Creating Products with Curiosity, Humility, and Play

**Adi Ignatius** (0:01)
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I'm Ali Ignatius.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:34)
I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

**Adi Ignatius** (0:44)
Alison, I feel like the executives I speak with these days are all struggling. They're struggling with uncertainty, they're struggling with the new global order, they're struggling with inflation, with AI. It's kind of a drag.
But today we're talking with someone who is markedly more upbeat and who has ideas on how senior leaders can inject a greater sense of play into their work lives.

**Alison Beard** (1:06)
That sounds fun. You know what they say about all work and no play, but I bet that a lot of listeners, especially managers and maybe me, are skeptical. Is work really the place for play?

**Adi Ignatius** (1:16)
Yes and no.
I think his point is that a lot of the joy can come from working closely with your customers to test and eventually to develop products that they will use and that they will actually love. And that requires embracing the idea that as an innovator, your instincts are often going to be right, but your idea for implementing it is likely to be wrong. And with the right mindset, right approach, you can increase your odds of getting to success.

**Alison Beard** (1:42)
Okay, I get it. So, we're not talking about foosball at the office, we're talking about playing with the work, being open to messing around and experimenting until you get things right.

**Adi Ignatius** (1:50)
Yeah, that's basically it. So, our guest today, he is a gamer. This is Mark Pincus. He's the founder and former CEO of Zynga, the mobile gaming company, and he's the author of the new book, Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love. Here's our conversation.
Alright, so you've written a book, Life at the Speed of Play, and I want to talk about what it means to inject more play in your work life. But I want to start with strategy. I want to start with your line in the book that your instinct is right 95% of the time, but your idea is wrong at least 75% of the time. I love the science in that. What do you mean by that?

**Mark Pincus** (2:34)
It's a really foundational point for all of us as entrepreneurs and creators in the world.
In a lot of ways, it's the need for the death of our own egos that get in the way of us tuning into the most successful variant of this idea that we're passionate about. So often we as founders have this instinct that we can feel that the world ought to be able to operate in a better way, that we should be able to order a taxi through our phone. We get that idea, we get excited about it, and then we just start trying to do it. And what we don't do is stop and really isolate just that instinct that there should be a better way and separate that from the way that we're assuming is the best way to package and bring that to the world. And the power of that is like a time machine, because if I could go back to myself in 2003 when I was building tribe.net and I had so many winning instincts that the world was gonna move to social networking, this was before Facebook, and yet I had one losing idea that I just stuck with. I had such a higher probability of success if I started with this premise that, okay, there's some instincts I've got, and I'm curious about those, and I'm looking out as much at what else people are doing in the world as what I'm doing to try to get more information on how do I tune into the winning variant of these multiple instincts I had.

**Adi Ignatius** (4:19)
So is this basically an appeal for rigorous experimentation, or is it something more than that?

**Mark Pincus** (4:25)
Well, it's not just rigorous experimentation.
We have to have curiosity and humility when we pursue something. And when we fall in love with our idea before it's baked, and before we get the feedback that this is a winning idea, we often ignore a lot of the information coming back saying that this isn't quite right. It's not just go test a lot. It's come up with four or five different variations of this idea, and be equally curious about those, and be equally curious about what you see other people doing in the world that is close to your idea.