WOW Once. Build Long-Term Loyalty.

Mechanics get users in. WOW moments build long term connections. Here's how Papaya builds products that earn attention - and hold it.

The question used to be simple: how do you build a better game than the one sitting next to yours in the app store?

Papaya real competition isn't only another bingo title or a rival solitaire app. It also includes Netflix, TikTok, and ChatGPT - every application competing for the same finite resource: a person's attention, on any given evening, with a device already in their hand. When the battleground shifts that dramatically, the entire philosophy of product development has to shift with it.

This is what we've learned building at Papaya - and why the lessons apply far beyond gaming.

When was the last time an app genuinely surprised you? Not impressed you with a feature - but made you feel something. That is the question driving every product decision at Papaya. Because today, we're not just competing with other games. We're competing on player’s attentions with Netflix, TikTok, and ChatGPT — and the only way to win is to create moments people don't forget.

Beyond Gaming: The New Battle for Player Attention

Netflix didn't just become a video service - they became a retention platform. They know exactly who their audience is, what keeps them engaged, and how to serve the right experience at the right moment.

The result: someone sat down to watch a Disney film, migrated to a Netflix game within minutes, and returned the next morning asking to play again. One evening. One habit formed.

That is a platform's outcome. And it is precisely this kind of thinking that defines Papaya's ambition - not just to be the best bingo game, but to be the most exciting player community in the world, where players keep returning because the experience genuinely earns their time.

Creating WOW: What It Actually Takes

"WOW moments" is a phrase that gets used carelessly. At Papaya, we define it precisely: a WOW moment is when every meaningful metric moves upward simultaneously - session frequency, time played, monetization, community conversation. Not one indicator. All of them, together.

When the Bingo Cash product team set out to shift player engagement, we didn't start with mechanics. We started with people. We asked players what films they loved, how they spent evenings with family, what they remembered fondly from childhood. The answer that surfaced repeatedly was nostalgia. Familiarity. The magic of something beloved and trusted.

That insight became a new game mode - Alice in Wonderland. The team broke the game mode entirely - instead of completing bingo lines, players guided Alice across a board of destinations. Immersive, narrative, genuinely surprising. Every metric followed.

The Real ROI: Building True Player Loyalty

But the numbers only tell part of the story. What we saw in player feedback was something deeper - a genuine emotional connection to the experience. Players weren't just engaging more; they felt something. The Alice theme sparked delight, wonder, and a sense of magic that players carried into our community spaces, our social channels, and into their own word-of-mouth.

Today, Alice remains one of the most loved and played mechanics in Bingo Cash. It drives our marketing creatives, shapes how we promote the game, and continues to be the experience players return to most. That is what a real WOW moment looks like - not just a spike in a dashboard, but a feeling that sticks.

This is the work our product and studio teams do every day - thinking creatively, identifying where we can initiate something new, and constantly asking where we can have a meaningful impact. Diversity of experience for our players isn't a nice-to-have. It is the strategy.

People don't return to a product because of its mechanics. They return because of how it makes them feel.

The Discipline of Starting Small

The natural instinct, once you have a strong hypothesis, is to build it fully. Launch it big. Back it with campaigns. That instinct is almost always wrong.

Before Alice, before the IP licensing, before the marketing layer - there was a bunny. A small character called Trail Bunny that hopped across the game board. Two development sprints. A narrow test. The sole purpose was to validate one thing: does a moving character create more engagement inside the core game?

It did. And only after that proof of concept validated the direction did the team expand - into IP, into a full game mode, into a monetization structure, into coordinated marketing. Each layer was earned by evidence from the layer before.

This is the principle we apply across every major product initiative. Build the smallest version that tests the real hypothesis. Measure it honestly. Scale only what the data validates. The approach is less exciting than launching a complete vision - and consistently more effective.

AI and the Next Frontier of Personalization

The relevant question isn't whether AI changes product management. It does. The question is what it actually enables.

At the team level, AI compresses the timeline between insight and action. Research, copy, documentation, data analysis - tasks that once required days or specialized roles are increasingly within a PM's direct reach. At Papaya, AI doesn't replace judgment. It removes the friction between a good idea and testing it fast.

At the product level, the shift is more significant. Today we segment players into meaningful groups. What AI makes possible is a different order of magnitude entirely - not dozens of segments, but hundreds of thousands of individualized experiences. Each player receives a different content cadence, different offers, shaped continuously by how they actually play.

An experience that gets better the more you play. That is the direction we are actively building toward.

Netanel Mor is the Product Team Lead at Papaya Gaming, overseeing product across the company's games portfolio. Outside of Papaya, he mentors aspiring product managers - helping them prepare for interviews, build their thinking, and break into the field.