Xavier Agulló

In summer 2018 I joined what was a small team of 6 people working on a word game prototype. The tactical goal was to copy an established word game, improve it and release it quickly.

The team was organized with a flat hierarchy and everyone was very competent, autonomous and professional. We had weekly reviews with the CEO of Socialpoint who truly energized us with his bold, action-oriented vision.

My main task there was not so much to design new systems, since we had a clear reference, but to handle the content (LOTS of content) in the game. Early levels were handcrafted to ensure the best experience, but later we were refining our tools to be able to create content automatically. By the time we released it world-wide we had over 4000 levels …in each of 7 languages! (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian and Portuguese).

By being in charge of the content I was also the main responsible for tracking the retention and conversion of the game. The game was live in a couple countries during all development, and a small continuous stream of new game users provided us with the necessary data to tweak and evolve the game. I was working side by side with data analysts to create and interpret dashboards to track player behavior. I had to optimize the early funnels for maximum retention, and later create the necessary pinch points to drive conversion.

The project was released after almost one year of development and kept evolving to become the most feature-complete word game out there. Eventually the project was able to acquire users while maintaining a positive ROI. However, the game couldn’t scale enough to become a hit and recently has gone into “maintenance mode”. I keep happy memories of my time working there, and I’m really proud the game made it so far …only a couple steps away from success!