Relax Gaming CPO Tony O’Mahony on Why Customers Buy Outcomes, Not Features | Exclusive Interview with iGaming News Today

Tony O’Mahony has led product teams at GiG, Lottoland and Casumo, and is now Chief Product Officer at Relax Gaming.

In an exclusive interview with iGaming News Today, he set out the lessons behind that run, and several of them are positioning arguments rather than product ones.

Customers don’t buy features, they buy outcomes

O’Mahony told iGaming News Today that the biggest lesson of his career is that “great products don’t start with great ideas, they start with real customer problems”.

Early on, like many product people, he spent too much time thinking about features. What changed his approach was recognising that “customers don’t buy features; they buy outcomes, experiences, and solutions to problems”.

That distinction is the difference between describing what a thing has and describing what it does for the person buying it, and it is as much a messaging problem as a roadmap one.

Great strategies choose where not to compete

On what separates a successful product strategy from an average one, O’Mahony started with clarity of purpose. Everyone in the organisation should understand who the product is for, what problem it solves, and how success will be measured.

The failure mode he named is familiar to anyone who has worked on positioning: “Average strategies often try to be everything to everyone, while great strategies make deliberate choices about where they won’t compete.”

He applied the same discipline to teams, telling iGaming News Today that great product teams “aren’t defined by how much they build, but by having the discipline to decide what not to build”.

Trust over short-term engagement

On personalisation, O’Mahony does not see innovation and responsible gaming as competing priorities. Better data allows more personalised experiences, he said, and the same data helps identify unusual behaviour and support healthier play.

Where he drew the line is worth quoting in full: the industry’s responsibility is “to use technology to build long-term trust rather than maximise short-term engagement at any cost”. Sustainable businesses, in his view, come from entertainment players can keep enjoying responsibly.

What else O’Mahony covers in the exclusive interview

• Why he thinks AI’s biggest impact will not be generating code or artwork
• Where he expects AI to matter most in iGaming, from personalisation to responsible gaming signals
• How he creates space for experimentation without losing accountability
• The four qualities he says define a high-performing product team
• Why he expects product leaders to become translators by 2027
• The question he thinks will replace “Can we build this?”

   

The full exclusive interview with Tony O’Mahony is published on iGaming News Today.