no prior product function existed.
  • Shipped or scaled 11 products across iOS, Android, Web, internal or external content management systems, and a partner-facing SDK/API — with additional multi-GEO expansions including Germany, France, and Japan.
  • ~10x product-led revenue growth.
  • Doubled the IPU through recommendation engine, quest systems, and offer prioritization logic.
  • Lifted CTI up to ~2x on best-performing offers, and roughly doubled RPI on best-performing campaigns as advertiser ROAS improved.
  • Designed the growth model and revenue equation underpinning the platform, and architected the yield management system covering offer ingestion, CPI filtering, reward scaling, RPC-based prioritization, and postback validation.
  • Guided KYC and payment compliance workstreams end-to-end, working directly with PayPal to clear the platform's high-risk merchant onboarding.
  • Led Customer Success Team as well, from Jun 2024 to Jun 2025, among my other CPO role and responsibilities. Owning direct advertiser relationships, onboarding, performance reviews, and account health across the demand side.
  • Built and maintained a sustained competitive intelligence practice covering 19+ named platforms analyzed in depth against a monitored set of 40+ across the mobile rewards category.
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, access controls, emulator and root detection, and event validation. In parallel to the workstream on the business side I owned: KYC identity verification for international users, payment compliance, and PayPal's high-risk merchant onboarding.

At Verifone, similar instincts applied — payment systems serving millions 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, unit economics matter as long as your unit economics do not clash with your advertisers' or your gamers' unit/life economics.  and any feature touches to incentives, RPI, RoAS are not standard features.

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

Owning both sides of the marketplace

A rewards platform lives or dies by advertiser trust. From mid-2024 to mid-2025 at Richie Games, I led Customer Success alongside my CPO duties — owning direct relationships with advertiser partners, running performance reviews, and closing the loop between advertiser expectations and platform behavior. Understanding the demand side directly sharpens every product decision on the supply side.

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: 19+ named platforms across 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 compare the progress of rival brands, and to position ourselves against them and shape the product strategy — 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 chronological résumé, see Work. For the founding chapter, see Founder Story.