The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (FarmVille, Words with Friends, & more)
Categories: Product, Startup, VC
Summary
Mark Pincus reveals his foundational product framework: your instincts are 95% right, but your ideas are 75% wrong. The 'Proven Better New' framework isolates your core insight and tests multiple ideas around it—even legendary designers like Sid Meiers fail when they ignore first-time user experience.
Key Takeaways
- Separate instinct from ideas: Your gut feeling about what consumers need is almost always correct, but the specific implementation is usually wrong. Test many ideas against your core instinct rather than dying on one idea.
- The 'Proven Better New' framework isolates your innovation zone by testing multiple product variations around a single core insight. This approach helped Zinga catch fatal flaws early—even in games from legendary designers.
- Prioritize first-time user experience above all else. Sid Meiers' 'Civilization' failed on Facebook due to poor onboarding, not game design. Junior Zinga PMs spotted the flaw immediately because they understood that excellent UX trumps great game mechanics.
- Redefine ambition by your consumer's eyes, not industry peers. Winning hearts of nurses in Indiana (FarmVille) required abandoning the goal of winning awards from game designers—a moral arbitrage between founder ego and market success.
- Kill your hope before it kills the product. Continuously test whether your current idea is an A-grade solution. If you're asking whether it's working, it's not—that signals you need to test new variations around your core instinct.
Related topics
Transcript Excerpt
If you're truly ambitious, burn your resume. >> You have all these amazing contrarian perspectives on how to build amazing products. >> Your instincts are right 95% of the time. Your ideas are wrong 75% of the time. We've seen so many founders who just stoically, heroically stick with a losing idea. >> How do you know if this is just the wrong path you're following? >> If you're asking whether or not your product is an A, it's not [music] an A. When you have lightning in a bottle, when you have true signal, everything works. >> Most products are better versions of things that existed before. Talk about how you get over that hump of copying. >> It's almost a moral arbitrage. You became a founder, an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator, but you're trying to win the hearts a…