“All of us as analysts, when we look at our user base and our data, what we are actually trying to do is decipher the story being told to us by the end user,” Yaniv Leven said to his audience at Casual Connect USA 2014.
Yaniv Leven, COO of Win, loves the challenge of quantifying fun. The most satisfying aspect of his career is being able to understand what players like by empirically testing different behavior patterns. This testing has led them to rethink features in their applications and tailor them to the players’ needs. The result has been greater engagement of users and a substantial increase in revenue.
Building Up
Leven is also very proud of the way Win has built their community from the bottom up by really trying to give personal support and care to all their players and listening to their needs.
At Win, Leven is responsible for general operations and analytics, heading marketing, CRM, analytics and finance divisions. In the past, he worked on complex statistical models in the finance industry. Building statistical models was the foundation for developing the analytics methodology he uses in his present work.
A Chance Encounter
Leven says his involvement in the games industry happened by chance. Because of his experience in finance, a friend asked him to join his company as CFO. His background in statistics meant that he was soon involved with building the analytics methodology of the company. The social games industry was in the early stages, and he grew along with it. He says, “As analytics went on to become a central part of the industry, the more intriguing the industry became to me. The vast amount of data waiting to be deciphered and organized to reveal quantifiable player behavior offers an amazing challenge to those who like to question why.”
For personal enjoyment, Leven loves to play Gameloft’s Rival Knights. He has also been playing Supercell’s Clash of Clans and EA’s Plants vs Zombies. The significant characteristic these games share is their ability to give the user the full flow of the game in many short and fulfilling sessions. This is the type of play best suited to his schedule.
The main platform he plays on is mobile. He prefers using his iPhone because of its user-friendly UI, but he admits he hasn’t yet played much on Android. But he doesn’t own any console, saying he is just not a console guy.
Besides gaming, Leven’s hobbies are running and cycling. He tries to run a half-marathon every weekend.
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