The method of defining, testing, and launching new merchandise can really feel chaotic. So how can we improve the percentages of a success, and reduce the time it takes to get to “proper”?
That is one thing I’ve spent my complete profession fascinated by. I’m a serial entrepreneur, finest identified for founding Zynga, which pioneered social gaming with hits like FarmVille and Phrases With Mates, in 2007. We achieved $1 billion in income inside 4 years, and went public in 2011. (In 2022, Zynga was valued at $12.7 billion when it merged with Take-Two Interactive, finest identified for Grand Theft Auto.) I additionally cofounded a enterprise capital agency with Reid Hoffman, and we backed firms together with SpaceX.
Reid is a buddy and lifelong collaborator, and he calls me an concept generator. However my problem has all the time been bringing my concepts to life. That’s true for everybody, in a way: All of us have concepts that we by no means pursue. Actual life can really feel like a beatdown. As soon as we begin imagining the various steps essential to implement our concept, it may possibly really feel overwhelming, costly, and loads much less enjoyable. Usually, that’s after we determine that possibly the concept wasn’t that nice. Even after we do pursue an concept, we’re often compelled to make painful trade-offs, with time as our main foreign money. The way in which to vary this equation is to massively speed up the pace at which we construct.
With Zynga, so as to survive, I needed to be proper about which merchandise had the very best shot at success — so I developed a easy framework. I name it Confirmed Higher New. It grew to become a faith inside Zynga, and has unfold to a lot of my fellow product makers.
Confirmed Higher New is a scientific strategy to producing successful merchandise quicker. Its core worth is in isolating actually new concepts after which testing them quickly to get correct buyer suggestions. It protects us from our urge to make the whole lot higher, avoiding wasted cycles and false indicators. And it stops us from reinventing options that another person already perfected. That approach, we are able to spend our time and power on innovation that truly excites us and our customers.
Picture Credit score: Nicolás Ortega
Begin with what’s confirmed.
With a purpose to implement the “Confirmed” a part of this system, there’s one concept that each product maker should get snug with: Copying what already works (legally).
I get it. There’s an inherent stress in actually going after the “Confirmed.” All of us wish to be revered by our friends, so our egos maintain us again. Copying additionally goes towards each intuition that we have now as product makers: We wish to innovate! Copying different folks’s work can really feel distasteful, unsuitable, unfair, and never one thing we’d take delight in. In my expertise, the extra junior the product groups, the more durable they struggle to not copy and even look as in the event that they had been copying.
However the biggest artists and product makers have usually been the very best at copying what’s already on the market; they’ve stood on the shoulders of giants. Steve Jobs, the grandmaster of product making, famously mentioned, “Good artists copy; nice artists steal.” (Satirically, he stole this quote from Picasso, who was a grasp at tracing and copying different artists’ works earlier than he created his personal.) Solely a grasp craftsman can spot excellence and be snug copying it.
If you happen to’re actually formidable, you might want to cease worrying about getting respect out of your friends. What appears to be like progressive to your clients might not be spectacular to the remainder of your business.
Steve Jobs spoke about this in 1997, when he addressed considered one of his first developer convention audiences concerning the new Mac. “This complete notion of being so proprietary in each side of what we do has actually harm us. It could be 10% higher, however often, it finally ends up being about 50% worse.”
After all, if all we did as product makers was copy, folks would don’t have any purpose to make use of our product as a substitute of no matter we had been copying. In order that’s the place our innovation zones of “Higher” and “New” are available.
“Higher” refers to one thing within the Confirmed product that you are able to do higher within the eyes of the present viewers, in order that 10 out of 10 of these customers will say, “Yeah, that’s higher!”
“New” refers back to the novel concept that’s our actual innovation zone. It’s one thing so new that it’s going to get folks to attempt, discuss, and even love our product. Right here, we have now to acknowledge simply how exhausting it’s to get an precise new concept that the world is prepared for and needs. One in all my maxims inside Zynga, repeated to this present day, was “all New fails.” It’s to not discourage innovation, however relatively to encourage experimentation and curiosity with out presuming success. “New” is the shiny penny everybody needs to spend all their time on. We put all our hopes and goals in imagining how our new concept can change the world. The disciplined product maker is aware of to isolate the brand new zone to derisk their product.
Right here’s the method: Begin with sufficient “Confirmed” that your product doesn’t fail for the unsuitable causes. Discover “Higher” should you can, as a result of it’ll improve your odds of success. Then, attempt heaps and many remoted “New” concepts on prime of your product till you get to one thing that does work. This means of remoted innovation will enable you massively change your odds of success to give you a successful product.
Case Examine: Zynga Poker
The quickest technique to perceive Confirmed Higher New is to see the breakdown for the unique Zynga Poker sport from 2007.
Basically, we took the confirmed desk structure and sport mechanics from on-line poker, made it higher by eradicating the obtain, and added a brand new characteristic: actual folks, usually your mates, with their footage on the desk.
Zynga got here from my deep intuition that video games might turn out to be a every day behavior for busy adults. They simply wanted permission to play, which got here within the type of being social and subsequently considerably productive. Video games had all the time been “empty energy” — by no means thought-about an excellent use of time. I knew social gaming may very well be large.
However Zynga Poker was so unambitious and noninnovative that it was embarrassing. It was only a poker sport that appeared precisely like each different — besides for 2 easy modifications.
One change — our higher characteristic — was on the spot play with no obtain, as a result of we constructed it in Flash for the online (which was novel on the time). This was a giant deal, as a result of I’ve all the time discovered you lose 80% to 90% of your viewers whenever you require a obtain. No different video games might afford to supply on the spot play over the online as a result of all of them provided real-money playing, the place safety was essential. We had a bonus as a result of we had been pursuing a free mannequin.
Our different change was our new characteristic: displaying gamers’ actual identities with their Fb profile footage as a substitute of random, creepy avatars. By isolating our new facet to purely social components, we might take a look at our core speculation with out reinventing the whole lot else. Once we noticed that 25% of individuals had been becoming a member of their mates at tables, we knew we had been onto one thing large.
We known as this social sport mechanics, and it grew to become Zynga’s complete innovation and progress engine. With social sport mechanics, we constructed one thing nobody had provided earlier than: the mixing of a participant’s social community into their sport board. This was how we disrupted the sport business.
Case Examine: Slack
Now let’s take a look at how Confirmed Higher New works in a very completely different business.
In 2012, Stewart Butterfield realized he needed to make a tough pivot. His firm, which had been constructing a large multiplayer sport known as Glitch, was low on cash with no prospects of extra funding. Folks on the firm requested themselves, “What can we do?” and realized that they had this one inner engineering instrument all of them used. That was Slack.
Slack completely applied the Confirmed Higher New mannequin towards HipChat, an present crew collaboration instrument. HipChat was a well-liked chat product used inside most giant enterprises to handle inner communications, primarily between engineers. Right here was an enterprise product everybody had relied on that wasn’t enjoyable. As a result of Slack was the product of a sport firm, they constructed a extra “cuddly” person interface on prime of what was functionally nonetheless HipChat. Slack’s Confirmed Higher New technique was to supply the very same product, however make it higher with an interface that felt extra pleasant. I don’t even bear in mind whether or not they had something new initially. I do do not forget that the product greeted you with 25 completely different phrases for good day.
When the corporate launched the product as Slack, it unfold virally: Eight thousand firms signed up inside 24 hours.Everybody beloved it — however they couldn’t clarify why. Inside Zynga, our IT group was rolling their eyes: “There’s nothing completely different. Why are you forcing us to get this?” However the large concept of Slack was making very small improvements that had been very significant to the top customers (to not the IT division). The product unfold by work teams and surpassed HipChat in a yr. Finally, Salesforce purchased Slack for $27.7 billion, making it one of many largest acquisitions within the software program business on the time.
Picture Credit score: Nicolás Ortega
Utilizing AI for Confirmed Higher New
AI is a tremendous instrument to get us leverage in implementing Confirmed Higher New, and has already turn out to be an important and magical instrument for product making. However to date, it may possibly’t substitute what we people add: creativity, empathy, and style.
I had a whole lot of enjoyable asking ChatGPT to ship a Confirmed Higher New evaluation of a number of hit merchandise to clarify their success — after which to assist us generate concepts for Higher and New merchandise. What I discovered was that AI is nice at wanting backward to investigate and clarify the world round us. However as of immediately, it doesn’t have the flexibility to differentiate between false and true indicators. It may well’t ask 10 customers what they’d say “Yeah!” to, and it has but to match the human skill to foretell and picture new merchandise, new markets, and new worlds.
AI and LLMs provide the potential to massively speed up Confirmed Higher New, however are additionally more likely to homogenize, decreasing each quirkiness and the potential to shock and delight folks. GPT can get you to a B-plus in seconds, but it surely may really be pulling you away from attending to an A.
In a approach, that’s not too completely different from the dangers of the Confirmed Higher New system itself. Years of deploying Confirmed Higher New have proven me that the system can turn out to be a crutch. It may well ship false indicators within the type of B-plus merchandise that by no means get to A-plus. Since you are copying profitable merchandise, you could get constructive indicators even when your distinctive new concept isn’t that good.
A core philosophical query about product growth is whether or not it’s an artwork or a science. My reply is that it’s each: The artwork is style, and the science is course of.
The most effective product makers don’t chase novelty for its personal sake; they begin with what’s been confirmed, construct with self-discipline, innovate the place it counts, and know when to interrupt the principles to ship one thing magical.
Tailored from Life on the Velocity of Play. Copyright © 2026 by Mark Pincus. Revealed June 23 by Harper Enterprise, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
The method of defining, testing, and launching new merchandise can really feel chaotic. So how can we improve the percentages of a success, and reduce the time it takes to get to “proper”?
That is one thing I’ve spent my complete profession fascinated by. I’m a serial entrepreneur, finest identified for founding Zynga, which pioneered social gaming with hits like FarmVille and Phrases With Mates, in 2007. We achieved $1 billion in income inside 4 years, and went public in 2011. (In 2022, Zynga was valued at $12.7 billion when it merged with Take-Two Interactive, finest identified for Grand Theft Auto.) I additionally cofounded a enterprise capital agency with Reid Hoffman, and we backed firms together with SpaceX.
Reid is a buddy and lifelong collaborator, and he calls me an concept generator. However my problem has all the time been bringing my concepts to life. That’s true for everybody, in a way: All of us have concepts that we by no means pursue. Actual life can really feel like a beatdown. As soon as we begin imagining the various steps essential to implement our concept, it may possibly really feel overwhelming, costly, and loads much less enjoyable. Usually, that’s after we determine that possibly the concept wasn’t that nice. Even after we do pursue an concept, we’re often compelled to make painful trade-offs, with time as our main foreign money. The way in which to vary this equation is to massively speed up the pace at which we construct.
