Brian Selzer
Product & Platform Leadership · Participation · Retention · Scale
Gaming · AI · Spatial Computing · Identity Systems · Emerging Platforms
I've seen this happen before.Mobile broke the rules of desktop. AR broke the rules of mobile. Spatial computing broke the rules of screens. AI is breaking the rules of everything that came before it. I've shipped products through all of it - usually before people had agreed on what to call the transition.What those years taught me is that the technology almost never kills a product. The participation layer does.The trust. The incentives. The emotional contract between a system and the people inside it. When that layer is designed well, a product earns something rare: people who return because they want to, not because switching is inconvenient. When it's designed poorly - or just designed for a thousand users when a hundred thousand show up - it corrodes. Quietly at first. Then all at once.That gap between early momentum and durable participation is where I've spent most of my career, and it's where I do my best work.
The Pattern
Most products are built to acquire. Very few are built to hold.The difference isn't a feature or a metric — it's whether the system understands what actually keeps people engaged over time. Not novelty. Not notifications. The things that have always mattered: feeling seen, earning something real, belonging somewhere worth belonging to, and trusting that the rules are fair.I call this Resonant Design. Where other engagement frameworks optimize for activation, Resonant Design optimizes for return — building systems where trust compounds rather than erodes, and where growth doesn't require gradually making the experience worse to sustain the numbers.The mechanics change with every platform shift. The human layer doesn't.I spent two years building the Halo 4 × 7-Eleven activation - location-based AR, real-world retail integration, digital rewards tied to physical behavior, millions of players. What made it work wasn't the technology. It was that people genuinely wanted to play. No manufactured urgency. No dark patterns. Just a system that respected its users. That's still the standard I hold everything to, and twenty years of platform transitions haven't changed it.
When Companies Call
The conversations tend to start the same way. A pilot worked — real traction, real users, real enthusiasm — and then something shifted when scale arrived. Retention started flattening. The community got harder to manage. AI features felt functional but emotionally hollow, and users weren't coming back the way they did at first. Or leadership started sensing a trust problem before the metrics fully showed it, which is actually the best possible time to have the conversation.Sometimes the issue is simpler: a product is about to make decisions that will be very hard to reverse — right before a fundraise, a launch, or a significant infrastructure commitment — and nobody has stress-tested the participation architecture yet.At that stage, small design choices become expensive. The teams I work with are usually moving fast on features and growth, which is exactly what they should be doing. My role is making sure the layer underneath — the one that determines whether people actually stay — can survive what's coming before a costly rebuild makes it unavoidable.
What I Do
Fractional Product & Platform LeadershipEmbedded senior leadership for companies that need someone thinking about the full participation picture — not just the feature roadmap. This includes engagement and retention architecture, progression and identity systems, community and fandom design, AI product behavior, onboarding, trust and incentive alignment, and platform continuity through scale.The work is practical. I'm in the product decisions, not just the strategy deck.Strategic AdvisoryOngoing partnership for founders and leadership navigating real inflection points — product direction, retention challenges, human-centered AI design, community architecture, and emerging platform strategy. Particularly useful when the decisions ahead are ones that are hard to walk back.Pilot-to-Scale DiagnosticA focused engagement built around one question: where will participation, trust, or behavioral dynamics break under growth pressure — and what does the team need to know before that becomes expensive to fix?The output is clarity: what should harden, what needs to be redesigned, what should wait, and where scaling may quietly undermine the experience that made the early numbers work.
Background
Twenty years across games, media, mobile, spatial computing, and emerging platforms — shipping products through every major interface transition of the past two decades, usually on the early side of the wave.I managed and grew Marvel's mobile business, co-founded Ogmento (the first venture-backed AR games company), served as VP of Business and Product Development at DAQRI before their acquisition by Apple, and built the Microsoft / Halo location-based mobile activation at scale. I also founded Augmented Reality Los Angeles in 2010, and I'm currently co-founding a next-generation participation platform focused on identity, progression, and real-world engagement.What runs through all of it is the same question: how do you build something people choose to stay inside of, long after the novelty is gone?Clients have included: Apple · Marvel · Microsoft · Nike · Pepsi · Google · PlayStation · NBA · Universal · Red Bull · Paramount · 7-ElevenProduction credits include: Spider-Man · X-Men · Fantastic Four · Incredible Hulk · Halo · Tomb Raider · Paranormal Activity · The GrinchPress: Forbes · Wired · Wall Street Journal · TechCrunch · LA Times · USA Today
Who This is For
Companies at seed through Series B, or established organizations navigating a significant platform, behavioral, or technology transition. The right conversation is usually with a team that has proven something real and is starting to make decisions that will be hard to undo.If you're building something people are meant to live inside of - not just use once - I'd like to talk.