Who We Are
Yalla Play is a venture-backed mobile games studio of about 25 people, headquartered in Abu Dhabi with team members in Brazil and Europe. We build and operate card games: our flagship, Spades Masters, has grown consistently for years and is played by millions. We are building toward a portfolio of card games, including Arabic-first titles for the MENA region, operated on one shared technology and Live Ops platform.
We reinvent classic card and board games with fresh mechanics, beautiful design, and social features that bring people together. Small team, big ambition, direct communication. Join us and be part of building something big from the ground up.
We are looking for a Head of Product & Monetization to lead the performance, roadmap, execution, and player experience of Yalla Play’s game portfolio. You will be the most senior product leader in the company, reporting directly to the CEO and partnering with him on every major product bet. You own what we build and why: product strategy, roadmap, monetization, economy, Live Ops strategy, product requirements, and KPI outcomes across our live games.
You will lead the Product function and manage the Producer and Art Lead, ensuring Product, Production, and Art are aligned around the right roadmap, clear priorities, strong execution, high quality standards, and measurable game outcomes. This is a high-autonomy role. We are looking for someone who forms their own conclusions from data and arrives with proposals, not questions. You will not be judged by the number of documents you produce.
You will be judged by the quality of your decisions, the speed of execution, the clarity of priorities, and the measurable improvement of our games.
This position is based at our offices in Yas Island, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Remote will be considered for the right candidate with Gulf-hours overlap.
What You’ll Be Doing- Own the product roadmap and KPI outcomes for our live titles: revenue, ARPDAU, retention, LTV, conversion, engagement, and economy health.
- Own product discovery, prioritization logic, product requirements, feature rationale, success metrics, and post-launch decisions for major game changes.
- Lead monetization and economy strategy: IAP catalog and pricing, offer segmentation, season passes, VIP programs, collection systems, ad monetization, and the balance between ads and IAP.
- Own the Live Ops strategy across events, offers, seasonal content, player segmentation, and content cadence, ensuring Live Ops is measured and connected to retention, monetization, and long-term game health.
- Guide game systems and product design: progression, rewards, player journeys, UX, economy changes, and monetization experiments, using dashboards, A/B tests, player behavior, and competitor analysis to decide what to build, cut, scale, or rework.
- Manage the Producer and Art Lead, ensuring Product, Production, and Art are aligned with clear ownership, realistic roadmaps, on-time delivery, strong execution, and visual quality that matches the bar of the genre.
- Establish lightweight product discipline: assumption documentation before build, design review gates, KPI reviews after launch, and post-mortems.
- Build the operating rhythm across Product, Production, Art, Engineering, BI, UA, VIP Support, and AdMon: roadmap reviews, Live Ops planning, prioritization, trade-off decisions, and performance follow-ups.
- Identify team gaps, quality issues, process weaknesses, and resourcing needs, and drive practical fixes.
- 10+ years in mobile free-to-play games, the majority in product roles on live titles.
- Hands‑on monetization systems experience: you have personally designed offer systems, passes, VIP economies, IAP catalogs, or similar systems and can reason about their math in detail.
- Ownership of revenue or retention targets for a live game, with results you can speak to.
- Strong analytical fluency: comfortable in dashboards, cohorts, funnels, and A/B results, and able to pull your own numbers when needed.
- Strong product judgment across game systems, player journeys, progression, rewards, UX, Live Ops, economy, and monetization.
- Experience leading…
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