The process of defining, testing, and launching new products can feel chaotic. So how do we increase the odds of a hit, and decrease the time it takes to get to “right”?
This is something I have spent my whole career thinking about. I’m a serial entrepreneur, best known for founding Zynga, which pioneered social gaming with hits like FarmVille and Words With Friends, in 2007. We achieved $1 billion in revenue within four years, and went public in 2011. (In 2022, Zynga was valued at $12.7 billion when it merged with Take-Two Interactive, best known for Grand Theft Auto.) I also cofounded a venture capital firm with Reid Hoffman, and we backed companies including SpaceX.
Reid is a friend and lifelong collaborator, and he calls me an idea generator. But my challenge has always been bringing my ideas to life. That is true for everyone, in a sense: We all have ideas that we never pursue. Real life can feel like a beatdown. Once we start imagining the many steps necessary to implement our idea, it can feel overwhelming, expensive, and a lot less fun. Often, that’s when we decide that maybe the idea wasn’t that great. Even when we do pursue an idea, we’re usually forced to make painful trade-offs, with time as our primary currency. The way to change this equation is to massively accelerate the speed at which we build.
With Zynga, in order to survive, I had to be right about which products had the best shot at success — so I developed a simple framework. I call it Proven Better New. It became a religion inside Zynga, and has spread to many of my fellow product makers.
Proven Better New is a systematic approach to generating winning products faster. Its core value is in isolating truly new ideas and then testing them rapidly to get accurate customer feedback. It protects us from our urge to make everything better, avoiding wasted cycles and false signals. And it stops us from reinventing features that someone else already perfected. That way, we can spend our time and energy on innovation that actually excites us and our users.
Image Credit: Nicolás Ortega
Start with what’s proven.
In order to implement the “Proven” part of this formula, there’s one idea that every product maker must get comfortable with: Copying what already works (legally).
I get it. There’s an inherent tension in really going after the “Proven.” We all want to be respected by our peers, so our egos hold us back. Copying also goes against every instinct that we have as product makers: We want to innovate! Copying other people’s work can feel distasteful, wrong, unfair, and not something we’d take pride in. In my experience, the more junior the product teams, the harder they try not to copy or even look as if they were copying.
But the greatest artists and product makers have often been the best at copying what’s already out there; they’ve stood on the shoulders of giants. Steve Jobs, the grandmaster of product making, famously said, “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” (Ironically, he stole this quote from Picasso, who was a master at tracing and copying other artists’ works before he created his own.) Only a master craftsman can spot excellence and be comfortable copying it.
If you’re truly ambitious, you need to stop worrying about getting respect from your peers. What looks innovative to your customers may not be impressive to the rest of your industry.
Steve Jobs spoke about this in 1997, when he addressed one of his first developer conference audiences about the new Mac. “This whole notion of being so proprietary in every facet of what we do has really hurt us. It might be 10% better, but usually, it ends up being about 50% worse.”
Of course, if all we did as product makers was copy, people would have no reason to use our product instead of whatever we were copying. So that’s where our innovation zones of “Better” and “New” come in.
“Better” refers to something in the Proven product that you can do better in the eyes of the current audience, so that 10 out of 10 of those users will say, “Yeah, that’s better!”
“New” refers to the novel idea that is our real innovation zone. It’s something so new that it will get people to try, talk about, and even love our product. Here, we have to acknowledge just how hard it is to get an actual new idea that the world is ready for and wants. One of my maxims inside Zynga, repeated to this day, was “all New fails.” It’s not to discourage innovation, but rather to encourage experimentation and curiosity without presuming success. “New” is the shiny penny everyone wants to spend all their time on. We put all our hopes and dreams in imagining how our new idea can change the world. The disciplined product maker knows to isolate the new zone to derisk their product.
Here’s the process: Start with enough “Proven” that your product doesn’t fail for the wrong reasons. Find “Better” if you can, because it will increase your odds of success. Then, try lots and lots of isolated “New” ideas on top of your product until you get to something that does work. This process of isolated innovation will help you massively change your odds of success to come up with a winning product.
Case Study: Zynga Poker
The fastest way to understand Proven Better New is to see the breakdown for the original Zynga Poker game from 2007.
Essentially, we took the proven table layout and game mechanics from online poker, made it better by removing the download, and added a new feature: real people, often your friends, with their pictures at the table.
Zynga came from my deep instinct that games could become a daily habit for busy adults. They just needed permission to play, which came in the form of being social and therefore somewhat productive. Games had always been “empty calories” — never considered a good use of time. I knew social gaming could be massive.
But Zynga Poker was so unambitious and noninnovative that it was embarrassing. It was just a poker game that looked exactly like every other — except for two simple changes.
One change — our better feature — was instant play with no download, because we built it in Flash for the web (which was novel at the time). This was a big deal, because I’ve always found you lose 80% to 90% of your audience when you require a download. No other games could afford to offer instant play over the web because they all offered real-money gambling, where security was crucial. We had an advantage because we were pursuing a free model.
Our other change was our new feature: showing players’ real identities with their Facebook profile pictures instead of random, creepy avatars. By isolating our new aspect to purely social elements, we could test our core hypothesis without reinventing everything else. When we saw that 25% of people were joining their friends at tables, we knew we were onto something big.
We called this social game mechanics, and it became Zynga’s entire innovation and growth engine. With social game mechanics, we built something no one had offered before: the integration of a player’s social network into their game board. This was how we disrupted the game industry.
Case Study: Slack
Now let’s look at how Proven Better New works in a totally different industry.
In 2012, Stewart Butterfield realized he had to make a hard pivot. His company, which had been building a massive multiplayer game called Glitch, was low on money with no prospects of more funding. People at the company asked themselves, “What can we do?” and realized they had this one internal engineering tool they all used. That was Slack.
Slack perfectly implemented the Proven Better New model against HipChat, an existing team collaboration tool. HipChat was a popular chat product used inside most large enterprises to manage internal communications, primarily between engineers. Here was an enterprise product everyone had relied on that wasn’t fun. Because Slack was the product of a game company, they built a more “cuddly” user interface on top of what was functionally still HipChat. Slack’s Proven Better New strategy was to offer the exact same product, but make it better with an interface that felt more friendly. I don’t even remember whether they had anything new initially. I do remember that the product greeted you with 25 different words for hello.
When the company launched the product as Slack, it spread virally: Eight thousand companies signed up within 24 hours.Everyone loved it — but they couldn’t explain why. Inside Zynga, our IT group was rolling their eyes: “There’s nothing different. Why are you forcing us to get this?” But the big idea of Slack was making very small innovations that were very meaningful to the end users (not to the IT department). The product spread through work groups and surpassed HipChat in a year. Eventually, Salesforce bought Slack for $27.7 billion, making it one of the largest acquisitions in the software industry at the time.
Image Credit: Nicolás Ortega
Using AI for Proven Better New
AI is an amazing tool to get us leverage in implementing Proven Better New, and has already become a crucial and magical tool for product making. But so far, it can’t replace what we humans add: creativity, empathy, and taste.
I had a lot of fun asking ChatGPT to deliver a Proven Better New analysis of several hit products to explain their success — and then to help us generate ideas for Better and New products. What I found was that AI is great at looking backward to analyze and explain the world around us. But as of today, it doesn’t have the ability to distinguish between false and true signals. It can’t ask 10 users what they’d say “Yeah!” to, and it has yet to match the human ability to predict and imagine new products, new markets, and new worlds.
AI and LLMs offer the potential to massively accelerate Proven Better New, but are also likely to homogenize, reducing both quirkiness and the potential to surprise and delight people. GPT can get you to a B-plus in seconds, but it might actually be pulling you away from getting to an A.
In a way, that’s not too different from the risks of the Proven Better New formula itself. Years of deploying Proven Better New have shown me that the formula can become a crutch. It can deliver false signals in the form of B-plus products that never get to A-plus. Because you are copying successful products, you may get positive signals even when your unique new idea isn’t that good.
A core philosophical question about product development is whether it is an art or a science. My answer is that it’s both: The art is taste, and the science is process.
The best product makers don’t chase novelty for its own sake; they start with what’s been proven, build with discipline, innovate where it counts, and know when to break the rules to deliver something magical.
Adapted from Life at the Speed of Play. Copyright © 2026 by Mark Pincus. Published June 23 by Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.
The process of defining, testing, and launching new products can feel chaotic. So how do we increase the odds of a hit, and decrease the time it takes to get to “right”?
This is something I have spent my whole career thinking about. I’m a serial entrepreneur, best known for founding Zynga, which pioneered social gaming with hits like FarmVille and Words With Friends, in 2007. We achieved $1 billion in revenue within four years, and went public in 2011. (In 2022, Zynga was valued at $12.7 billion when it merged with Take-Two Interactive, best known for Grand Theft Auto.) I also cofounded a venture capital firm with Reid Hoffman, and we backed companies including SpaceX.
Reid is a friend and lifelong collaborator, and he calls me an idea generator. But my challenge has always been bringing my ideas to life. That is true for everyone, in a sense: We all have ideas that we never pursue. Real life can feel like a beatdown. Once we start imagining the many steps necessary to implement our idea, it can feel overwhelming, expensive, and a lot less fun. Often, that’s when we decide that maybe the idea wasn’t that great. Even when we do pursue an idea, we’re usually forced to make painful trade-offs, with time as our primary currency. The way to change this equation is to massively accelerate the speed at which we build.
This story originally appeared on Entrepreneur
