Mehmet Yavuz Açıkalın
I go by Yavuz.
I am passionate about understanding, predicting, and influencing user behavior in digital products.
I combine my academic expertise in behavioral science, experience working in games, and full-stack data science toolkit to improve acquisition, retention, and monetization outcomes for games.
- Currently, at Electronic Arts, I am driving analytics and data science efforts within Respawn Entertainment, owning product analytics, monetization, personalization, and player lifecycle management for Apex Legends.
- Previously, I owned Data and Insights functions in executive roles at Silicon Valley gaming startups exceeding billion-dollar valuations, where I:
- Led teams of 10+ across Data Science, Data Analytics, and Data Engineering.
- Scaled the data function alongside the studio expansion into multiple titles and third-party publishing, ultimately touching 20+ published games exceeding $500m in revenue.
- Drove $50m+ in incremental revenue impact through hands-on work across in-app purchases, ad monetization, and personalization.
- Stayed technically involved, contributing to high-impact analyses and data products while mentoring teams in advanced experimentation and causal inference.
- Built data products and dashboards held to a paid-customer bar, ranging from developer dashboards to ML tools for driving product personalization and marketing automation.
- Hired and retained talent from the best companies in tech, while remotely managing teams scattered across 4+ continents and time zones.
- Got siloed product teams building with independent toolsets to adopt shared data infrastructure without the authority to require it.
- Owned company-wide OKR setting and forecasting, aligning top-down targets with bottom-up team perspectives across disciplines.
- Served as a key stakeholder in a nine-figure acquisition, supporting the M&A process from the sell side.
- I live in Southern California.
- I grew up in Turkey, then moved to the US for college.
- I studied Neuroscience and Economics at Duke, on a full ride from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
- I got my PhD from Stanford, where I learned a lot about behavioral science. I published research at the intersection of consumer behavior and neuroscience.
- I also contributed to an academic textbook.
- I helped teach Data & Decisions, Product Launch, and Marketing Management to MBA students at Stanford GSB.
- I got pretty good at coding and statistics by building experimental paradigms and analyzing large and diverse datasets for my research, alongside rigorous coursework.