Rewards Club how-it-works preview
Redacted product animation showing how Rewards Club made loyalty value more visible and easier to understand.

Growth and Loyalty

Building the Casino Generosity Ecosystem

A flagship story about making casino value easier to understand, trust, and return to.

Leadership Question

How do you turn value that exists across the product into value customers actually understand and return to?

LoyaltyGrowthService Design

Hiring scan

Why this case deserves attention

This case study shows John can shape ambiguous product portfolios, align senior stakeholders, connect design to business outcomes, and lead beyond individual screens by building the strategic model that makes better product decisions possible.

Leadership role: Senior Product Design Manager leading growth and loyalty design
Timeframe: Multi-quarter initiative
Team: Design, loyalty, product, marketing, and operations stakeholders
Scope: Cross-channel casino loyalty and rewards model

See artifacts Product judgment read

Rewards Club A/B

+9% GGR

U.S. test period proved that generosity perception and revenue could move together.

Tier retention

64% → 68%

Full launch improved the share of users maintaining or increasing loyalty tier.

Canada test

+10% GGR

Parity-first expansion showed the system could travel cleanly across markets.

Business Impact

Rewards Club A/B testing delivered +6% APDs, +9% GGR, and a +9% generosity perception score in the U.S.
Full launch improved the share of U.S. users maintaining or increasing loyalty tier from 64% to 68%, validating the behavioral model beyond the test.
The same model scaled to Canada with +3% APDs, +10% GGR, 0 launch bugs, same TTM as the U.S. model, and 15% lower QA time per release.

Customer Impact

Made value easier to notice, understand, and feel across scattered moments by turning isolated rewards into one relationship model.
Loyalty-branded Reward Box drove 9–22 percentage-point higher open rates across loyalty tiers by increasing trust and clarity in CRM surfaces.
Loyalty-branded Reward Machine improved weekly Reward Machine retention by 5% year over year by reinforcing loyalty identity across core product touchpoints.

Team Impact

Created a reusable model for rewards, promotions, CRM, and loyalty surfaces instead of isolated feature work.
Gave product, CRM, analytics, engineering, and market-expansion teams a shared design language for generosity and retention mechanics.
Turned generosity from disconnected offers into a scalable growth and market-expansion platform.

Why This Mattered

The business problem, customer problem, and leadership role were the same system.

This flagship story matters because the commercial stakes, the customer experience gap, and the design-leadership opportunity were tightly connected.

Flagship narrative

The real opportunity was not to improve one reward surface. It was to make generosity feel like a coherent relationship.

Once the work was framed that way, business growth, customer clarity, and cross-functional alignment stopped competing with one another and became part of the same design problem.

Business problem

Rewards Club A/B testing delivered +6% APDs, +9% GGR, and a +9% generosity perception score in the U.S.

Customer problem

Made value easier to notice, understand, and feel across scattered moments by turning isolated rewards into one relationship model.

Strategic role

John's role was to move the work from fragmented feature delivery into a portfolio-level design and decision model: connecting customer motivation, business goals, research signals, and cross-functional priorities into direction teams could use.

Team / Scope

The organizational surface area

The people, systems, and product environment that shaped the work.

Team

Design, loyalty, product, marketing, and operations stakeholders

Scope

Cross-channel casino loyalty and rewards model

Timeframe

Multi-quarter initiative

Design Approach

How the work was framed and driven

The system John used to connect business context, product direction, research, and execution.

I reframed the problem as a product relationship challenge: define how generosity should be noticed, understood, reinforced, measured, and scaled across Rewards Club, promotional mechanics, CRM touchpoints, and loyalty surfaces.

Leadership operating model

Map

Connect

Clarify

Prioritize

Align

Scale

System

Design leadership

Map

Mapped where players noticed, missed, trusted, or misunderstood value across rewards, promotions, and loyalty mechanics.

Connect

Connected promotional mechanics and loyalty surfaces into one recognizable generosity relationship instead of a set of isolated moments.

Clarify

Made value, progress, and reward meaning easier to recognize so generosity felt intentional instead of incidental.

Prioritize

Used research and product analytics to guide which generosity touchpoints mattered most for engagement and retention.

Align

Built shared language across product, marketing, loyalty, and design so teams could make connected decisions.

Scale

Created a reusable design model for how generosity could show up across surfaces, markets, and programs.

Key Decisions

The decisions that shaped the direction

Tradeoffs that required leadership judgment, not just design execution.

Tension

Promotional intensity vs. perceived trust

Tradeoff

The business wanted visible, motivating reward mechanics, but overemphasis on isolated offers could make the experience feel noisy or transactional.

Resolution

Shifted the framing from one-off promotions to a broader generosity relationship so value could feel cumulative and more trustworthy.

Tension

Local optimization vs. ecosystem coherence

Tradeoff

Individual teams could improve their own reward surfaces quickly, but that risked deepening fragmentation across the overall experience.

Resolution

Introduced portfolio-level models and design language so local decisions were grounded in a larger experience narrative.

Tension

Speed of execution vs. strategic clarity

Tradeoff

Roadmap pressure favored tactical improvements, while the real leverage depended on stepping back to define how generosity should work across the whole system.

Resolution

Used research, mapping, and cross-functional alignment to create a strategic frame that still informed practical delivery decisions.

Visual Proof

Artifacts, screens, and working evidence

Selected visuals, videos, and redacted artifacts that make the work concrete without exposing sensitive detail.

Before / after value model
Abstracted system visual showing the leadership shift from disconnected promotional value to a more coherent rewards, loyalty, and generosity model.

Rewards hub overview
Redacted product screen showing a more centralized rewards view intended to make value, progress, and offer logic easier to understand.

Customer value network
Abstracted model showing how promotions, rewards, loyalty, CRM, games, and research signals connected around the customer value relationship.

Leadership swimlane
Redacted strategy artifact showing how design connected value surfaces, team responsibilities, and decision points across the work.

Behavioral value loop
Abstracted loop showing how discovery, action, reward, progress, and return behavior created a more durable engagement model.

In-game value feedback
Redacted product artifact showing how value feedback could become visible inside the play experience.

Measurement and operating model
Abstracted model showing how customer understanding, participation, repeat engagement, and business health shaped decision quality.

Reward drop mechanic

A continuous reward-drop sequence showing how generosity becomes a visible, motivating interaction instead of a passive account update.

Executive summary

The unforgettable version of this story is simple: value existed, but it did not add up.

The business was trying to grow repeat engagement, strengthen retention, and make value feel more compelling in a competitive market. But players often encountered generosity through scattered promotions, disconnected rewards, and loyalty moments that did not feel like one relationship with the product.

I led the design strategy that changed the question from “How do we improve a reward surface?” to “How should FanDuel Casino make value easier to understand, trust, and return to?” That shift gave teams a clearer product direction for loyalty, rewards, CRM, promotions, and market expansion.

Challenge

The value was there. The relationship was not.

Business pressure and customer perception were colliding in a system that had grown faster than its experience model.

In casino, growth and retention are tightly connected to motivation, reward visibility, and the feeling that the product is generous in a way that is worth returning to. The challenge was not that value failed to exist. It was that the value was distributed across promotions, rewards, loyalty mechanics, and product surfaces that did not consistently reinforce one another.

From the customer perspective, a player could receive meaningful offers or earn meaningful rewards and still miss the larger story. That was the strategic risk: value that is hard to understand is value that is easier to forget.

From the business perspective, that meant product decisions about promotions, loyalty, and reward communication had an outsized effect on growth, retention, and market differentiation. The system needed a clearer operating model for value, not just better local UX.

Leadership role

What John led

The work required design leadership across framing, insight synthesis, and ecosystem-level alignment.

Set the strategic frame for treating generosity as a product relationship instead of a set of isolated reward moments.
Connected customer insight, business goals, and cross-functional priorities into a shared product direction.
Defined the models, maps, and decision language teams used to reason beyond individual screens.
Led design and research influence across the product areas that most affected perceived generosity and repeat engagement.

Approach

Strategic approach

The work focused on the moments where customers either understood value, missed value, or decided whether it was worth returning for.

The core leadership move was to make generosity a product relationship. That meant defining how value should be introduced, explained, reinforced, measured, and scaled instead of letting each surface solve its own version of the problem.

Map

Map where value was getting lost

Looked beyond isolated rewards to understand where anticipation, progress, urgency, and return behavior were being created or disrupted.

Connect

Connect the moments customers felt

Created a joined-up view of how offers, rewards, loyalty signals, and gameplay-adjacent moments should reinforce one another.

Clarify

Make generosity easier to understand

Focused on making value easier to notice, easier to understand, and more likely to motivate the next action.

Prioritize

Prioritize the moments that changed behavior

Combined customer research and product analytics to decide which moments mattered most for comprehension and re-engagement.

Decision

Why it mattered

Outcome

Start with a system map instead of a single feature flow

The fragmentation problem could not be solved by optimizing one screen at a time.

Teams gained a shared model for how generosity should work across the broader customer relationship.

Focus on perceived generosity, not just reward issuance

Value that exists but is not clearly understood does not create the same motivation or trust.

The work made visibility, continuity, and emotional legibility part of the product decision, not downstream polish.

Use design artifacts to align cross-functional decisions

Product, loyalty, marketing, and operations each owned different parts of the customer experience.

Design became the connective layer for portfolio-level prioritization and tradeoff conversations.

+9%

GGR

Rewards Club A/B test improved gross gaming revenue while also lifting generosity perception.

9–22 pts

CRM open-rate lift

Loyalty-branded Reward Box improved open rates across every loyalty tier.

+5%

Reward Machine retention

Loyalty branding extended beyond CRM into product surfaces that reinforced repeat behavior.

Artifacts

Artifacts that made the system tangible

The strongest artifacts did not just show screens. They helped teams see how customer value, loyalty identity, reward mechanics, and business outcomes connected.

Reward drop mechanic

A visible, high-signal generosity moment that makes value feel active, motivating, and worth returning for.

Tradeoffs

The decisions that made the work strategic

The hardest decisions were not visual. They were about trust, coherence, and whether the organization would solve local surfaces or the larger value model.

Tension

Promotional intensity vs. customer trust

Tradeoff

Reward mechanics needed to feel motivating without making the experience noisy or overly transactional.

Resolution

Shifted the framing from isolated promotions toward a broader generosity relationship customers could recognize over time.

Tension

Local wins vs. ecosystem coherence

Tradeoff

Teams could improve individual surfaces quickly, but local optimization risked deepening fragmentation across the total experience.

Resolution

Used shared artifacts and language to keep local work aligned to the larger value model.

Outcomes

What became clear, scalable, and measurable

The outcome was not just a better rewards experience. It was a clearer model for how generosity could move customer perception, product behavior, and market execution together.

Outcome

Rewards Club delivered measurable uplift in APDs, GGR, generosity perception, and loyalty-tier retention through a joined-up rewards strategy.

Outcome

The model scaled to Canada with strong commercial results, 0 launch bugs, same time to market, and 15% lower QA time per release.

Outcome

Loyalty-branded CRM and product surfaces improved open rates and Reward Machine retention by making generosity more trustworthy and legible.

Outcome

The work made generosity memorable as a system: easier for customers to understand, easier for teams to govern, and easier for the business to scale.

Director Signal

Leadership signal

This case study shows John can turn a fragmented product portfolio into a memorable business and customer model: clear enough for customers to understand, teams to align around, and leaders to scale.

What We Learned

The leadership lessons that carried forward

The strongest case studies leave behind more than shipped work. They sharpen the operating principles behind future decisions.

01

Design the relationship, not just the reward

Loyalty systems work when the emotional logic and operational logic support each other.

02

Create alignment through shared models

Shared maps helped teams reason about offers, journeys, and customer expectations together.

03

Anchor growth in clarity

Customer generosity becomes more effective when the experience feels legible, intentional, and trustworthy.

Transferable Leadership Read

Why this case matters for complex product leadership

This section makes the transferable leadership value explicit: ambiguity, trust, systems thinking, research translation, and decision quality.

Transfer signal

Trust as a product system

Complex products need users to understand what the system is doing, why it matters, and when to trust it. This case shows the same leadership pattern through generosity, value perception, and system coherence.

Transfer signal

Behavioral feedback loops

The work connects product mechanics, customer motivation, and measurable behavior, which is directly relevant to emerging products that depend on feedback, confidence, and repeat use.

Transfer signal

Cross-functional judgment

The leadership signal is the ability to align product, research, analytics, marketing, and executives around a system-level bet instead of a local interface fix.

Outcome

What changed because the work moved

How the product, organization, and future decision quality improved.

Outcome

Established Rewards Club as a loyalty program that moved engagement, revenue, and perceived generosity together.

Outcome

Improved retention behavior and loyalty progression by making rewards, progress, and value easier to interpret over time.

Outcome

Scaled the generosity model across markets and CRM surfaces without losing quality or speed.

Outcome

Created a portfolio-level framework for how loyalty mechanics, generosity perception, and product design could reinforce one another.

Director Signal

Leadership signal

This case study shows John can shape ambiguous product portfolios, align senior stakeholders, connect design to business outcomes, and lead beyond individual screens by building the strategic model that makes better product decisions possible.

Building the Casino Generosity Ecosystem

Why this case deserves attention

The business problem, customer problem, and leadership role were the same system.

The organizational surface area

How the work was framed and driven

The decisions that shaped the direction

Promotional intensity vs. perceived trust

Local optimization vs. ecosystem coherence

Speed of execution vs. strategic clarity

Artifacts, screens, and working evidence

Executive summary

The value was there. The relationship was not.

What John led

Strategic approach

Artifacts that made the system tangible

The decisions that made the work strategic

Promotional intensity vs. customer trust

Local wins vs. ecosystem coherence

What became clear, scalable, and measurable

Leadership signal

The leadership lessons that carried forward

Design the relationship, not just the reward

Create alignment through shared models

Anchor growth in clarity

Why this case matters for complex product leadership

Trust as a product system

Behavioral feedback loops

Cross-functional judgment

What changed because the work moved

Leadership signal

Building product ecosystems, stronger teams, and sharper executive alignment.