Nordeus is now providing their clients with an enhanced user experience using powerful push notifications, resulting in improvement of all key performance indicators, especially early retention. In a session at Casual Connect Europe Miloš Milošević, Data Scientist at Nordeus, described a messaging system that opened up a new channel of communication with Nordeus users. Learn how they have tackled the problem of generating personalized notifications for each user, and then sent them in the right moment, based on their daily in-game behaviour. Miloš introduced best practices, as well as knowledge about message optimization, iteration and testing that can be translated to any game. Miloš explained that “personalization really matters” and advised developers to “really listen to your users”. Since Casual Connect Europe, Nordeus has opened, sourced and released the tool for push notifications called Pushkin.
Miloš Milošević is a data scientist at Nordeus, the European company best known for Top Eleven, the world’s most successful sports game. Miloš’s mission, as well as the mission of the analytics team at Nordeus is to provide the Nordeus teams with reliable, high quality, useful data, giving them key insights that will allow them to influence product strategy.
Miloš splits their time between data science and date engineering tasks, working on infrastructure, fine tuning the Hadoop cluster, and further developing their ETL process, with the goal of keeping the data pipeline running smoothly. Other tasks include finding ways to improve KPIs with machine learning pipelines and implementing them all the way to production, and creating new tools to expand and improve their reporting capabilities. Recently, Miloš spoke with Casual Connect about career choices and insights.
CC: What is your favorite thing about your job?
Miloš: The infinite possibilities and constant exploration, not knowing where the data will take you next. The surge of adrenaline when you think of the next big thing you could implement, and then the feeling of immense satisfaction when you lead the idea from whiteboard to production. Honestly, I think this sense of freedom and power is the most important thing to have on a job.
CC: How have your past career experiences been helpful to you in your current position?
Miloš: Before Nordeus, I worked at a tech startup and that has helped me greatly in my current position. In a startup, there is a lot of iteration on various possible solutions to a problem and things are constantly changing. This fast paced work rhythm is something you must accept if you work in the Analytics department as well. You constantly face various demands from different people, so you must prioritize every request and resolve it one by one. Also, and this especially applies to machine learning, you often don’t know what the best solution to a problem is. What you do then is mix and try multiple things fast, sometimes settling for a solution that is good enough but not necessarily the best. Learning that from my previous experience is probably the most valuable lesson.
CC: What inspired you to pursue this career?
Miloš: As a high school student, I was into programming and algorithms, so I competed in programming competitions at a national level which eventually earned me a full scholarship at one of the best computer science faculties in the country. As a college student, I continued to develop my algorithm skills which then compelled me to compete at an international scale. At one moment, I realized machine learning is the new set of algorithms everyone will need to learn. From that point on I striven to develop my machine learning skills which led me to pursue a career in Data Science.
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CC: How did you become involved in the game industry? How did you make your start? What do you find to be the most fun part?
Miloš: Game industry has always been the industry to work in for me, since I enjoyed playing games from a young age. Like I said, when it came to switching jobs, Nordeus was my first pick and the main reasons were that it is a gaming company and officially the best employer in the region, a true people first company.
The most fun part of working in a gaming company are the people. Their playful spirit plus the culture which company nurtures equals a fun and eventful day at work every day.
CC: What are some of the challenges you have faced in your current position? How have you overcome these challenges?
Miloš: While working on a game that has over 130 million registered users you tend to impact millions of people every single day. This is awesome, but at the same time it can be intimidating. When you know that one mistake can have a negative impact, it is a great responsibility. The easiest way to overcome this is to simply trust the people around you. One person can always make a mistake, no matter how careful he or she is. However, a group of people looking after each other is very likely to fix all possible bugs before they reach production.
CC: What do you do in your free time? What are your hobbies?
Miloš: I like to spend my free time with my family and friends, traveling somewhere or just relaxing with a movie. Also, my hobbies include playing video games (I’m quite hooked on Hearthstone) and playing guitar.
CC: If you were not in this industry, what would you be doing?
Miloš: I would probably be somewhere in the IT industry, doing a somewhat similar job.
CC: What was your dream job as a child?
Miloš: My dream job as a child was to be a programmer, so I would say I didn’t disapoint my seven year old self 🙂
CC: What has been your proudest moment during your career so far? What led to this moment happening?
Miloš: I don’t have one, but two important moments in my career to which I am equally proud of. The first is being a part of the team that designed, implemented and put to use our push notification system. Creating the system itself and then designing various machine learning models that utilized it to optimize our messaging campaigns consequently impacting our KPIs is definitely the most rewarding moment of my career so far.
The second moment is designing a new type of servers that allowed us to switch our ETL to an event based approach, redefining the way we think.
CC: What do you think will be the next big trend in the industry in the next three to five years? How are you incorporating this trend into your future plans?
Miloš: As far as the game industry goes I believe we will see the first VR/AR hit game in the next three years, it will be fun to see which major game company will plunge into the market first. Also, I think we will see some significant investments into the Eastern markets such as China and India.
On the Data Science side, with the popularization of deep learning frameworks, I expect to see more and more data scientists in gaming companies sharing their experiences with implementing deep neural networks to replace the more common models. As for us in Nordeus, we have big plans for the future.
CC: What have been some of the most effective tools for mobile marketing and retention at your company?
Miloš: During the years we’ve developed different internal tools that we are constantly using. Most notably, almost all of our internal tools are backed up by Tableau at this point, which we use to a great extent.
Besides that, we are using AppsFlyer and Singular. Considering the nature of mobile marketing, these two tools help to control our campaigns and analyze the results.
CC: How have you handled constantly changing technology? How have you been able to incorporate it into your business?
Miloš: Part of our jobs is to assess all new technologies that come out and figure out if we want to use it or not. Sometimes, the technology is good but a community doesn’t form around it so doesn’t pay off to use it. And sometimes, communities form around technologies and build them from ground up. It is very hard to predict where a certain new technology or a new tool will end up. We always determine the cost of trying out the new technology, the time that we will spend implementing it, testing it out, etc., along with the benefits it may offer. If the end result is positive we do it, if not we wait around more.
CC: What challenges did you have in setting up analytics and tools? How did you handle these challenges?
Miloš: Setting up analytics is always a very slow and demanding task, as well as scaling up when your game explodes. We experienced a big blow to our productivity when we transitioned from a traditional relational database to a Hadoop based one. I would say that it was our greatest challenge. However, in the end it really paid off as we are now far more productive than we could ever be with a relational database. The key to handling these challenges is to be prepared. Every time we knew a slow period was coming we warned our stakeholders so they were prepared as well. Also, never stop giving answers to the most vital questions, no matter what. In the end, that is the core function of every analytics team.
CC: What kind of other tools would you fear most of all as competitors?
Miloš: As a gaming company, I wouldn’t say we fear our competitors. We work hard and develop our games in the best possible way we can. If we do a good job, success will come naturally.
