This year, starting in March 2020, we made a company-wide decision to start working from home putting the safety and health of our people as number one priority. This decision has made 2020 one of a kind, challenging our teams to stay connected while WFH, and trying to keep work and social engagement among colleagues high. 

Despite, or maybe because of the new circumstances, every department has unique, one of a kind Singular Story for 2020. This week we speak with Ana, Product Owner at the DFS team; Branko, Head of DevOps; and George, Program Manager at the Casino team.

A Year in Review: Singular DFS Team 

This was quite a fruitful and colorful year for the DFS (Data Feed Services) team, says Ana Jovanova, the Product Owner. 

We are pleased to have with us our first two Sport Data Editors in the crew, responsible for maintaining and enriching the Singular market set in a tidy daily manner – adds Ana. 

And that was not all 😊.

The DFS team has also welcomed 2 young and promising Singular internship practitioners, already under the intensive care of the experienced DFS team members, preparing them for the incoming professional endeavors.

The list of the most important newly introduced features implemented by the DFS team in the last 12 months consists of:       

• Centralized Market Mapping Instance – а standalone application dedicated for mapping market catalogs within Singular market definitions
• The Subscription Management concept (both fixed and dynamic one) – providing our clients the flexibility for a multi feed manner of operating, supporting mixed markets from various Feed Providers in each of the PreMatch/InPlay phases of the match lifecycle
• LSports integration – one more in the Singular portfolio of Feed Provider integrations
• Definition Split – a one-click feature providing the bookmakers match definition split functionality
• Custom Adapter implementation – (in a final phase of implementation) – providing the possibility of integrating the Singular platform with a custom made feed provider sending customized sport data.

A Year in Review: Singular Casino Team 

The team followed the roadmap as closely as possible during the year. We’ve come a long way both in terms of the team and products. – says George Nadirashvili, the Program Manager.

We worked on existing products as well as created a completely new solution for crypto games and revived the Sport Toto project, continues George. As a result of these features, the team has also increased the total bet amount in our Jackpot, Dealer, Auto roulette products by roughly 25%, 60%, and  25% respectively.

LIVE ROULETTE SUITE

Adjarabet Live Auto Roulette is the most beloved live casino product on the platform. We brought the product up to date with a plethora of new features that make it stand on par with the current competition. Some of the features include: in-game statistics for winning numbers, player preferences menu, keyboard shortcuts, jackpot win animations, and last but not least a way for the players to go back to the vanilla game experience by disabling all the new features.

Adding some more excitement to the game, the team created a new popup for all three roulettes to increase the visibility of jackpot draws and make the jackpot feature stand out. Players can now filter the jackpot history according to dates and see top wins and biggest jackpot draws.

Adapting to the newly emerged situation with the world pandemic, our team implemented several improvements and new features to provide a better player experience. In this process, the team took into consideration addressing both entertainment and safety aspects:

• A full-featured mobile version of back-office was implemented, simplifying the administration of live roulette products during the COVID-19 pandemic remotely.
• Due to the possible (at the time) closedowns due to the pandemic, people were restrained from visiting the land-based casinos. Therefore, we made other players’ bets visible for online players, giving them the sensational feeling of actually playing at the same table as others.
• Enhanced the chat option with more versatile options for emojis, GIFs, and game integration, which automatically announces jackpot and huge wins to all players. 
• The increased chat engagement required also chat monitoring where operators are now able to moderate the chat channels, blocking users when necessary and removing offensive messages via profanity Filter.

Players are now able to set the predefined length of the session so that they can better control their gambling habits. Iterative move on the player sessions length and spending control was the implementation of the autoplay feature in all three roulettes, allowing the players to define loss/win limits.

Additionally to the new features, the team has also, integrated two new Casino Games:

• Sport Toto – Original version of Sport Toto was created back in 2015. The team launched the product with visual and functional improvements.
• Singular Crash Game – Building on top of existing crypto game platforms, the team has gone ahead and introduced a Singular branded version of the crash game.

A Year in Review: Singular DevOps Team 

For the DevOps team, this year was all about growth and higher involvement in company high-end deliverables. There have been some strategic changes in the organizational structure of the team and their scope of work:

• The reorganization of the support team enabled a more standardized approach across clients and internal teams’ collaboration. We now have 24/7 timeline coverage in 3 shifts.
• BI and Data analysts teams have grown to a compact production group capacity.  They are now champions in YoY growth in team size with four members in total :D. 
• Although late in the year, we are sparking on the Information Security and Data protection role, and we are happy to embrace new values that this role will bring to the company.

The DevOps team is the crucial building block of Singular operations. They provide systems support and some logistics support for the internal purposes of the company. Moreover, the DevOps team is the first touchpoint with our clients. They maintain and upgrade 5 Singular related environments (Production, DEV, QA, Certification, and Demo), which have had a very accelerated growth process for the past 12 months.

They created and managed entire infrastructure environments for customer gaming ecosystems, and participated in customer interaction before any other team started providing any service. This year, the team has been involved in managing, establishing, and in some cases removing a set of nine customer-related environments in both, Production and Staging, making a total of 18 environments.

They created and managed entire infrastructure environments for customer gaming ecosystems, and participated in customer interaction before any other team started providing any service. This year, the team has been involved in managing, establishing, and in some cases removing a set of nine customer-related environments in both, Production and Staging, making a total of 18 environments.

We’re so proud to have such dedicated teams who are committed to delivering outstanding solutions for our clients. To #BeOustanding means to constantly strive for the best version there can be, and we make sure to always pursuit it.

It is exactly one of the main reasons why Singular’s products have won prestigious awards & nominations. It is proof of how innovative our work is, and we’re happy that our teams are here to celebrate these milestones together with us.

Stay tuned for more Product Talks in 2021! 💪