Q&A: Hero Gaming CTO on sustainable success models and personal transitions

After finishing 44^th in this year’s EGR Power 50 rankings, Hero Gaming firmly has its eyes set on the future. And with the promotion of David Drottson from head of technology to chief technology officer, it marks a symbolic transition for the former Verisure man.

Drottson joined the Swedish operator in 2015 as a front-end developer, before accelerating up the corporate ladder to become head of technology in January 2020.

His move to chief technology officer in October came with heaped praise from group CEO Tomas Backman, who said Drottson had been a “crucial driver” of the operator’s recent success.

He tells EGR Technology how a structural reshuffle came about and why he was the best man for the job, how the success of Boom Casino is a replicable model and discusses internal improvements.

EGR Technology: What was the reason behind the restructuring and you moving into your new role as CTO from head of technology?

David Drottson (DD): We didn’t have a dedicated CTO before, and that role was shared between several different people who were taking care of parts of it. Some of those people included the founder Georg Westin who was, in effect, the CTO when the company was smaller.

As the company grew, he became more involved in entrepreneurial endeavours, which suits him really well, so our CEO Tomas Backman needed someone who would do the day-to-day technical and organisational work and I was there.

I’ve always been interested in these kinds of things and I had been doing some of them already so I said yes.

EGR Technology: What will differ in your role as CTO compared to head of tech?

DD: I will have more responsibility and there are areas that I wasn’t involved in before. And, of course, I now get to join meetings with the highest management to be part of the high-level strategy and decisions.

For me it is a gradual growth. I used to be a programmer at the company and then I became head of the front-end team and then the head of tech. The CTO now encompasses the IT departments, as well as some financial and legal responsibilities too.

EGR Technology: Going back to earlier in the year and touching on Covid-19, how did lockdown affect your company?

DD: Speaking mostly for the Malmö office here, as that is where most of my reports work, initially Sweden was never locked down at all. The only restrictions that affected us were from other countries who wouldn’t let us travel. In Malta, where we have a lot of staff, the situation was different. We couldn’t travel to Malta because it was locked down.

For us working in Sweden, it hasn’t been such a big change. The thing we are doing as a company is acting responsibly and letting everyone work remotely if they choose to and encouraging people to not use public transportation. We had to adjust a bit to remote working. We weren’t that much affected by the whole pandemic situation, to be honest.

EGR Technology: How has the launch of Boom Casino gone? And what, from a technology standpoint, sets it apart from other Hero Gaming brands?

DD: Boom is doing really well for its intended markets so we are happy about that. From a technology standpoint, we have had this multi-brand strategy for a while and so we want to be able to create localised versions of the products we develop that are able to fit the market they’re intended for.

The technology stack is pretty much based around modularity, so we are able to reuse the same kind of code, same functionality in multiple products and then skin them differently and extend them in different ways.

Boom was the first project we did that had that as a central focus. Boom was written from scratch but with this modular approach in mind, everything we made for Boom could be reused for other products. We could also replace some of the specific implementations in our existing products with the shared Boom ones and so that’s what made Boom kind of different. It’s more modular and I would say better written to be reusable than our other products are.

EGR Technology: Moving into the future, is this something you’d like to replicate across potential new brands by using Boom as a blueprint?

DD: Exactly and we are already using that. We are building other products that are localised versions of Boom. They are basically just customised and re-styled variants of the same product.

EGR Technology: It seems as if everyone is talking about it – what are your thoughts on the Pay and Play market?

DD: Pay and play I would say is a very good and responsible option in markets and countries that support a digital identification system. Sweden, and other European countries such as Estonia, I think, have a very advanced digital identification system with a bank ID which is tied to a specific customer and its security is high.

This, of course, makes it very easy in Sweden to not have to register players as they are using the same method they use for online payments, and therefore identifying yourself with a government authority or big financial institution.

We know exactly who that player is and they can’t create duplicate accounts. It’s great for when it comes to responsible gambling. I would love for more countries to have these types of digital identification systems. It would be very helpful for us, both from an operational and development perspective.

EGR Technology: What new technologies are you working on at Hero Gaming in terms of VR, AR, AI, machine learning etc?

DD: To be honest, I don’t see many of those things to be immediately applicable to us at the moment. We have a web application presence for the most part so we are not doing native mobile phone applications, and VR technology for web I think is years and years away before we have the performance to even consider that.

When it comes to machine learning, of course, you can use that for business intelligence. Making prediction models and forecasts, mapping out player behaviours, recommendation engines and things like that. We are doing a fair bit of it and have some exciting projects around it mapped out for the future.

EGR Technology: Are they any plans in the pipeline that you can give any hints away as to what you’re working on right now?

DD: We will aim to release other localised versions of Boom wherever we think that there’s a good market fit and there’s the player base to support the new product. From a technical point of view we’re also doing a lot of work behind the scenes to become even faster going forward while still keeping focused on not adding technical debt.

EGR Technology: What are your hopes and expectations as CTO over the next 12-24 months?

DD: I’m hoping to get the development department even more focused by creating clearer goals and a transparent framework. In the last couple of years we have seen a hyper growth taking place, which always brings challenges. So, my focus is to ensure that we, from a technical perspective, have the right foundation in place to deliver on the overall company strategy while supporting our other departments, so that we together can grow even faster in the future. That’s my ambition.