The best part of the day should be not knowing what you are about to win.
Surprise turned the psychology of the reward into a game: play, collect glossy “Surprise” eggs, open them, and win real prizes, from a gift card to a week driving a Tesla. I was principal product manager for the mobile apps, on iOS and Android, leading the parts that make a rewards game feel magic: the prizes, the animation, and the tools behind the curtain.
The most powerful motivator in behavioral science is not the reward, it is the variable reward: the not-knowing. It is why a slot machine is stickier than a paycheck. Surprise was built on that insight. Every egg is a small, honest gamble with a real prize on the other side, and the whole product is engineered around the few seconds before you find out what you got.
Neuroscientists call that gap reward prediction error. The design lesson: never reward every action the same way. Variable, intermittent rewards keep the brain guessing, and the guessing is what keeps you coming back. Every egg in Surprise is a prediction error waiting to happen.
It started as software for work.
Surprise began as a SaaS platform that used variable rewards to change behavior inside companies, aligning employees, managers, and leaders around goals worth hitting. The insight was strong; the wrapper was too narrow. So the company made a bold move: take the same psychology and give it to everyone, as a consumer game. I joined as that pivot was happening, to help turn a behavioral platform into something millions of people would open for fun.
Play, collect, open, win.
The loop is simple and it is everything. You play, quizzes and games that pay out in gold coins and eggs. You collect those eggs in your wallet, common blues up through chrome, diamond, and gem. You open them, the moment the whole app is built around. And you win: perks you collect toward, prizes you claim, dreams you chase three-to-win. Then the timer resets and you come back.
Open one.
This is the product’s core feeling. It works here too.
What I owned.
The prizes.
A rewards game is only as good as what you can win. I led merchandising: the prize catalog and assortment, from everyday perks to the headline dreams, planned so there was always something just out of reach worth chasing, and priced (in odds and effort) to keep the game fair and alive.
The feel.
The difference between a spreadsheet and a game is the feel, and the feel is animation and sound. I drove the reveal moments: the egg wobble and crack, the coin bursts, the round-complete feedback, the prize rivers, each paired with sound effects tuned so an egg opening is genuinely satisfying. I managed the animation team and worked shoulder to shoulder with design to get every frame right. In this product, motion is not polish, it is the mechanic.
The engine room.
Behind the game is an operation: prizes to source, partners to manage, data to read. I led internal tools, an operations dashboard (AliceAi) and a distributor partner portal, so the team could run the prize economy and the partners could supply it. The fun on the surface needs a serious machine underneath.
Built across two cities and a lot of time zones.
Surprise was fully distributed, with the core product and engineering teams in Kyiv and Tel Aviv. I led mobile product across both, shipping release after release, v1 through v2.09 in about seven months. Fast, remote, and genuinely global, with a group of people who cared about the craft of a good reveal.
In February 2022 the war in Ukraine began, and everything changed for a company whose heart was in Kyiv. The situation forced a restructuring, and my time with Surprise came to an end. The product does not get a tidy final chapter, and it would be wrong to give it one. What I carry from it is the work and the people: a team that built something joyful, under conditions none of us chose.
My part.
I was principal product manager for Surprise on iOS and Android, leading merchandising, animation, and internal tools through the pivot from a behavioral platform to a consumer game. I managed the animation team and worked closely with the design team throughout. I shipped quickly with a distributed team and helped turn a serious idea about human motivation into something that felt like a gift to open. It is some of the most purely fun product work I have done, and I am proud of it, ending and all.
Great games and great rewards share a secret: the anticipation is the prize. Surprise was a whole product built in that half-second before you find out. I got to design that feeling, and to work with good people a long way away while we did it.