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ADI IGNATIUS: I’m Adi Ignatius.
ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ADI IGNATIUS: Alison, I feel like the executives I speak with these days are all struggling. They’re struggling with uncertainty. They’re struggling with the new global order. They’re struggling with inflation, with AI. It’s kind of a drag, but today, we’re talking with someone who is markedly more upbeat and who has ideas on how senior leaders can inject a greater sense of play into their work lives.
ALISON BEARD: That sounds fun. You know what they say about all work and no play, but I bet that a lot of listeners, especially managers and maybe me, are skeptical. Is work really the place for play?
ADI IGNATIUS: Yes and no. I think his point is that a lot of the joy can come from working closely with your customers to test and eventually to develop products that they will use and that they will actually love. And that requires embracing the idea that as an innovator, your instincts are often going to be right, but your idea for implementing it is likely to be wrong. And with the right mindset, right approach, you can increase your odds of getting to success.
ALISON BEARD: Okay, I get it. So we’re not talking about foosball at the office. We’re talking about playing with the work, being open to messing around and experimenting until you get things right?
ADI IGNATIUS: That’s basically it. So our guest today, he is a gamer. This is Mark Pincus. He’s the founder and former CEO of Zynga, the mobile gaming company, and he’s the author of the new book, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love. Here’s our conversation.
ADI IGNATIUS: All right, you’ve written a book, Life at the Speed of Play, and I want to talk about what it means to inject more play in your work life, but I want to start with strategy. I want to start with your line in the book that your instinct is right 95% of the time, but your idea is wrong at least 75% of the time. I love the science in that. What do you mean by that?
MARK PINCUS: Well, it’s a really foundational point for all of us as entrepreneurs and creators in the world. In a lot of ways, it’s the need for the death of our own egos that get in the way of us tuning into the most successful variant of this idea that we’re passionate about. So often we as founders have this instinct that we can feel that the world ought to be able to operate in a better way, that we should be able to order a taxi through our phone.
We get that idea, we get excited about it, and then we just start trying to do it. And what we don’t do is stop and really isolate just that instinct that there should be a better way and separate that from the way that we’re assuming is the best way to package and bring that to the world. And the power of that is like a time machine because if I could go back to myself in 2003 when I was building tribe.net and I had so many winning instincts that the world was going to move to social networking – this was before Facebook – and yet I had one losing idea that I just stuck with. And I had such a higher probability of success if I started with this premise that, “Okay, there’s some instincts I’ve got and I’m curious about those and I’m looking out as much at what else people are doing in the world as what I’m doing to try to get more information on how do I tune into the winning variant of these multiple instincts I had.”
ADI IGNATIUS: So is this basically an appeal for rigorous experimentation or is it something more than that?
MARK PINCUS: Well, it’s not just rigorous experimentation. We have to have curiosity and humility when we pursue something. And when we fall in love with our idea before it’s baked, and before we get the feedback that this is a winning idea, we often ignore a lot of the information coming back saying that this isn’t quite right. So it’s not just go test a lot, it’s come up with four or five different variations of this idea and be equally curious about those and be equally curious about what you see other people doing in the world that is close to your idea.
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah. So you have a concept that you talk about in the book, Proven, Better, New. And I think it’s interesting and it in some ways flies in the face of some strategy theory that’s out there, but talk about what you mean by that and why you think it’s a good approach to developing a new product.
MARK PINCUS: Well, it really goes hand in hand with this belief that we have winning instincts and they’re trapped inside of losing ideas or even worse, B plus ideas – ideas that are good enough to keep going to get some users, some funding, team, but they’re never going to win. And Proven, Better, New is a framework that I came to out of necessity with Zynga after having such a long, painful failure with Tribe.
iI’s saying even though this is about innovation and pursuing our passion, let’s approach this in a dispassionate way like we’re scientists with white lab coats and let’s isolate your innovation zone and let’s separate that from the rest of the product that you’re building and don’t fail for the wrong reasons.
So don’t fail because a part of your product that you were never intending to innovate on brought you down. And one of my favorite examples is during fairly early on with Zynga, we got big enough that the big game industry started gunning for us. And at one point Sid Meier, who’s like the godfather of game design with Civilization, was building a social Civ. EA was building a SimCity social and we’re like, “Okay, now they’re bringing their biggest brands, their best designers after us.”
And in both cases, within an hour of their games launching, the Zynga PMs sent around their analysis and said, “These are dead on arrival.” And it wasn’t because they lacked amazing graphics and innovative ideas, it’s that the users were never going to see them because their first time user experience, the onboarding, the first three clicks, the first five minutes was a fail state because they didn’t copy us. So they didn’t say, “What is the most successful onboarding for a social game in the world?” Which was Zynga Games.
They didn’t copy that. They chose to just do their own, even though that wasn’t where they were going to innovate. And so no one ever made it past the first five minutes because it was a long, painful tutorial. And that happens in so many products that someone has a great idea, but because they try to make everything different in their product, no one gets to it or it fails because you’ve made everything different but not better.
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah. So like I said, it goes against the mythology of, I guess, something like Blue Ocean or strategic approaches that I guess the question is, are leaders too obsessed with originality and not obsessed enough with just understanding, realizing what already works?
MARK PINCUS: In a lot of ways, I advise founders, “burn your resume” and you already have by being a founder maybe and don’t look for any respect in the eyes of your industry and your peers look for respect in your end users. In their eyes, if they like your product better than what’s out there, then you’re winning. That’s the only innovation that matters. Just making it different for the sake of different isn’t going to win hearts and minds of anybody.
And so you have to be kind of ruthless in your willingness to take the ideas that work elsewhere and start with those and build on top of those. And I’ve always believed that the master craftsmen of product making like a Steve Jobs, when I see a great product maker, I see someone who brilliantly stole the best ideas in the world as their starting point and then they built on top of that.
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, and he quite openly said, great artists, great innovators, steal, and that’s nothing shameful about that. I want to talk about the concept of play. You founded Zynga and that’s all about playing, but you’re talking more deeply about running product development, running even entire companies along the lines of being more playful, which is a really appealing concept. But what does that mean exactly?
MARK PINCUS: First of all, I could really stop right here and make a PSA announcement for fun. I think we don’t put fun into the equation enough both in how we work and approach things, work with our teams, how we treat ourselves. I think no matter what your product is, when you look at Slack, which was taking such a boring enterprise application of team messaging and they interspersed it with fun and that made all the difference in the world.
So I do think, and I’ll just say at one point the CEO of American Express, Ken Chenault came through Silicon Valley on a tour and stopped in our offices for just a kind of ceremonial, I want to meet the companies and you’re one of them meeting. And I gave them this whole pitch on fun and I said, “What if Amex competed on a fun card instead of rewards and points back?” And he loved it so much that they partnered with us and they created a card based on fun, prepaid debit card for 20 somethings. And so I think fun is kind of undersold.
So I don’t think it’s just about building games or apps that are meant for fun. I think it’s a whole attitude and approach that if we’re more playful, we’re more open to imaginative ideas and creativity. If we can approach new products and ideas in a way that has less heaviness and less consequence, we’re going to be more successful. It’s not going to be this long, painful march. And if it is, we’re going to pull the plug on it.
ADI IGNATIUS: At Zynga, your mantra was test more ideas in a week than your industry does in a year. That means you’re testing so many ideas that fail that you essentially become a failure machine. How do you know when you hit on the idea that’s actually going to work?
MARK PINCUS: People ask me that a lot and they say, “Okay, well, what’s the metric? What’s the thing I should be looking for to tell me that this one is it?” And I say, I think you might hate this answer and people do, but you kind of, I think know in your gut it’s the right one is if you’re with a life partner, if you’ve ever felt deeply in love in your life, you didn’t need a metric. You didn’t need to ask somebody, how do I know this is it? You just knew it.
That’s what I’ve found is the same with winning products, that when it’s right, you don’t have to ask somebody like, “Do you think this is right?” Or, “What’s the metric?” Or, “What’s the feedback loop?” Everything says this is right. And when it’s not right, that’s when you start trying to read the tea leaves and you’re looking for more data and it’s just that’s a B plus. It might be right, but it’s not. It’s not quite it. That’s so hard.
ADI IGNATIUS: Talk more about play. I get looking for gamification as an option and you described that at American Express maybe, but you also are talking more culturally about creating a kind of playful environment where I think you said that it just feels less weighty. How do you create that in a productive way that people are having fun, it is playful, but you are achieving your objectives?
MARK PINCUS: Well, there is no formula and you have to figure this out for yourself, but here’s the good news, you can start with you. Build a house you want to live in. And we usually don’t do that or we start out doing that, but we get off that path so quickly I say it’s death by a thousand compromises, then know your goal or suffer death by a thousand compromises.
What is it that turns you on? What is it that makes you love working on this? The point that when I’m in it, I am waiting for Monday morning so I’m allowed to email everybody again. Everyone should have the opportunity to do something every day that they love. And also part of what makes you love it, I think it’s the weird, quirky changes that you made to your house that no one else would’ve done that you’re kind of proud of.
I think the weird things you can do, it’s your company now and part of the thing to have fun with is create whatever rules you want. There’s no grownups anymore and whatever that means. I think those are the things that make you kind of fall in love with your job or your company. And part of the thing I’ve had fun with and I’ve seen it be successful is anything you can do to convince you and your team that this is not a normal company. Just pick any rule that has always bothered you about work and just completely try changing it and see if that’s fun.
If you don’t want to work inside, figure out how to have everyone work outside or I think we all move to remote work. I find that way less productive and kind of lonelier. And so I think people want to be around each other, but it’s kind of stifling to be just in an office. So I think there’s so much room for people to reinvent just what it means to be at work.
ADI IGNATIUS: So I want to go back to your previous thought, which was when you create a product that’s great, you just know it. And in some ways, it is sort of Steve Jobs-like, right? He wanted to create the iPhone. He wanted to create a product he loved and he trusted himself as a focus group of one so to speak. But you had said your instinct is right 95 percent of the time, but your idea is wrong 75 percent of the time. So how do you know when you fall in love with something that you maybe have the right instinct, but the wrong application?
MARK PINCUS: I mean, that’s such a fundamental question for all of us. I’d say I’ll give you my answer here, but the real answer is that is your mission as a founder is to develop that taste and you’re going to develop that over your whole career and you’re going to calibrate it. First place to start is with other people’s products and start noticing, “This is the product I wanted to make. Oh my God, I’m going to try it.” “Oh, I don’t like it.” “Why don’t you like it?”
The cheapest research is finding someone else who’s built a version of your idea that you don’t like and you almost can send them thank you notes. So that’s a starting point, but you’ve got to start calibrating looking at yourself in the third person and noticing, did this really turn you on and engage you or not? I wish that the problem was that we all built our ideas out and loved them and then no one else did, but that’s not my experience.
My experience is I fall in love with an idea and then we start building it and then I’m like, “Eh, meh, it’s not that great.” I’m like, “I don’t get it. I thought this was such a good idea, but now that I’m using it, it’s not.” And it’s like, I kind of like it, but I don’t love it. And I just think that the biggest high in the world is building a product that you are addicted to.
And that happened to me eight times with Zynga Games and every one of those times the game went on to be a worldwide hit, meaning, a game that did more than a million dollars a day in revenues and that’s the first place to start is with yourself and with you as a focus group of one.
And do you love this product and experience? And then if you do, see if other people do also, but that’s kind of square one and most people skip that. And I would just say you have to start there. Do you love this?
And I want to add the best product makers, the people with the best taste and the people who are the most sophisticated at making products, they don’t launch their products to find out if they’re going to work. They don’t ever launch an MVP. They never launch a minimum viable product. I’m not saying they don’t build it and test it and verify, but they launch a maximum potential product. It’s the exact opposite of MVP. And I like to say that the best product makers like the best investors don’t make bets, they collect winnings.
They already know. At Zynga, every time we launched a hit game, we already knew it was a hit. We didn’t launch it to find out. The one time we didn’t was Farmville. That was so quick. It was six weeks and that was the only time, but I’ll say, again, we knew within two days of turning the game on that it was a hit. And so there’s a question of what is launch? At the point that we marketed that game, we already knew, it was already clear it was a hit.
ADI IGNATIUS: So everything you described as sort of the innovation machine, building a company that’s a little weird, that’s different. How do you sustain that culture as you grow, as you scale, as you have more investors, maybe as you go public? Is it possible to sustain that as you scale into a giant company?
MARK PINCUS: It is, but I would say in every chapter you have to reinvent the company and come back to your core values and principles and mission and reinvent the company in service of that and never in service of scale. So scale is never the objective and a lot of founders get confused and they think, “I need to find an investor who knows how to scale.” Or, “I need to hire someone from Amazon who’s worked at scale.”
And the problem with that mentality is nobody can come in from the outside and teach you how to scale your company because they don’t understand the magic formula that made your company successful, your culture, what it is today, and they will inevitably destroy that. And so the painful truth is only you can scale your company in a way that stays aligned with your core values and with the principles that defined your company.
And so I want to add, Adi, that it’s so crucial, first of all, that when you get beyond product market fit and lightning in a bottle, if you are lucky enough to get that or a product that’s working, we got to spend as much time thinking what if everything goes right as much as everything goes wrong. And so much of that and that scaling becomes, how do I get people to do the right thing when I’m not in the room?
ADI IGNATIUS: I also like the concept you write about of stopping time at kind of key moments. Talk about that.
MARK PINCUS: I would love to convince your listeners to steal this idea of stopping time. And my point is every day is not the same and it’s not always just operate on this usual time clock. And there’s so many moments that we have when we really need to stop time and gather the troops and realize that this is a company making moment. And a concept that goes along with it to me is overfunding something.
And these might sound weird, but my example with Ken Chenault coming through Zynga, I could have treated that as just another day, “Oh wow, I get to meet the CEO of American Express. That’s cool. Maybe we’ll get a picture together.” Or I could treat that as an IPO moment. I could say, “Okay, I’m going to overfund that meeting. I’m going to over prepare. I’m going to spend the next two weeks prepping a whole presentation with my team to show him.” I like to say, in that moment, I also say, “King for a day. If I was king for a day at your company, Ken, if I was the CEO of American Express, here’s what I would do with your company. Let me show you what my credit card would look like.”
And you’d be surprised how often that CEO wants to hear what you would do because that’s not their normal walkthrough Silicon Valley dog and pony roadshow moment and it’s a better use of his time, even if he doesn’t like your idea. At least you put a lot of thought. I showed him the look and feel and art of it and I went deep on what my fun card would look like.
This wasn’t just an idea I threw out at him. I had another moment where Carol Bartz, the CEO of Yahoo was interviewing me on stage in front of her leadership team and I could have just shown up and just answered questions about Zynga, but I said, “I have a chance to pitch the whole leadership team at Yahoo. What do I want to pitch them on? Social gaming.” So I said, “Carol, I took the liberty of creating a whole presentation on what I would do if I was CEO of Yahoo for a day. Would you mind if I show your team?”
She’s not going to say no. And I went through a whole presentation. I showed the new Yahoo homepage. I showed the engagement metrics and everything and that led to a deal we did with Yahoo. But my point is those were stop time moments. You have so many of those when it might be you have a chance to interview a CTO that you didn’t think you could ever get or – over-investing and overfunding those moments. That’s one of the most useful versions of stopping time.
ADI IGNATIUS: So the great business coach, Bill Campbell, said you were a great 18-month thinker that you could sense what people would want in the fairly near future. Is that innate or is that a skill that we can actually tap into and refine?
MARK PINCUS: It’s somewhat of both. We all have the capability in us to get better and better at predicting the future better than we are now. We will get to different places. Some people might become best in the world and most won’t, but we’ll get better than we are now. And it’s part of our mission, our career as founders to just calibrate that, keep calibrating that and keep getting better and better.
And it’s keep writing down, is what I do in my book of life, but what do you believe today to be true? What do you believe the future’s going to be? And checking in on whether you’re right and look for patterns that repeat. And the pattern that I found was I seem to represent the early majority mass market. I am not that technical and I never have been and nor am I trying to be.
In some ways, I feel like it’ll somewhat improve my game and in a lot of other ways it might make me worse. I wanted to protect the virgin state of my user stupidity and I saw that as an asset.
There’s a rule that people can steal from me, which is I said, “Let’s test everything on third-graders because they’re just learning to read, but they mostly aren’t going to read. And if they can understand how to play our game or your app, adults might be able to. And if they can’t, nobody will.”
If they can’t figure it out in three clicks, they’re gone. And that’s a pattern that I’ve seen to be true, to repeat. I’ve also noticed any app that makes it to the front of my iPhone, to my home screen is going to have a stick value of a billion dollars. Probably now that’s five billion. I noticed Raya, when I was single, was on the front of my iPhone and chess.com is on the front of my iPhone and I invested in Raya and I tried to invest in chess.com.
So I’ve seen that that pattern is true for me. Anyone listening to this can start to find out what patterns are true for you. I think we all do this in a way with movies and music. We see if you love a movie, is it a hit? Is your taste a predictor of culture? And the more that you see that pattern, the more you can kind of set your sales by it.
ADI IGNATIUS: If you were advising not a startup, but the CEO of a company, what would be the single most important lesson from your life, your research, your book that they could apply tomorrow morning?
MARK PINCUS: I would say the most fundamental lesson that I’m still learning also is what we started with is separate your winning instincts from your losing ideas. I just a few days ago was talking to the founder of a really successful internet company who’s thinking about a bold new idea and I said, “The instinct behind it sounds brilliant, but I’m not tuning into. I’m not getting this idea and I want to encourage you to separate the two to increase your odds of success.”
And to go with that, are you surrounding yourself with other truth seekers, other people who want to be intellectually honest so that you are getting the right kind of feedback? Because if you are the CEO of a successful company, if you have been a successful founder, chances are you’re not getting the most pure form intellectual honesty, true signal back from people because they are giving you too much benefit of the doubt. And they’re like, “Well, you’re smart and if you believe in this, there must be something there and that’s circular and it’s dangerous.”
ADI IGNATIUS: Mark, I love that. I want to thank you for being my guest on HBR IdeaCast.
MARK PINCUS: Well, it’s really fun.
ADI IGNATIUS: That was Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga and author of Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love.
Next week, Alison talks to experts who have studied how some of the world’s highest-performing coaches make smart decisions under pressure. If you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, please consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review.
You’ll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly exclusive insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR online. Just head to hbr.org/subscribe. And thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, audio product manager Ian Fox, and senior production Editor Kristin Murphy Romano. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Adi Ignatius.
