A team I'd want to learn from
Founders, operators, peers I'd choose to work alongside for the next five years. This is the top gating variable.
Patrick
McGrath
Fifteen years building consumer products at the intersection of AI and behavioral design. From launch to category leader.
- Phone
- Based
- Berlin, DE / Seattle, WA
Product
Leader
01 Targeting
Currently open to
Comp and title aren't what gates the decision. These three things are.
A problem worth solving
Consumer AI, behavioral products, ML/AI applied where humans actually use it. Consumer robotics too, where software is the breakthrough. Category timing matters more than category prestige.
Right fit on scope
Director through CPO for full-time. Higher Agency for fractional and project engagements. Comp and equity should reflect the level — they aren't what makes the role interesting.
02 Overview
Executive summary
PopCap → NaturalMotion → Wooga → Ten Square Games → Higher Agency + Alexandria
Consumer psychology product design. Behavioral psychology applied to cutting-edge consumer technology. Games are where this scaled, leading 100+ person organizations across PopCap, NaturalMotion, and Wooga, building ML personalization that drove $800M+ (40% of revenue) on June's Journey, shipping a $4B+ portfolio. Now running Higher Agency, building agentic teams and the Alexandria platform for consumer AI clients across finance, education, fitness, and food.
$4B+ Portfolio scaled
500M+ Users reached
100+ Team members led
15yr Product leadership
03 Point of view
On consumer AI
The application layer is the moat
The model layer is becoming a commodity. The application layer is where consumer value lives, and where consumer adoption stalls. Foundation labs are building developer tools. Claude Code without image generation. ChatGPT without delight. That gap widens for any consumer outside the US and Asia early-adopter bubble. The path to mass consumer AI runs through invisibility and clear value, not capability demos. Like the internet: nobody understands TCP/IP. Everyone notices when Wi-Fi breaks.
AI is a LiveOps problem
Frontier model labs ship like premium-product developers. Release, move on, release again. Real consumer products are LiveOps work. Shipping is the start, not the end, and the product evolves over months and years as users and trends shift. Gaming taught this discipline at scale. Fifteen years operating products that had to stay relevant after launch. That muscle is what AI will need as it goes from prompt-and-pray to products people open every day.
Higher Agency builds for it
Applications that solve a specific consumer problem, learn from usage, and improve through operation rather than re-release. Alexandria is the platform that makes that possible. 170 specialist agents, orchestrated, measured, and refined the way a live game team refines a live game.
04 Expertise
Core competencies
Deep expertise in ML product management, behavioral design, and scaling consumer products to billions in revenue.
ML Product Management
- ML personalization engine: $800M revenue (40% of total)
- Systematic A/B testing across features, monetization, and content
- Python/SQL analysis, multi-armed bandit optimization
- Behavioral segmentation via spend patterns
Cross-Functional Leadership
- Led 100+ org (engineering, design, analytics)
- 2x faster feature cycles, 40% fewer bugs
- Quarterly C-suite reviews, monthly OKR tracking
- 95%+ team retention through M&A transitions
Strategic Product Vision
- 3-year roadmap: $2B+ revenue across portfolio
- Quarterly board presentations (strategic thinking)
- Validated $100M+ ARR from $40K/day via research
- M&A product integration, 95%+ retention
Consumer Monetization
- 20x revenue growth, maintained 4.7+ app rating
- D30 retention: 15%+ vs ~7% industry average
- "Never overwhelm, always delight" principle
- Non-predatory F2P via behavioral segmentation
Data Analytics & Intelligence
- Analytics infrastructure for 100+ person org
- Monthly top-100 user calls (40% roadmap input)
- Custom segmentation, 85%+ LTV prediction
- Systematic experimentation, data-driven culture
Trust & Responsible Growth
- Trust/safety frameworks for 60M+ users
- GDPR compliance: EU, Asia, Americas regions
- Trust-first approach as competitive moat
- Hypergrowth without compromising trust
05 Capabilities
Where I lead, where I'm steady
An honest tier read on capability. Hard fit issues live further down on the page in their own section.
Strong
Where I lead and have shipped at scale.
- ML personalization at revenue scale ($800M from one system, 40% of total)
- Consumer monetization without predation (20x growth, 4.7+ rating sustained)
- Cross-functional org leadership (100+ people across eng, design, analytics)
- Product turnarounds and late-lifecycle optimization
- Behavioral segmentation and ML-driven LiveOps
- P&L ownership and board-level strategic communication
Steady
Competent execution, not where I'd headline.
- Growth marketing and paid UA (can run it, prefer to partner with a specialist)
- Python and SQL for analysis (not production engineering)
- ML systems literacy (run ML product teams, not an ML engineer)
- Backend architecture decisions (can read code, can't write production)
- Web3 and blockchain product (operated in it, didn't build the chain)
06 Career
Professional experience
Fifteen-plus years building and scaling consumer products from startups to $2B+ businesses.
01
Founder & CPO
Higher Agency
Founded Higher Agency (higheragency.solutions). An AI consulting firm building agentic teams and the Alexandria platform for consumer-facing AI clients across finance, education, fitness, and food. Parallel Fractional CPO engagements continue in gaming.
- Founded Higher Agency, building agentic teams and custom Alexandria deployments for consumer-facing clients across finance, education, fitness, and food. Agents learn from team usage patterns and company-specific work, compounding value as they're used.
- Built Alexandria, a multi-agent platform with 170 specialist agents across 22 teams. Pioneered GM-orchestrator architecture, recursive agent learning, specialized-agent testing, and drift detection. Patterns now standard in frontier-lab agent frameworks.
- Drove $2M+ revenue growth for an early-stage gaming studio via monetization redesign and behavioral segmentation (45% conversion lift) on a parallel Fractional CPO engagement.
- Led product turnarounds for 3 growth-stage startups by combining behavioral psychology research with data-driven product optimization to develop clear vision and executable roadmap.
02
Co-Founder & CEO
Moonlit Games
Founded a mobile gaming studio exploring mid-core ARPGs with blockchain and AI. Wound down when we recognized the crypto-gaming infrastructure wasn't ready for the audience we wanted to serve. Knowing when not to build is part of the job.
- Secured funding and partnerships from Polygon and ImmutableX to support an on-chain mid-core ARPG with player-owned economies.
- Validated market hypotheses through user research. Found that the audience we wanted wasn't ready for the wallet UX, and the wallet UX wasn't ready for the audience.
- Shipped a product vision combining emergent narrative gameplay with transparent token economies.
- Wound down deliberately when the gap between what was technically possible and what the audience would tolerate became clear. The decision saved a lot of runway.
03
Managing Director, Berlin / GM, Fishing Clash
Ten Square Games
Dual mandate: stand up a Web3 game studio in Berlin from zero while running Fishing Clash as GM (top-grossing Hobby game). The studio went from legal entity to a 22-person team in 12 months.
- Stood up a Berlin subsidiary from scratch. German legal, banking, payroll, infrastructure. The entire founding operation, in-market and solo.
- Hired 22 people in 12 months across engineering, design, product, and operations. Personally sourced and recruited half of them through direct outreach.
- Built the studio's culture and Web3 product vision while parallel-running Fishing Clash as GM.
- Negotiated partnerships with Polygon, ImmutableX, and major crypto exchanges to enable on-chain gameplay and asset trading.
- Navigated EU regulatory complexity for crypto gaming. AML, KYC, licensing across jurisdictions.
04
General Manager (GM)
Wooga (Playtika)
Hired to scale June's Journey from launch to category leader. Game was making $40K/day with no monetization infrastructure. Led product strategy delivering 20x revenue growth to $2B+ and #1 global ranking. 40 straight months of MoM growth.
Case study
"I don't think of it as a game."
Three months in, the team was on the phone with the top users from the game's Facebook community. The same line surfaced again and again: "I don't think of it as a game."
That reframed everything. June's Journey wasn't competing with Candy Crush for casual gaming time. It was competing with bath bombs, tea, and Netflix for comfort-ritual time. Players weren't there for mastery or competition. They were there for calm. The behavioral lever wasn't progression. It was emotional regulation.
What shifted because of it: positioning moved from "hidden object game" to narrative escape; monetization triggered around emotional state rather than skill walls; content cadence built around weekly chapters with cliffhangers; trust signals layered in because the audience was buying calm, not adrenaline.
The ML personalization engine that drove 40% of revenue ($800M+) was built on top of behavioral segments that one quote made visible: spend patterns, comfort zones, purchase rhythms. Each triggered offers tuned to that segment. 20x revenue growth to $700K+/day. 40 straight months of MoM growth. D30 retention at 15%+ versus an industry ~7%. 4.7+ app store rating sustained through scale.
That's the work behind "behavioral design." Working backwards from one person's words to the lever underneath, then rebuilding the product around it.
- Scaled June's Journey from $40K/day to $700K+/day ($2B+ lifetime, 60M+ downloads, 40 straight months of MoM growth) by building sophisticated growth, engagement, monetization, and LiveOps systems.
- Built the ML personalization engine driving 40% of revenue ($800M+) by segmenting behavior (spend patterns, comfort zones, purchase frequency) and triggering individualized offers tuned to each segment.
- Led a 100+ cross-functional organization (engineering, design, content, product, analytics, growth) with dotted-line authority across tech, marketing, and data science.
- Held industry-leading retention (D30 15%+ vs industry ~7%) and #1 global ranking in the hidden object category, sustaining a 4.7+ app store rating through 20x revenue growth.
- Implemented a two-track lifecycle system combining progression-based offers (pain-point analysis) with predictive behavioral segmentation (ML-driven). Drove $50M+ incremental revenue via systematic A/B testing.
- Owned full P&L with accountability for creative vision, business strategy, financial performance, and cross-functional orchestration.
- Expanded the entire Hidden Object genre from a $200K/day total market to June's alone clearing $1M/day. Grew the category 5x while growing the product 20x.
- Built Product Management and Analytics organizations from scratch. New roles, training programs, evaluation frameworks, career paths. Mentored 10+ PMs and analysts; several promoted to senior roles.
- Created the LiveOps PM role and reorganized product team responsibilities. Velocity 2x, ownership clarity sharpened across the org.
- Presented quarterly to the Playtika board and monthly to C-suite. Layered in trust and safety frameworks (fraud detection, GDPR compliance) and grew advertising revenue 80% via placement optimization and rewarded video (peaked at 25% of revenue).
05
Founder
Looped
Founded a consumer real estate web app that reimagined property search around lifestyle and preferences rather than traditional filters. Pulled signal from 40+ APIs (Google Places, Foursquare, government data on schools, parks, walkability, nightlife, economic indicators) into a contextual ranking layer that let users index a property against their actual life.
- Launched contextual real estate search with a ranking layer built on 40+ APIs (Google Places, Foursquare, government data on schools, parks, walkability, nightlife, economic indicators). Users indexed properties against their actual life, not just beds and price.
- 5,000 users in the first two hours at public launch crashed the backend. Spent the following weeks rebuilding the data layer to scale. Picked up coverage from TechCrunch and Startup Grind, demoed at conferences.
- Built a parallel investor view indexing properties on signals like rent-to-earnings ratio. Same data layer, different consumer.
- Proved data can be delightful when it's gamified. Most people don't want to do math on a $600K decision. The right ranking and visualization turned a stressful search into something people enjoyed. A lesson that showed up later in June's Journey's behavioral segmentation.
- Wound down when European property-data providers (three companies own the market) cut off API access and absorbed the consumer-facing features. The lesson that became a spine of Higher Agency: own your data, or someone else owns your roadmap.
06
Lead Product Manager
NaturalMotion (Zynga)
Hired to revive CSR Racing and CSR Classics, a $1B+ franchise with 180M+ players that had hit declining revenue in mid-to-late lifecycle. Redesigned the monetization economy around behavioral economics and defined the Product Manager role across NaturalMotion studios.
Case study
"Cheap car, expensive driver." — CSR Racing
CSR Racing was a $1B+ franchise stuck at industry-typical 2 to 5% F2P conversion. The behavioral problem was a perceived-value cliff. A $20 premium car was rejected by anyone who hadn't already committed to the game. The price was the floor of the perceived value, and that floor was too high.
The redesign separated acquisition from upgrade. Sell the car cheap. Set a low anchor, deliver clear value, get the player into the driver's seat. Lock the car to progression gates so it can only be raced later, after the player has invested time. Then upsell the upgrades at twenty times the car's purchase price.
Three behavioral levers stacked:
Anchoring. A $1 to $3 car set the price frame for "this game's prices." The next purchase felt cheap by comparison.
Endowment effect. Once owned, the car became "my car." Its perceived value distorted upward, and upgrades became investments in something the player already cared about.
Compound commitment. Each upgrade purchased made the next upgrade rational. The player wasn't choosing between zero and $20. They were choosing between $20 and the entire ladder they'd already started.
The result: first-time conversion lifted 45%, total conversion 33%, top-line revenue 55%. Conversion rates landed at 15 to 20% versus the industry's 2 to 5%.
The lesson: "raise prices" isn't the only way to grow revenue. Re-engineer where in the player journey the price decisions sit, and the same dollar feels cheap.
- Lifted first-time conversion 45%, total conversion 33%, revenue 55% via segmented targeting and personalized offers on CSR Racing and CSR Classics (180M+ players, $1B+ franchise revenue).
- Defined the Product Manager function across NaturalMotion studios. Wrote the PM playbook, established discipline, frameworks, and career paths for the new role.
- Created business cases for 2 new titles with financial projections and competitive analysis, presented to the executive team, secured greenlight funding.
- Embedded with game teams during prototyping to shape early product direction, not just post-launch optimization.
07
Sr. Product Manager
PopCap (Electronic Arts)
Inherited Plants vs. Zombies 2 post-launch (200M+ downloads, $1B+ revenue) when EA pushed the game out before its F2P economy was ready. The job was to fix the transition without breaking what made the IP beloved.
- Lifted first-time conversion 206% and total conversion 73% on Plants vs. Zombies 2 by redesigning offer presentation and removing friction in the purchase flow.
- Grew DAU/WAU/MAU 13%/28%/97% in one quarter through re-engagement campaigns and retention mechanic tuning.
- Built advertising revenue to 40% of total in three months by reaching out directly to McDonald's and Coca-Cola, bypassing the ad networks entirely. Direct deals added 2.5¢ ARPDAU on ads alone.
- Redesigned the live game economy across the player lifecycle through systematic A/B testing and player feedback.
- Defined and embedded the Product Manager role at PopCap post-EA acquisition. New responsibilities, frameworks, mentorship for junior PMs into the function.
- Helped shape PopCap's mobile-shift strategy across the broader portfolio.
08
Product Manager / Product Analyst
Z2Live (King)
Product Owner for MetalStorm: Online, a mobile combat game in late-lifecycle decline. The job was to redesign the monetization and content cadence to extend the curve, plus own the Apple relationship and market analysis for the broader portfolio.
- Grew top-line revenue 75% through monetization redesign, content cadence, and economy rebalancing on a late-lifecycle game.
- Lifted DAU 86% to a peak of 650K by tightening retention mechanics and re-engagement campaigns.
- Doubled advertising revenue via UI rework and ad placement tuning.
- Owned the Apple platform relationship. Featuring negotiations, App Store positioning, launch coordination.
07 Education
Academic background
Master of Science (MS)
Finance
Seattle University · Seattle, WA
Bachelor of Arts (BA)
Finance
Pacific Lutheran University · Tacoma, WA
08 Self-awareness
Where I don't fit
If your role looks like one of these, we're both better off knowing now.
Pure enterprise B2B
No consumer touchpoint means I can't bring my edge to the work.
Deep IC engineering roles
I'm a product leader, not an engineer. I can analyze data, not write production code.
Compliance-dominated roadmaps
Healthcare and education interest me. Gov tech, legal tech, and anywhere compliance dictates the roadmap more than the user does, less so.
Pure platform or infra PM
No user-facing surface means I'd be miscast against my actual strengths.
Companies optimizing short-term extraction
My playbook is the opposite: sustainable engagement and trust as a moat.