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Retention & progression
Whether users stay long enough, and progress smoothly enough, to reach the part of the product that retains and monetizes. Annotated onboarding walkthrough, progression funnel, prioritized pacing fixes.
Engagement structure · Diagnose
Product & Growth Audit
1 month · fixed fee, agreed on the discovery call
Your live game or consumer product acquires users well, then loses them before they pay back what they cost. We audit retention, liveops and monetization, and hand your team build-ready specs it can implement, not a backlog of recommendations.
It's the same shape every time. Acquisition works and the early funnel looks healthy. Then value leaks out somewhere your dashboards don't explain. Sometimes it's a retention cliff. Sometimes there's no event cadence at all, or an offer model nobody has touched since launch. We find the leak, put a size on it and give you the fixes in the order to build them.
This is product and growth work, not an AI engagement, though it often maps the workflows an AI Build Program later automates. Patrick spent fifteen-plus years shipping free-to-play at PopCap (EA), NaturalMotion (Zynga) and Wooga (Playtika), on progression design, liveops cadence, economy tuning and monetization architecture. So the findings get past the numbers to the behavior causing them.
How it runs
- Kickoff
- Data
- Diagnose
- Readout
- Specs
Scope
Three modules: retention, liveops, monetization
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Liveops & engagement
Whether users come back for a reason you planned, or by accident. Gap analysis, a 12-week calendar template, an engagement-system backlog your team can run.
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Monetization
Where the model leaves revenue on the table, and where new surfaces could earn more without hurting what already works. Teardown, re-architected offer model, revenue-impact estimates.
What you get
Six deliverables, written so your team can build straight from them
- Audit report: full findings across all three modules, each as finding → fix → estimated impact
- Executive summary deck: the central thesis and the highest-ROI moves, built to present to leadership
- Feature and system specs: build-ready one-pagers for the headline fixes, each covering problem, mechanic, economy, segmentation and metrics
- 12-week liveops calendar: an event cadence ready to fill in and use the day it lands
- 90-day action roadmap: quick wins, mid-term and structural work, ordered by effort against impact
- Live readout and Q&A: a working session on priorities, recorded and shared
Commercial terms
Fixed fee, paid in two installments: half to begin, half on delivery. It's one engagement with one kickoff, one data handoff and one readout. You're not buying three mini-projects.
An optional monthly retainer covers hands-on implementation once the audit defines the work. The same operators who wrote the specs build alongside your team.
Fit
When this engagement is the right call
- A live game or consumer product with healthy acquisition that isn't reaching payback
- A retention curve with a cliff your team can see but can't yet explain
- Liveops that happen when someone has time, rather than on a deliberate cadence
- Monetization built early and never re-architected against how users actually behave
If the diagnosis points to the economy, to UA or to a technical problem instead, we'll say so in the readout and scope it as its own engagement. The audit exists to rule problems in or out, not to set up an upsell.
Next step
A 30-minute call with Patrick
Bring your retention curve. On the first call we'll give you our read and a straight yes or no.
Further reading
Churn prediction is the easy part
Most players decide to leave in their first sitting, so a churn score that fires after a week of silence reports a decision already made. Three games this year showed us how to find that moment, and how to prove a fix worked.
Live ops after AI
The AI that paid off in live ops sat under the calendar, in churn and LTV forecasting, where it puts a decision in front of a person days sooner. The talking NPCs and self-filling calendars vendors pitch first are the wrong place to start.
Live-ops AI: buy the plumbing, build the judgment
Every live-ops platform now sells AI, and the prices are public. Buy the part that ships config. Build the part that decides what to ship, because it runs on your game's own history.