Rob Alvarez
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The Secret Framework That Keeps Users Coming Back | Episode 417

  Exploring gamification for your product or org? Let’s chat → professorgame.com/chat

Episode Summary

Exploring where Marty Cagan’s Silicon Valley Product Group methodology and the Octalysis framework reinforce each other and where they leave gaps. He argues that product discovery answers what users need but rarely why they keep returning, that Power & Ease feature lists capture build effort but not motivational power, and that rapid A/B-driven sprints risk producing a black-hat-heavy Frankenstein product without a cohesive motivational system underneath.

About the Host

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

Key Takeaways

  • Product discovery and Octalysis strategy dashboards ask overlapping foundational questions about users, actions, and metrics, but operate through different lenses and rarely inform each other in practice.
  • The Power & Ease feature list typically scores ease of implementation rigorously but underweights the emotional resonance and Core Drive strength of each feature, leaving prioritization decisions partially blind.
  • Data-driven A/B sprint cycles tend to optimize for short-term Black Hat motivators (scarcity, loss aversion, urgency), which produce immediate metric wins but burn users out over time.
  • Battle plan engagement loops are missing from most products audited: users complete an action and reach a dead end rather than being routed back into the journey for motivationally meaningful reasons.
 

Mentioned in This Episode

 

Free Resources and Get in Touch

Rob Looking forward to reading or hearing from you, Rob   Full episode transcription (AI Generated) Rob Alvarez (00:00) So hear me out. What if every product discovery sprint didn’t just find out what users need, but also what keeps them coming back? There is where I’ve been exploring the overlap, yet also the disconnection between Marty Cagan’s Silicon Valley Product Group’s, principles, and also the Octalysis framework in gamification. Rob Alvarez (00:23) principles that product, strong product teams, as Marty Cagan likes to describe them, that they use, lead towards these teams being able to get very good at building useful stuff for their products. And that’s very important. Don’t get me wrong. That is really, really crucial. They also are very good at looking at the data and looking at what works in those immediate terms. You make some changes and see, A B testing and see if this works here and there. but they’re not necessarily looking even into what’s engaging, especially in the medium and longer run. In product mentality terms, discovery is what tells us what works. Gamification is able to also answer the question why it matters to the users. The overarching problem is these two worlds, so product discovery, so to speak, and motivational design, they rarely get to speak to each other. Valley’s Product Group emphasizes understanding needs before starting to build. In Autelis, you also start with a strategy dashboard. You’re defining and understanding what are you trying to achieve, who you’re achieving it with, what are their motivations. You’re thinking of what are the actions you are expecting these people to do. All these metrics and all that foundational work starts sort of in the same place. They’re the same conversation, essentially. what you’re trying to figure out is very correlated, it’s very close, and could, in fact, be happening at the same time. But of course, each of these two happen through very different lenses, which is something that can be sometimes hard to integrate. You could even say that this whole mindset of minimum viable products or MVPs can be mapped to some of the steps in the Octalysis framework, mainly things like the and Ease feature list, maybe a little bit of the brainstorming, maybe a little bit battle planning. But essentially, what you’re thinking is that if you run through these processes, you can come up with a better MVP. And I’m not saying better here because I product mentality also talks about you you don’t want to build it bigger. You want to build it smaller to test it out. And I’m not saying bigger, but better focused with better hypothesis to better understand more things, including motivation. And that is a place where you can actually start exploring how that can look. When we try to integrate these two frameworks, it’s just because the result can be something so much better. It’s not just about building functional products, which is great. They have to be functional. They have to be solving a series of problems that people want solved or are looking for a solution towards. But we also are building motivating systems that sustain that engagement. Long after they figure out like, yeah, this could be a solution for me. How can I integrate that into whatever daily, weekly or monthly usage? that I’m looking for after the launch. It’s not just that data that you gather immediately and very fast for the next iteration. It’s how does this look like in the longer term? So in this episode, what I’m looking towards is making that first initial exploration on how Silicon Valley’s Product Group or Marty Cagan in general, their flow and their principles can align to the Octalysis process. And also where we might start to think about building some bridges to be able to connect those parts that are not very well connected.

[03:42] Where product and gamification can integrate

Rob Alvarez (03:42) So if this has gotten you curious and you definitely see how the few minutes that we have left in this video are not going to be enough and you want to dive deeper into what this could mean for you, especially even more what it could mean for your product and your product team, please go ahead and look at the link that we have in the description because I’d really like to chat with you to understand how this could be of use for your specific situation. there are, you know, sort of three integration points or ways and places where I think I see things can be coming together. And I also have a place where things are like rather dark in the sense that they’re really, really going to be hard to see how we build those bridges. So let me share that with you. In general, when you’re thinking about how the discovery of products happens, You see when a is looking and finding these very strong needs and they figure that out, they build for that, but then the product is great, it is able to achieve those things that the user wants. The problem is what comes after. You build the product, people liked it, they discovered it. this is going back to Octalysis terms, the people discovered it in that user. or that player journey, They went from discovery to the next step. So depending on how you build it, that should be an onboarding phase. You might be lucky in many ways and have that onboarding. And then getting into the scaffolding, the problem is you’re not catering necessarily for getting people through those phases, not just because they want to achieve the result or the function that you’re building for, but because… they need, they want to get to those win states where they say, yeah, I achieved this. I want more out of this. And it usually has to go well beyond, yeah, the product promised this and I got that or that small piece of that so I can go on to the next step. usually these results are not very immediate. So you don’t get to a strong win state early on. Here is where gamification can uncover how we get users not just to go from discovery, that landing page where they say, yes, I’m excited about this. I’m going to sign up. But to then have that continued usage that can build you things like even a testimonial in the future. You want to be able to get those things together because the product mentality discovery tells you what your users want. And this is what we were discovering at the start. they want this. They have this need. They need this problem solved. What you typically don’t have integrated there is why they actually eventually take action. And maybe not just the action of going from the landing page to signing up, but everything that happens after that. So how might you layer motivation mapping into your next user interview? Those are the kinds of questions that you could be asking if you’re thinking through framework that can get together these product principles and also gamification principles, which of course I’m talking about, Octalysis because this is now my day today and I see the power of how this works with our clients. The second side of this is when you’re sort of choosing between two features, It’s like, do we do this or do we do that? Because for whatever reason, you can’t do both. They both test well, but they have a different depth of what happens after. Again, the typical exploration you do on the product mentality gets you only so far. You understand the initial actions and where they lead to, but what happens after that? Why are they actually taking actions? How do you prioritize which of these features has more power? And or because here it here the product mentality tends to be pretty good with a strong product team. Developers are very well involved and engineers are very well involved in the whole process. So you really know, tend to understand how difficult it is to build. But what it might be missing in the power ease feature list is they have the ease of implementation, but it doesn’t have the power of how motivational this would be to the user. Yes, it works, it ranks good, it gives a positive thing. How much of that positive? How is that going to look like for the user to come back to the app, again, every single day, several times a day, once a week, sometimes a week, once a month, whatever that looks like for your product. It’s not just about the effort that it takes to build that feature, which is important. You also want to have an understanding a very clear outlook on the impact, the emotional resonance that that new feature, that new part of the product might have. So when you’re thinking about your next MVP, your next sprint, what about thinking it also in terms of how strong those core drives are for the kind of user that you have, which you defined in your strategy dashboard, and how those core drives are actually going to impact their user journey, depending also on where in the journey, on the player journey they are at at that point. And there’s something else that can be easily overlooked when not understanding the product mentality also through the lens of gamification or sustained engagement after these launches. You go through these iteration cycles, these small things that you start building, and they give you these positive ROIs in each of them. but you’re not really understanding how that looks in a bigger picture, how that looks in terms of motivation and how, yeah, you test, oh, you have all the features and then you just change a small thing and having this new small thing actually improves. Like, oh yeah, that’s okay, that’s fine. how does that change the way the user is interacting? How does that change the engagement, the motivation they have towards the app? Is there something that I could actually do to not just make some changes, some improvement that give me those immediate metrics, but that I can actually see where my product is getting to that next level. When you think of it in terms of what we call in Octalysis is a battle plan, it reminds us how we are building engagement loops. We usually, when you’re looking at the apps that we do audits on, one of the key things that we tend to notice a lot is that the loops are non-existing for most of the case. you get to something, you end there, and that’s sort of the end of the journey. What about if that action leads you once again, whatever way is meaningful, if you’re thinking about the motivation of your users, how can that lead all the way back to getting them to come back? It’s not just about achieving that objective, but how that objective helps you understand things better further. And in the battle plan, this is one of the things that we’re taking care of. We’re looking into those game loops where people come back for the right reasons. So how can you plan for sustained motivation beyond that launch, beyond the users achieving a certain objective? How does that actually feed your user in terms of motivation to want to come back even more than before? Because they achieved that, they feel great about it, and now they also want to perform the next great thing. now I actually want to address the elephant or the Frankenstein in the room, A key risk that you run when doubling down and tripling down and a hundred times going down deeper in the product mentality that Marty Cagan discusses is that you start stitching together features that each, you know, start making things work better. And they, don’t get me wrong, they get you better metrics, especially short term metrics. But you start to struggle with that systematic view, that systematic understanding of what is going on. Not only, of course, in terms of motivation, but you’re just sort of adding mini things. And eventually, those mini things, if not understood correctly, it’s really easy to fall into, now we have this huge blurb of different things. How do we understand it? We might want to make an overhaul. of the app because this or that reason, or we change slightly the vision, or we have, you know, sort of a new kind of user coming in, how do we sort of cater for all of these nebulous different things stitched together? So especially when, and I’ve mentioned this a couple of times, when we have this classic view of data, you know, in rapid product cycles, this is definitely the case, right? You’re looking at the data. yeah, A-B testing, A-B testing, A-B testing. yeah, this worked better. You are not really looking into the things that happen after that immediate motivation. In Octalysis terms, you would say that you’re only tapping into that black hat motivation. And you could see how many games were very black hat driven. Like, you you don’t want to miss out or you need to come back. There’s a lot of scarcity. There’s a lot of casinos do this where, of course you can do this and do this and do this. But eventually people can can just be burned out or, you know, the motivation is not there to sustain it. in the future. like, do it now, do it now, do it now, do it now. Yeah, you do it now. But eventually, the do it now is not enough. Or it’s like, if I get off the cycle, I might finally manage to be able to get free of this sort of addiction that I get here. So what it is usually lacking when you have this very strong data focus is that you have all these things being stitched together and looking at the immediate results, which is what Black Hat tends to give you. the final product tends to be very black hat oriented. Problem is what happens in the long run. It’s harder to view this in that very data driven mentality. When you’re building that piece by piece in terms of sprints, you can easily end up with this Frankenstein as I was saying before, because you’re lacking an overarching theme, overarching view because you. you lose out on that power of building what could be called a cohesive, a systematic experience. Here is one of those places where I see there needs to be built a bridge because the way this is typically worked is like, we have, we build all these profiles and we do all this huge work, which is exactly the opposite in some ways of what the product principles will tell you. like, no, do these small things, small things. So this one has that thing you could say in the product mentality. It’s like, you’re building too large and you don’t know what’s going to happen. And here we have the huge problem of also building a frankenstein that is built only on black hat motivation. So how can we account for a proven process, scientifically proven with all the clients that, for example, The Octalysis group has had, it is a proven process like Octalysis. How can we help this very strong methodology also fit into the principles of product thinking. This is a place where I still believe there is a significant bridge to build and something that I will personally and professionally be exploring more in the future. So just to wrap it up, Silicon Valley’s Product Group’s mentality and principles, they bring us clarity and speed. Octalysis’ framework gamification gives us that heart, that drive. Together, I do believe that they can help us build products that people stay with, not just start with. And if you would like to explore this any further, there’s anything else you would like to see in these terms, something that you would like to look into, understand, I would definitely invite you to click on the link that I have in the description so we can chat about this even further and understand especially how this can work for your situation and for your product.

[15:53] Episode sign-off

Rob Alvarez (15:53) And as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over.   End of transcription

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