The hidden pattern behind successful products | Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga)
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | GrowthShow Notes
Mark Pincus founded Zynga—the company behind Words With Friends, FarmVille, and Zynga Poker—and has arguably created more hit consumer products than anyone in history. At Zynga, eight of 10 major game launches became massive hits, reaching over a billion players. Over the past five years, Mark has been synthesizing everything he’s learned about building successful consumer products and turning it into a book, Life at the Speed of Play, which comes out on June 23. This is the first interview he’s done about the book.
In our in-depth conversation, we discuss: 1. His “Proven, Better, New” framework: copy what’s proven, make it better so that 10 out of 10 people say “f*ck yes, I’ll use this”—then add something new 2. Why being less ambitious is the path to the most ambitious ideas 3. His rule of thumb that your instincts are right 95% of the time, but your ideas are wrong 75% of the time 4. “Kill hope before hope kills you” 5. How to raise kids in the age of AI — Brought to you by: WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more Vanta—Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI — Episode transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-common-pattern-behind-successful — Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0 — Where to find Mark Pincus: • X: https://x.com/markpinc • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markpincus • Website: https://www.lifeatthespeedofplay.com — Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Mark Pincus (02:46) The Proven Better New framework overview (07:29) Earning the right to innovate (08:30) What “better” really means (12:03) Quick summary of the framework (12:40) Examples of the framework in action (13:30) How to use proven correctly on your platform (15:13) The moral arbitrage of copying (23:55) Be less ambitious (28:25) The Bolt.new story and staying humble (33:15) Kill hope before hope kills you (37:00) Using AI as a failure machine (40:08) Why Zynga’s games succeeded (it wasn’t virality) (48:36) The future of consumer social apps (57:05) How to know if your product is a B+ (1:01:25) Distribution in the age of AI (1:15:39) Make everyone a CEO (1:18:18) Stay close to the metal (1:21:35) Why Mark says micromanagement is beautiful (1:23:35) The expert witness (1:25:05) The number one job of a CEO is to be right (1:26:35) What Mark is teaching his five kids (1:35:14) Mark’s “why” (1:37:08) Mark’s new book: Life at The Speed of Play — Referenced: • Tribe.net: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe.net • Zynga: https://www.zynga.com • Sid Meier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier • Electronic Arts: https://www.ea.com • CityVille: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityVille • Words With Friends: https://wordswithfriends.com/ • Scrabble: https://playscrabble.com • Reddit: https://www.reddit.com • TED Radio Hour, MIT Media Lab founder, 1984 TED talk.: https://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_negroponte_5_predictions_from_1984 • Peter Thiel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterthiel • FarmVille: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FarmVille • Craig Newmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark • How to consistently go viral: Nikita Bier’s playbook for winning at consumer apps (co-founder of TBH, Gas, advisor, investor): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-consistently-go-viral-nikita-bier • Angry Birds: https://www.angrybirds.com/ • OMGPop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMGPop • Draw Something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw_Something • Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/slack-founder-stewart-butterfield • Brian Chesky’s new playbook: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-
More from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Emmanuel Ameisen is an interpretability researcher at Anthropic, where he looks inside LLMs like Claude to understand how they think. Before joining Anthropic, he spent years in applied ML at Stripe and Insight, and is the author of Building Machine Learning Powered Applications. His research has produced some of the most striking findings in the field: that models form general representations of concepts, plan many tokens ahead without stating those plans explicitly, and may exhibit something structurally similar to the distinction between conscious and unconscious processing in humans.
Josh Woodward is the head of Google Labs, the Gemini app, and AI Studio. He has spent over 17 years at Google and oversees its longest-running and largest labs team, whose products include NotebookLM (now Gemini Notebook), Project Genie, and Flow. His job is to find, experiment with, and scale new AI products, and he has built one of the most distinctive product cultures in the industry for generating ideas, running experiments, and, even more importantly, knowing when to quit.
Tibo Sottiaux leads ChatGPT and Codex at OpenAI. Under his stewardship, OpenAI has shipped some of its most consequential consumer launches: Codex, ChatGPT Work, and most recently, the new Dots personal agent platform. He joined me at DevDay, hours after his team launched more than 20 new products, to talk about where things are heading.
Molly Graham is back for round two, and this one is even more powerful. Molly has spent more than 20 years helping organizations and the humans inside them navigate growth and change. She’s held leadership roles at Google, Facebook, Quip, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and is the host of TED’s WorkLife podcast (which she took over from Adam Grant). She also runs Glue Club, a leadership community for senior operators, and writes a popular newsletter called Lessons.
Peter Sellis was the first product manager at Snapchat, where he spent seven years building one of the most beloved consumer products in history. He went on to serve as Head of Product at Discord, where he helped drive some of the fastest user growth the platform had seen. Having left his role at Discord, he gets to be especially real and unfiltered — nothing to promote, no PR, no comms team.