Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:00:50 · Lenny Rachitsky, Mark Pincus
[00:00:50] S1: Building a consumer social app, very few people have successfully done it and built something durable. [00:00:55] S0: We have, beyond a latent demand for social, it's lost the adrenaline. People are proud to tell you they're not on Instagram. They're not missing the party. If you want to reinvent social, look for where the cocktail is. We know it when we see a great cocktail party. You feel it, you're like, "Oh, I'm so glad I'm here." Today we're all hanging out on our Claude, on our GPT, but there's no cocktail party. My challenge to your listeners is figure out how to make it rowdy.
00:01:24 · Lenny Rachitsky, Mark Pincus
[00:01:24] S1: Today, my guest is Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, who has arguably created more successful consumer products than anyone else in history, over a dozen both within Zynga and before Zynga. And over the past five years, he has been working on a book that synthesizes all of the things that he's learned about building successful consumer products. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. It's coming out in a few weeks and it is so good and it's also a really quick read. In a quote for the book, Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, said that, "Today, the only bottleneck to building great products is knowing what to create. Mark is an expert at this." And after reading this book and having this conversation, I could not agree more. In his book and in this conversation, Mark shares a really clever and counterintuitive framework that he's developed for coming up with successful product ideas. Why being less ambitious is often the path to coming up with the most ambitious ideas, why you need to kill your hope before your hope kills you, why your instincts are usually right, but your ideas are usually wrong. Also, what he's learned about raising kids, he's got five, and so, so, so much more. This episode is for anybody who is building a product or thinking about starting a company. [00:02:55] S0: I've been a big listener. [00:02:57] S1: Oh, wow. Thank you. [00:02:58] S0: And I'm excited to finally be on.
00:02:58 · Mark Pincus, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:02:58] S0: And I'm excited to finally be on. [00:03:02] S1: I'm excited to finally have you on. You just put out a book. It's coming out around the same time that this podcast is coming out. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. There's so much here I want to talk about. I want to start with this framework that you developed called Proven, Better, New. And the framework is basically designed to help you come up with and refine your product ideas and your startup ideas to basically increase the odds that your idea is a good idea and that it will work. It is such a clever idea, it's such a simple idea with so much depth. I want to spend a bunch of time on this. So first of all, just give us kind of the overview on this framework, what it is, how people might use it in coming up with ideas.
00:03:44 · Mark Pincus
[00:03:44] S0: Sure. Well, this is a framework that we got to early on at Zynga and it became like a religion and the fundamental, the core principles and engine behind how we did product management at Zynga. And it was so fundamental to the book that for three of the four years writing the book, we called it Proven, Better, New. But then I was like, "Oh, that's too dry a name." And I love this concept of life at the speed of play, which we can talk about, but is the bigger gestalt of the book. But Proven, Better, New is this core philosophy that I've had around products since I started Zynga, which is that we have these instincts in our gut, these human level instincts that are pretty much always right. And then we put these ideas on top of the instincts that are usually wrong. And my rule of thumb is your instincts are right 95% of the time, your ideas are wrong 75% or at best right 25% of the time. The framework of Proven, Better, New takes that philosophy and says, "Okay, what do we do with that?" Okay, let's isolate your innovation zone, let's isolate that thing you have in your gut, and let's just test many, many ideas around that and let's fail for the right reason, not the wrong reason." I mean, at Zynga, we'd see new game launches. Sid Meier, the godfather of game design, who's the most revered game designer, he came out with, I think, a social Civilization on Facebook and we thought, "Oh, God, here comes the ultimate game designer." And 10 minutes after the game came out, the Zynga PMs emailed around their analysis and they said it's dead on arrival because his FTUE, his first time user experience was so many clicks and so bad that no one was ever going to see his great game design. Even Sid Meier tripped over what were understood by the most junior product managers at Zynga was the best of breed approach to onboarding a new user to the first time user experience on the Facebook platform. But because he didn't perfectly copy that, he didn't do the proven right, his innovation never got seen by anybody. So the point of Proven, Better, New is to say, "Let's take all the proven off the table." If you want to build the AI Snapchat or the AI camera, there's so many of those I see now, AI cameras, fine. Let's start with what you're not innovating on, the icon. Maybe just the way a camera works.
00:07:12 · Mark Pincus
Look for where that's the best of breed proven, whether it's Apple or Snapchat or Instagram, and copy those legally. And with hopefully some taste we can get into great copies and bad copies, but be a master of the proven first. Get your PhD in proven first. And I like to say we haven't earned the right to innovate on the camera until we are the world's leading PhD on the best mobile cameras that already exist. And then better is usually we can't find better. Better is usually very small increments and innovations and better is something that 10 out of 10 of the existing users of that product would say, "Fuck yeah." 10 out of 10, not you. What you think is better is called new. What we think is better is new. We usually are too ambitious on the new and so better could be it's now free, there's no download. There's something that you can both statistically show works, is better and every user would say yes to. And usually it's very small and it's polished and it's things that intense users, power users will notice the most. And in our game, Words With Friends, it was Scrabble, but if it was just Scrabble, why was it a massive hit with 14 million DAUs and Scrabble itself wasn't, right? There must have been something better and novel about it, but it had such a polish for mobile was the better. And the new, what's the novel new idea, the back of the box idea that's going to get people to download and try it? In the case of Words with Friends, it was social. It was your friends are just ... It was attached to the Facebook graph and your friends are just already there to play with you, which was a new idea. Even that which you'd think, "Of course I want ..." You might not get 10 out of 10 people saying yes, and we have to accept that that new idea is probably going to fail. It's a reason to try it for people, but it's probably going to fail. And if we do Proven, Better, New right, the product has much better odds of succeeding in the market, not failing for the wrong reasons. And if we start with the premise that the new is probably not right and we've got four other new ideas ready to test, then we just prosecute it in a different way. I like to think if you do Proven, Better, New right, it's like a time machine because what if I could go back to Mark 2003 and '4 and say, "Dude, you don't even realize how right you are.
00:10:43 · Mark Pincus
One of your instincts is going to be a $1.6 trillion company once," and you are a year ahead of them, right? You're a year ahead of a $1.6 trillion company. I'm not going to tell you which, I'm not going to totally cheat, but I'm just going to tell you, "There's something, there's another answer in this that you could pursue that'd be worth 1.6 trillion. Oh, and by the way, your Tribe idea, that's Reddit, that becomes a whole company industry listings." So there was a point in Tribe where I knew my metrics weren't working, our D30 retention was terrible. We were a sinking speedboat. And if I had had this attitude of I'm going to try a lot more ideas, I'm going to look around me. If you're doing Proven, Better New, you're also looking around you for what are you finding heat that's proven in the market that you can also go test? And I would have massively changed my odds of success.