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Getting ADDICTED to CAREER PROGRESSION is Easy, Actually | Episode 433

 

Have a product challenge around retention? Quick intro chat → professorgame.com/chat

Stop feeling like you’re grinding without a progress bar. In this episode, we explore the behavioral science of “leveling up” in real life to combat burnout and invisible growth. By applying the Octalysis Framework we discusse how to map your career as an evolving skill tree. Whether you are a product leader looking to build meaningful user progression or an individual seeking to reclaim your “Player 1” status, this episode provides a blueprint for turning disjointed milestones into a cohesive, high-functioning journey of mastery.

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.

 

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Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob Alvarez (00:00.024)
Did you just gain 50 XP for finishing that workout or was it actually a health quest that you completed? Imagine if every challenge that you faced from a tough boardroom meeting to learning a new language contributed to a visible progress bar. Today we’re looking behind the curtain of human motivation to ask what if life had XP bars? Real life growth is often invisible and this is part of what leads to burnout because our win states are too

far apart from each other. work hard, but without feedback, we don’t feel that progress. over 400 interviews with global experts and my work at the OctelSys group, I’ve seen how defining these metrics can turn function-focused tasks into human-focused engagement. In this video, you’ll learn how to view your career and perhaps even your life through skill trees, level ups to sustain long-term motivation. We will explore how to map

life quests, how to build your skill tree and truly own your own level ups. And if you’re some form of product leader, product manager, or somebody who is into this kind of products, and you’re looking for these meaningful progression systems where it goes well beyond those just broad points and something that makes the users really come back over and over again. Let’s have a quick chat, click on the link in the description and see how we can help you with your users to truly.

Level up. Nowadays, you can see me as the founder of the number one gamification podcast in the world. I also work at the leading gamification consultancy, the Octalysis Group. We also work with gamification behavioral science. You can see all these things nowadays sort of in my CV. But I also remember reaching out to experts every single week when the podcast started, struggling just even to find the first few guests.

Not going to lie. was also very lucky to get some of the very top people in the world of gamification, like Yookai Chow. Episode number one had some beginner’s luck, as we like to say. That’s one of the game techniques that we use. But in general, it felt like a beginner’s quest. was constantly being ignored by some people, quite frankly. Some of them just didn’t even reply, but I stayed committed for the long run. I saw this as a

Rob Alvarez (02:26.818)
quest and another quest and another quest. was initially getting this whole thing started. In fact, the first few people I reached out to, to send and to record the first few interviews, I didn’t even have really a podcast. was building a podcast. was going to, to share with the public. There were even some recommendations, which I’m honestly, still encourage people to do it that way. That when you start a podcast, you don’t just straight away publish the first thing that you have. You.

Maybe you want to accumulate two, three episodes so that when you publish it and people go in and see it say, it’s not just a starting podcast. This already has a few episodes. This person seems to be at least slightly committed into that. So I wanted to get those three and maybe other plus two, because I didn’t even know when the next guest would come in. If you don’t define what that win state is. And for me, it was getting my first five interviews agreed and then actually recorded. You’re just busy. You’re not progressing.

You’re not really breaking those big goals into smaller quests and they allow you to hit those core drive to development and accomplishment milestones more frequently. You can see how you’re getting better through each and every one of your quests. What is one of your main quests that helped you advance the main story of your own game you’ve been ignoring that would actually give you the biggest experience points, the biggest pot of experience points? Right.

Now my own skill tree has evolved from many different places very early on as a recent graduate software engineer graduate to being involved in politics as I recently shared to then being an entrepreneur in a very small company that we founded back home, becoming a product, a project manager, becoming a professor, becoming a product manager, becoming the head of engagement strategy in Europe, the analysis group.

Each role wasn’t just a reset. In fact, there’s a new branch. It was like adding product mentality to my gamification core. I was already building out of this core that I had, just like in any RPG character you have in video games or games, you have those core skills that you need to be able to progress through. Every one of those large quests, because each one of these roles don’t get me wrong, this was years in the making and reaching to the level to be able to…

Rob Alvarez (04:52.834)
do those roles and then being actually performing within those roles confidently and learning a lot still in the process. It was adding to my core so that my character could be more developed. Growth is essentially, it’s a core drive three process. It’s a lot of empowerment of creativity and feedback. You weren’t just gaining those points, those experience points. You’re choosing where to spend your effort to unlock new opportunities.

In RPGs, sometimes you get experience points and you decide where to, yeah, I spend it to gain this new ability. In real life, it’s slightly different. It’s more, what is the time that and the focus that I can dedicate so that I can actually gain those new abilities. When you decide on that, then you can creatively start searching out for those opportunities as well and continuously be growing that core drive to development and accomplishment. But then also using constantly your creativity because you’re not going from here to there.

you are actually building your own journey. So if you had to look at your career, let’s say, let’s start by career as a skill tree, which branch are you currently over leveling? Maybe it’s going a bit too deep. There’s some people argue that there’s no too deep in most subjects, but which one maybe have you already leveled up enough, at least for now, and which one, which is also meaningful for what you are doing is still at level one.

You want to ask yourself these questions and put it into the game mentality. So you understand, actually to get, I’ve been playing the Witcher a lot to get into that cave. I do not just need a lot of good strength with my sword. I also need the spell to be able, for example, the Igni spell, which the sense of fire, you need to burn through some of these things. It needs to be strong enough for me to be able to fight this good fight. Same thing happens with your career. So keep that in mind. If you had to look at your career,

through the lens of a skill tree, think about those branches. Which ones are already developed enough, at least for now? And which ones do you need to continue building, to continue leveling up and go in the right direction you want to actually take? And most recently, I can tell you that reaching this eighth anniversary of the Professor Game Podcast felt like a major level up. It wasn’t just, of course, the number of episodes or actually doing this for eight years in a row every single week.

Rob Alvarez (07:14.06)
It was also about the status that I’ve continually gained and all the opportunities of speaking, consulting, all these things that now I own. to remember how we started these whole stories with reaching out to experts in this beginner quest where people were actually rejecting being on the podcast because the podcast wasn’t even there. They didn’t even know about this whole thing. Was it really going to work? There were a few podcasts that had started and then disappeared. Was it worth investing that time that they were going to invest in the podcast?

Who is this person? mean, am I going to associate my, my status to this other person who’s doing that? And again, you know, thanks a lot, you Kai for being episode number one and being open enough to open the gates for many other things. When people knew you kind of already been a guest, also made things a little bit easier, but all the way back from that to getting to eight years in. And to be honest, it’s been a while since I last had to reach out to a guest because I didn’t have, I didn’t know what episode was going to come out next.

I’ve been getting inbound people asking to be guests, to be repeat guests for quite a long time. Now it’s a completely different situation. I own this. Now the real level ups are actually bridging that core drive to of achievement and accomplishment. They’re also bringing in a lot of core drive for that ownership. Now this is something that I own. It is mine. That’s a different between I did that to I am that I

It is now a part of me. Make your milestones feel like, like there’s something that, that you now are able to possess. is yours now. It’s not like, for example, it’s very different in the very old Mario playing world where you were advancing, advancing, advancing, but all of a sudden you lost your lives and you had to start over again. That’s not really how life looks like for most things, especially when you’re thinking in terms of your skills and the

capabilities that you have to build the life that you want for yourself. Even if you have a reset moment where you start over again, a new career, you have all the background that you have on your history. There’s many examples of this out there. In fact, you were talking about developing your life as a game. There’s the book by, by UK as well, 10,000 hours of play. He shares many stories about how people develop their lives through viewing that through the lens of a video game.

Rob Alvarez (09:40.108)
And that way of not losing what you’ve already advanced and all that story, I can tell you from my own story, you look at my career path and if you don’t see the end point, which is not the end point either, which is where I’m at currently, if you don’t look at that, maybe you start seeing many sort of disjointed and disconnected things that happen. And especially when going through that path, in some ways it did feel like that. Like it was not really, I’m now here, I’m now there. What about what I did before? How is this connected to this?

but you see it now and it all comes together. If you start framing it that way, you understand how you are currently leveling up and you wanna do it as intentional as you can. think of your biggest professional milestone, the biggest thing that you’ve achieved professionally up until now. Did it feel like they just put a badge on you? You just wore it for that day or during the event? Or was it a new permanent stage? You’re at a new level, you have a new home?

You have a new identity. Did that milestone say, now I am this, now I’m able to do these things, or was it something like, yeah, I did this thing and that’s it, it’s over. That is the way you want to consider your leveling up stories, not something that you kind of wear for a bit and then it goes to the trash or you never see it again. It is something that is now yours. Now you completely own it. Just to wrap things up, the magic of this whole XB bar,

Direction that we have been taking on this episode. It’s not that the bar itself. It’s not the XP points You know, we talked about gamification being a lot more than the points It’s the clarity that it gives you on your journey. You want to start treating challenges as quests your achievements the things that you’ve achieved as part of your possessions They are now part of you They’re part of that skill tree that you built and always remember it is you who is holding the controller you are

the player one in that story. You are not an NPC. So think about it that way. Think about it through the lens of building your skill trees and you will be able to achieve amazing things coming up. And if you’re, as I said this before, if you’re a, listening to this episode, if you’re a product leader and you’re thinking, well, this sounds great for personal life, but I might also like to do this as a meaningful progression system for my own users beyond

Rob Alvarez (12:01.228)
beyond just the points at the progress bar. Let’s have a quick chat. There’s a link below in the description and we will definitely find a way to be able to help you level up and engage your as you know, at least for now. And for today, it is time to say that it’s game over.

End of transcription