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Playing on the console. <\/p>\n
getty<\/p>\n
Mark Pincus knows a little something about product market fit. As the founder of Zynga, where millions play online games formerly enjoyed in the physical realm, Pincus has had a front-row seat to the innovations of the twenty-first century, and their collective impact on our lives. With his new book, Life at the Speed of Play, he takes aim at principles that may help us to better integrate AI into our lives.<\/p>\n
Central to Pincus\u2019s thesis is the role of \u201cgamification,\u201d the idea that we have to embrace our work with cheer and willingness, if we\u2019re going to make anything out of these monolithic markets and compelling tools. \u201cLife at the Speed of Play\u201d seems to be essentially about conceptualizing our approaches to life and work, given that everything is changing so quickly that it\u2019s hard for humans, even large groups of them, to keep up.<\/p>\n
The Traveler<\/p>\n
In the first part of the book, Pincus introduces us to certain useful word-images, talking about \u201cInternet treasures\u201d and \u201cabysses\u201d illustrating eras of development. Here\u2019s one of his descriptions of the latter:<\/p>\n
\u201cOne thing most founders share is the experience of being in the Abyss,\u201d he writes. \u201cFor most of us, this place before and after our start-ups, or even jobs we have loved, is open-ended and dark. It\u2019s unstructured. The world doesn\u2019t care whether we get out of bed in the morning. We lose purpose and don\u2019t know whether, how, or when we will ever reemerge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sounds familiar, right? But then he counts the role of this interim in the grand journey:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Abyss also has value that we\u2019re unaware of when we\u2019re in this state, however. Once we get over our anxiety about being in the Abyss, it becomes an opportunity to explore our curiosities. Giving ourselves permission to pursue things that are not obviously useful or productive is critical. These explorations help us tune into our instincts, hone our ideas, and develop our taste.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s more from this section of the book, too, including the concept of the \u201cforever franchise\u201d and the \u201cimagination chessboard\u201d that drives introspection on angles. Angles of work, angles of innovation.<\/p>\n
Pincus also introduces us to his Book of Life, a specific type of journal that has helped him to navigate a world that moves at blistering speed. He talks about a \u201ctime machine\u201d made mostly of documentation and introspection, where the intrepid human can become, so to speak, unglued in time, and look at moments subjectively, in a relative way.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy Book of Life hasn\u2019t just kept me accountable to personal goals;\u201d Pincus notes. \u201cIt has also kept me connected to the deeper \u2018why\u2019 behind my work. Without this regular practice, it would be too easy to get distracted and lose sight of these convictions. For example, I\u2019m a pretty good investor, but I will never be an amazing one. I don\u2019t care to become one and, honestly, can\u2019t see what difference it would ever make if I were. That\u2019s not my \u2018why.\u2019 \u2026 a Book of Life is like a compass that helps you come back to your North Star\u2014 what will matter to you over your entire life, not just today, or even this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Through this lens, Pincus brings us through parts of his life, those moments, like the launch of his first company, Freeloader, in 1994, and in subsequent times when his focus included work on eVOTLs and other transport technologies. And, of course, at Zynga.<\/p>\n
I thought this was useful:<\/p>\n
\u201cI think of my Book of Life as a time machine that can take me backward and forward in my own life, and help me make better decisions,\u201d he writes. \u201cI write notes to my past self in the margins\u2014 and many to my future self as well. It\u2019s a life-long dialogue. The practice of coming back to today can be a powerful tool to help motivate us to go after moonshot ideas, but also to reset priorities and make hard decisions like killing marginal projects. This practice builds a hunger to disrupt my own patterns.\u201d<\/p>\n
Notwithstanding the recommendation to \u201ckill your babies,\u201d at least the marginal ones, there\u2019s a lot in here to chew on. Pincus also includes helpful visuals showing how the Book of Life works, and applies the concepts to the work world, where he contends that falling in love with your own ideas is \u201cthe death of consumer startups,\u201d and urging innovators to follow the true signal and \u201cstay close to the metal.\u201d And he shows the reader how to make bolognese, in aid of establishing that, in some ways, product research is a matter of \u201ctaste.\u201d<\/p>\n
The MVP of Business<\/p>\n
There\u2019s another part of the book where Pincus adds a couple of interesting terms to the conventional Minimum Viable Product metric \u2013 namely, Minimum Idea State, and Maximum Launch Product.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver the past 20 years, we\u2019ve all been sold this concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as the way the best teams build and launch products,\u201d Pincus writes. \u201cThe problem with this concept is that we no longer have the time to deliver on \u2018viable.\u2019 My friend Eric Ries, who turned MVP into a religion with his book The Lean Startup, defines \u2018viable\u2019 as: \u2018real users can utilize your product for real-world behaviors.\u201d<\/p>\n
He elaborates:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe real goal of the MIS is to get to our Maximum Launch Product. We want to find true signal with real users, so that we have the conviction to overinvest in the product.\u201d<\/p>\n
With those ideas in hand, Pincus turns to another construct of his business philosophy called Proven Better New.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe process of defining, testing, and launching new products can feel chaotic,\u201d he writes. \u201cHow do we decide where to innovate and how to build conviction? How do we increase the odds of a hit and decrease the time to get to \u2018right\u2019? In building Zynga, I had to be right to survive\u2014 so I developed Proven Better New. It\u2019s a simple framework that I\u2019ve spent my career trying to master. It became a religion inside Zynga and has also spread to many of my fellow product makers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s more:<\/p>\n
\u201cProven Better New offers a systematic approach to generating winning products faster. The core value is in isolating truly new ideas and then testing them rapidly to get accurate customer feedback. When used well, this framework helps us build conviction much faster by getting to our Minimum Idea State with greater intellectual discipline. Because this framework protects us from our urge to make everything better, we avoid wasted cycles and false signals.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also speaks to a kind of \u201cmoral arbitrage\u201d that people might go through in applying some of this:<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all want to be respected by our peers, so our egos hold us back from copying,\u201d he writes, \u201cas does our lack of experience as product makers. Copying what works goes against every instinct that we have as product makers: We want to innovate! The idea of copying other people\u2019s work can feel distasteful, wrong, unfair, and not something we\u2019d take pride in.\u201d<\/p>\n
But following in established grooves, Pincus suggests, can be useful.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s where AI comes in:<\/p>\n
\u201cAI is an amazing tool to get us leverage in implementing Proven Better New,\u201d Pincus writes. \u201cWe had a lot of fun uploading this chapter to ChatGPT and asking it to deliver a Proven Better New analysis of several hit products to explain their success\u2014 and then to help us generate several strong shots on goal. AI has already become a crucial and magical tool for product making, but so far, it can\u2019t replace what we humans add: creativity, empathy, and taste.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s that word, taste, again.<\/p>\n
A Way Forward<\/p>\n
Another area that Pincus goes into at length is the practice of \u201croadmapping,\u201d or the study of bringing direction to your fledgling enterprise, with something he calls \u201cbold beats\u201d as an ingredient in the business cookbook.<\/p>\n
\u201cBold Beats should be quick to build, test, and kill, and have isolated impact on your product,\u201d he writes. \u201cWhen successful, Bold Beats should lead to major changes in your metrics. Think of them as controlled adrenaline shots for your product roadmap.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then there are also \u201cblue sheets,\u201d a documentation process for change, where Pincus takes on the idea of building buy-in, explaining what happened when he introduced the blue sheets concept to a team:<\/p>\n
\u201cAt first, teams fought the change,\u201d he writes. \u201cThey acted as if I were a CEO out of the Dilbert comic, forcing them to be corporate rather than fast. They kept two sets of roadmaps: one they worked from and one to \u2018communicate up to Mark.\u2019 This lasted for around three months. I was starting to question my decision, too. But then, one week, a team found a viral breakthrough, which everyone else saw and copied immediately because we all shared one analytics and reporting system. Once they saw another team nail something and immediately put it to work themselves, the game changed. This was what turned the Blue Sheets into a competitive advantage. It enabled us to adapt and optimize improvements between and across teams.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pincus urges us to \u201cbuild a teaching hospital,\u201d metaphorically, to measure with OKRs and \u201cchase audacious goals.\u201d He talks about making your own metrics, with examples like average revenue per user or ARPU, Active social network or ASN, and net promoter score or NPS.<\/p>\n
\u201cYour number one job as a founder and CEO is to be right,\u201d Pincus writes. \u201cThere\u2019s something magical about being right, about finding true signal. When you\u2019re looking at a restaurant menu and can\u2019t decide what to pick, it\u2019s because nothing on the menu is right. But when you see the right thing, you just know.\u201d <\/p>\n
The Trajectory of Computer Science<\/p>\n
Analyzing the move from the early Web 1 environment to today\u2019s Web 3, Pincus suggests there\u2019s a lot of opportunity in the air.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday, we have so many reasons to be optimistic,\u201d he writes. \u201cWe\u2019re on the verge of five new planets: AI, robotics, space, crypto, and the metaverse. AI is massively reducing the time and cost to turn ideas into apps we can test. We have line of sight to humanoid robotics. It hurts my brain to imagine what life will be like when there are nine billion R2-D2s following us around.\u201d<\/p>\n
I feel him on that last one. When a robot is next to you talking, it\u2019s going to be disorienting at first. But presumably, we\u2019ll get used to it.<\/p>\n
In conclusion, Pincus articulates his hope to empower and influence a new generation:<\/p>\n
\u201cMy hope is that this book inspires you to go pursue your own ideas right now and to start working on and refining your own taste, what makes products great for you,\u201d he writes. \u201cThese frameworks and practices represent a mindset you can use to approach any idea. By going narrow and small, we find the edges, and that\u2019s where we can innovate and expand the world\u2019s boundaries.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pick up a copy of this ground-breaking business book to prepare for the rest of our AI revolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Playing on the console. getty Mark Pincus knows a little something about product market fit. As the founder…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85842,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12176,24,25,37964,46053,46054,41364],"class_list":["post-85841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-nbsp","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-eric-ries","tag-mark-pincus","tag-minimum-viable-product","tag-zynga"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}