Every episode of the Professor Game podcast, hosted by Rob Alvarez of The Octalysis Group. Honest breakdowns of gamification, behavioral design, and the Octalysis Framework, applied to real products, retention, and engagement. New episodes weekly, plus interviews with leading experts.
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down algorithm aversion, showing why people abandon an AI tool after its first visible mistake, even when it outperforms them. He covers the 2015 […]
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Charlie Hopkins-Brinicombe, co-founder and CEO of Trophy, a gamification layer that powers features for around two million consumer-app users, makes the case for rewards beyond points […]
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob explains subtraction neglect, the tendency of teams to fix problems by adding features, programs and pilots while rarely considering what to remove, using his own […]
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down adoption target difficulty, showing why login counts cannot tell you whether a goal is set right. He covers a 2026 Journal of […]
Want in before anyone else? Join the Engagers and get early access to the November relaunch: professorgame.com/relaunch Episode Summary Rob marks Professor Game’s ninth anniversary by announcing the biggest format change in over 450 episodes, moving from one episode a week to several episodes […]
Don’t experiment on your own revenue with broken game mechanics. Get our guide “Core Drives in the Wild” to learn how to apply real behavioral science to your product: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Kristen Berman, behavioral scientist and CEO and co-founder of Irrational Labs, argues […]
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down why a product can feel stitched together even when every team involved did excellent work, using Conway’s Law as the lens: organizations that […]
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Mykhailo Rogalskyi, co-founder of Fintech IT-Group and the fintech unicorn behind monobank (11 million users), shares how a viral in-app scavenger hunt called Lemon Hunt […]
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down the peak-end rule, the finding from Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier’s 1996 study that people remember an experience by its most intense moment […]
Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Dan Shapiro, author of Decoding Genius: The Unexpected Lessons of After-School Chess Club, shares how a father-son hobby turned into a study of why chess has held […]
