Skillz powers competitive gaming experiences for millions of mobile players worldwide, hosting billions of tournaments with millions in monthly prizes. The company provides game developers with a turnkey SDK that allows casual mobile games to monetize through skill-based competition.
As Head of Product Design:
⇢ Led 4 specialized design teams (Mobile SDK, Web, App, R&D.)
⇢ Cultivated strategic partnerships with Engineering, Product, and Data leaders to align design vision with business objectives.
⇢ Implemented design systems and optimization to boost productivity by 50%.
⇢ Ideated improvements that directly increased player engagement by 40% and retention by 35%.
SDK Platform Redesign
COMPANY
Skillz
ROLE
Leadership
Feature design
DURATION
3.5 months
The outdated platform design required both usability improvements and visual updates. Poor design hindered developer adoption, created frustrating user experiences, and ultimately reduced monetization potential for game creators.
Goals
We aimed to start the redesign with the home screen, results, and player matchup flows. Product management committed to improve the following metrics:
‣ Increase games per player by 17.5%.
‣ Increase retention by 15%.
‣ Convert +7% of free players to paid.
‣ Increase user trust (NPS score to 50).
Process
User Research
‣ Defined our users (with product marketing).
‣ Define success metrics for testing.
‣ Recruited users, tested prototypes, & parsed results into actionable feedback.
Design
‣ I orchestrated a strategic three-day workshop, uniting cross-functional teams to plan the redesign, resulting in stakeholder-approved wireframes and a unified product vision.
‣ We implemented evidence-based decision making by conducting user testing with both internal teams and real users, ensuring solutions addressed real pain points.
‣ We streamlined the visual system with a modernized design language and default themes, reducing integration complexity for developers while allowing customization for brand alignment.
Improvements
‣ Beautiful default themes.
‣ Simplified SDK theme choices.
‣ Added upsell prompts to cash games.
‣ "Featured news" carousel instead of a full-screen popup.
‣ Accessibility checker for developers.
‣ High scores in usability testing.
Results
We didn't hit our targets out of the gate, but we broke down the design components and turned this project into a successful iterative updates.
What went wrong:
‣ Unrealistic KPIs for primarily UX/UI changes.
‣ No A/B testing due to time constraints.
‣ Too many people involved, leading to inefficiencies.
What worked:
By prioritizing key aspects of the holistic redesign and testing strategically, we made meaningful improvements:
‣ 25% increase in daily tournament entries.
‣ 15% boost in day 7 retention.
‣ 7% improvement in install-to-deposit rate by day 7.
‣ NPS score raised to 50.
Tiered Leagues
Company
Skillz
ROLE
Leadership
Design
Duration
3.5 weeks
The Leagues feature across the platform was a single leaderboard where players competed for prizes. However, a list of thousands of players made it difficult for anyone but elite players to place high enough to win meaningful rewards.
Goals
Create tiered leaderboards so that a player competes with a smaller, similarly skilled group. This gave players a much better chance of placing higher and earning rewards:
‣ Expected 14% increase in revenue per user.
Process
Research
We drew inspiration from other successful games, including one I had designed at a previous company. This reduced the need for extensive research and exploration.
Design
We chose a scalable design and incorporated our new brand colors. From there, I created a prototype (below) to test my sticky headers idea and overall user experience.
Figma prototype
I introduced the idea of having medals flow down to the Leagues tab, triggering a tooltip that displayed the player’s new leaderboard rank.
This single design change led to a 35% increase in users tapping on the Leagues tab and participating in Leagues.
Results
‣ 35% increased engagement in Leagues.
‣ No revenue data (I departed shortly after launch).
Skillz Console
Company
Skillz
ROLE
Leadership
Design
Duration
45 days
Design an OS platform for a customizable, curated, and dedicated Wi-Fi device provided to VIP players to enhance their Skillz gaming experience.
We designed the OS and hardware skins.
Results
This project was canceled during development.
Skillz Ads
Company
Skillz
ROLE
Framework
Create visually striking and consistent ads for in-game transitions.
