- In today’s CEO Daily: The executive behind FarmVille shares lessons on creating and popularizing products in the AI era
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Good morning. Zynga founder Mark Pincus made social gaming a global habit. Now he’s sharing his learnings—and has a lot to say about why AI won’t save you. Zynga reached more than a billion users with hits like FarmVille before being acquired by Take-Two Interactive in 2022. Now Pincus has written a book called Life at the Speed of Play that’s both a memoir and a guide to creating products that people want. These are hard-won lessons.
I spoke with Pincus years ago when he was struggling as the hard-driving, metrics-obsessed culture he’d built was spiraling amid rapid growth, a volatile IPO, and poor management decisions. He was, by his own admission, a bad boss who had to learn leadership lessons on the job. But he’s also a successful serial entrepreneur who has built popular products and empowered others to do the same.
I spoke to him recently about his advice for creating and popularizing products in an AI era. Some observations:
Science before art: “There is an art and a science to product making. The best leaders really have mastered the science, and then they do the art. Picasso spent the first part of his career tracing … until me and our teams have mastered what’s proven, we haven’t earned the right to do something new. When great companies launch their products, they’re collecting winnings, they’re not making bets.”
The impact of AI: “What we find quickly is that AI gets us to a B‑plus in seconds. Not only does it never get us to an A, it distracts us. You don’t know what an A looks like if you’ve never really owned it. You have to learn how to do it first to know what A looks like … but I’m an extreme AI optimist; we haven’t gotten to the new economies that are going to be created by AI.”
Grow your talent: “At Zynga, I found that we had to grow our own product makers. People we hired from outside were smart, but they’d been taught things in a way that were not useful. They weren’t fast enough, or it wasn’t the right kind of speed. Our whole ethos was test more ideas in a week than the industry tests in a year. I picked this one room and called it my teaching hospital. We were trying, ideating, inventing in the space of a game.
Demand ‘bold beats’: “It’s something we made up to convince our teams to innovate and try to grow futures. We said, every quarter you have to do a bold beat, which is a positive disruption in the consumer experience that, if it’s successful, lights up Twitter or the blogosphere or TikTok—and moves some real metrics by 10% or more. Whether you’re running American Express or a startup, you’re trying to figure out: how do we launch really bold ideas this week? Not three years from now.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com