Professor Game Podcast

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down adoption target difficulty, showing why login counts cannot tell you whether a goal is set right. He covers a 2026 Journal of Marketing Research study of the Australian micro-investing app Raiz Invest and a randomized test in a popular free-to-play puzzle...

Want in before anyone else? Join the Engagers and get early access to the November relaunch: professorgame.com/relaunch Episode Summary Rob marks Professor Game's ninth anniversary by announcing the biggest format change in over 450 episodes, moving from one episode a week to several episodes on the same Monday, all answering a single question. He reveals the first of at least three changes coming...

Don't experiment on your own revenue with broken game mechanics. Get our guide "Core Drives in the Wild" to learn how to apply real behavioral science to your product: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Kristen Berman, behavioral scientist and CEO and co-founder of Irrational Labs, argues that personalization is overrated in product design, and she brings the experiment to back it up. She wa...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down why a product can feel stitched together even when every team involved did excellent work, using Conway's Law as the lens: organizations that design systems are constrained to produce designs that copy their own communication structures. He walks through...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Mykhailo Rogalskyi, co-founder of Fintech IT-Group and the fintech unicorn behind monobank (11 million users), shares how a viral in-app scavenger hunt called Lemon Hunt turned into the bank's biggest gamification win, and its costliest infrastructure failure. He walks t...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down the peak-end rule, the finding from Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier's 1996 study that people remember an experience by its most intense moment and its ending, not its average. He walks through how cruise lines engineer both moments with nightly raff...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Dan Shapiro, author of Decoding Genius: The Unexpected Lessons of After-School Chess Club, shares how a father-son hobby turned into a study of why chess has held people's attention for more than 1,500 years. He walks through Miguel Najdorf's feat of holding 45 blindfold...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down Gartner's prediction that 40% of large warehouse operations will adopt gamification by 2028, showing why the definition attached to that number (points, badges, leaderboards, and rewards) is the setup for the White Hat to Black Hat drift rather than a win...

Recently funded and aiming for sustainable retention? Intro chat (no sales pitch): professorgame.com/chat Episode Summary Travis Clapp, co-founder and CEO of Coursebox AI, joins Rob to explain how AI is reshaping course creation and delivery for a platform used in 180 countries with over 300,000 courses built on it. He walks through Coursebox's "Break My Brain" feature, an AI mode built for person...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real engagement programs: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down behavioral debt: the borrowed motivation hiding inside every legacy points, discount, or bonus program, showing why cutting an engagement program off cold is the fastest way to blow it up. He walks through JCPenney's collapse under Ron Johnson,...

Real cases pulled apart through the Octalysis Core Drives, sent to your inbox over a few days. Get the free guide: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down why the same reward can pull a team forward or quietly wreck it, using three cases where the design decided the outcome. He walks through a school in Caracas where escalating fines for late pickups made lateness worse, the sales...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Frédéric Guitton, who leads sales and marketing at iTargetGolf after a career across banking, startups, financial services, and investment firms, explains how driving ranges are turning dead space into an interactive, gamified experience. He walks through the company's p...

Want a sharper read on motivation design? Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, real cases decoded through this exact framework, one short email a day: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob argues that Black Hat motivation, the urgency and scarcity most designers treat as the villain, is the on-ramp that gets people to act at all. He breaks down the Octalysis Group's award-winning pro...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Michael Lukich, a marketing analytics leader with more than 20 years across consulting, data, and strategy, explains why the fix for a struggling team is almost never more effort. He walks through the closed-loop trap he built early in his management career, the systems...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products, with one real-world example in your inbox each day: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down why disconnecting on vacation is so hard for driven people, and why it is a motivation problem rather than a willpower one. He maps the specific Octalysis Core Drives that keep high achievers tied to wor...

These engagement failures, and how to fix them, map directly onto the Octalysis Core Drives. Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down why Amazon shut down KiroRank, the internal leaderboard that scored staff on raw AI usage on its Kiro developer platform. He shows how stacking Core Drive 2 (Development & Accomplishment) and Core Drive 5 (...

Struggling with retention, churn, or adoption in your product, service, or program? Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide and see how to apply real behavioral design to your engagement: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Alan Yeats, CEO of Pocket Sized Hands, a co-development game studio in Dundee, Scotland, explains why the best learning games start with play and add the curriculum sec...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real corporate cases: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down why enterprise AI adoption stalls even with paid licenses and training, while a group of students beat a locked, proctored exam with ChatGPT and no support at all. Reading both cases through the Octalysis Framework, he shows how the exam accidental...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide and see behavioral design applied to real products and services: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Eleanor Ross, Creative Director at Expert Theory and one of the youngest recipients of the National Training and Simulation Association's Top Under 40 award, breaks down how she designs wargames and simulations that put learners inside high stakes dec...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Rob breaks down why the most durable loyalty has almost nothing to do with points, contrasting a typical airline miles program with a neighborhood barber who keeps a customer for ten years with no app, no tiers, and no expiring rewards. He shows how the same Core Drive c...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Victoria Ichizli-Bartels, author of fourteen books on gameful living and coiner of the term "self-gamification," explores how the role of the tabletop RPG game master maps onto the inner conversation we have with ourselves. She walks through Jill Bolte Taylor's "brain hu...

Get the free Core Drives in the Wild guide, behavioral design applied to real products: professorgame.com/WildCD Episode Summary Tetiana Kobzar, product designer with 18 years of experience and creator of the Comportance Framework, joins Rob to share how behavioral design turns clinical and educational software into products people actually want to use. She walks through the seven steps of Comport...

Don't experiment on your own revenue with broken game mechanics. Get our guide "Core Drives in the Wild" to learn how to apply real behavioral science to your product: professorgame.com/WildCD Most apps lose 77% of their users within the first three days because they treat onboarding like a tax audit instead of a human journey. In this episode, Rob Alvarez breaks down why your "helpful" 15-step to...

Identify the exact strategies Sharon and Rob discussed so you can start increasing engagement in your own projects today. Grab our Core Drives in the Wild guide for free professorgame.com/WildCD What if the secret to solving real-world isolation or preventing misconduct wasn't more rules, but better play? Sharon Wood, a veteran gaming executive who helped launch the original Grand Theft Auto, join...

Don't experiment on your own revenue with broken game mechanics. Get our guide "Core Drives in the Wild" to learn how to apply real behavioral science to your product: professorgame.com/WildCD Most companies treat user churn as a data problem, but looking at "where" someone leaves doesn't explain "why" they lost interest. We break down the "Engagement Leaks," a phenomenon where record-breaking mar...