Innovating with conviction: lessons from Marc Pincus (Zynga founder)

Marc Pincus, founder of Zynga (social gaming company that sold for $12.7 billion in 2022), knows a thing or two about innovation. In a recent podcast interview with A16Z, he shared some of his key insights about innovation. His perspective helped me to develop an innovation framework that I will now carry forward in my career: innovating with conviction.

Here are the key elements of the framework:

• True Signal
• Idea Thesis
• Conviction
• Idea Variants
• Cycling through Idea Variants
• Minimum Viable Idea State

True Signal

Your goal is to get true signal about your product idea. Is what we are building actually valuable to our customers? Is the problem important enough, and is our solution addressing it better than the customer’s alternatives?

Idea Thesis

When you pursue a new innovation opportunity, you’re really pursuing an idea thesis. The core idea thesis consists of the most important assumptions and hypotheses about the problem and solution space. What do we believe the customer problems are? Why do we believe these are important problems? Why do we believe that our solution is so much better than existing alternatives? What do we believe about customer awareness and adoption?

An example of a core idea thesis is Amazon’s bet on third-party sellers. The core idea thesis was that independent sellers needed a way to reach customers, build trust, and fulfill orders–and Amazon’s third-party seller platform could solve all three problems for them.

Another example of a core idea thesis is the iPhone (more below). The core idea thesis was that an edge-to-edge touchscreen interface and an app-centric model would be exponentially more valuable to consumers than the small screen, Blackberry keyboard and web-centric alternative.

Conviction

The core idea thesis is usually based on your instincts — or hunches. You can start gathering data to strengthen your instincts and hunches, until you start to develop conviction in it. Once you have conviction in your core idea thesis, it’s time to begin executing on it.

The best product thinkers have high conviction in their idea thesis before they pursue it. As Marc said in the podcast interview:

“The best product makers are not making bets [on the underlying thesis]. This whole MVP, this whole lean startup thing is selling us a false prophecy… Steve Jobs didn’t put out the iPhone to see if anyone liked it, he already knew. If you were on his team, you were smiling like a Cheshire Cat because you knew it was going to be great… You were not going to see how the iPhone did, that was not an MVP product.”

Pincus is arguing that Jobs knew the underlying core idea thesis–of the smartphone with a touchscreen interface and an app-centric rather than web-centric model–was going to be great. He had high conviction when he pursued this idea thesis.

“When Brian Chesky puts out new versions of the Airbnb product, he already knows it’s going to do well…What I challenge you guys to get to is the conviction that your idea [thesis] is right.”

Idea Variants

Once you have clarity on your core idea thesis, it’s time to develop your idea variants. These are the specific implementations of your core idea thesis. It’s super important to separate your idea variants from the underlying idea thesis.

There are two benefits of separating your idea thesis from your idea variants:

1. Avoiding over-investment: You have the courage to move on from a failed idea variant before you over invest in it, because you have a backlog of many other idea variants if this one fails. You can be much more objective about whether this particular idea variant is working, because you have many alternatives.
2. Avoiding early dismissal of an idea thesis: You understand that an idea variant is just an implementation of your core idea thesis. Thus, if one particular idea variant fails, you don’t necessarily dismiss the entire idea thesis. This is a problem I’ve seen happen before — where teams try an idea variant, it doesn’t work, and they’re quick to dismiss the entire idea thesis. If they had only tried other variants, perhaps they would have found something that worked.

A healthy way to view idea variants is to assume that every one of them will likely be wrong. You could try to prioritize them by highest likelihood to succeed, but even then you might be wrong. You have to be willing to abandon an idea variant quickly and move on to the next one to get closer to finding product-market fit.

Marc shared some additional perspective about how to think about idea variants:

“My core product management philosophy is: let’s just assume that your idea [variant] is wrong. It’s like a Time Machine, and you could come back from 2 years in the future. ‘The thing you’re working on, it’s the right idea [thesis], but the actual idea [variant] you’re working on is wrong.’

“What would you do with that information today? Would you still heroically go with that one idea variant, or would you abandon it and move onto the next one?”

If you have many idea variants in mind, it’s a lot easier to distance yourself from any one of them. Before starting implementation on your first idea variant, spend time brainstorming many different variants and develop a backlog of multiple variants. Then the goal is to get true signal on the idea variants and find the most valuable one (product-market fit) as quickly as possible.

How do you develop those idea variants? In addition to doing your own brainstorming, look at what others are doing so you can build on the state of the art.

“Even before you start that one idea [variant], you and your team need to come up with, ‘What are your ten other variants of that idea?’ What is everyone else in your space doing? Are you spending enough time looking at their ideas that relate to your instincts as you do your own? You probably should be spending brain cycles 50–60% of your time looking at what everyone else around you is doing, and trying to see why they’re wrong or why they’re almost right. And then spend half your time on your own idea [variants].”

Cycling through Idea Variants

After generating a list of multiple idea variants, it’s time to start testing them. Marc advises us to cycle through the idea variants as quickly as possible. If you assume that 1) your initial idea variants are likely going to be wrong, and 2) that competitors are out there trying to find the winning idea variant, then you have to move with speed and urgency.

Pincus compared cycling through idea variants as taking shots on goal.

“When we first came out with mobile games, we had the incumbent players like EA [Electronic Arts]. They were taking two years to get a product out there and generate learnings. We said, ‘We want to take as many shots on goal in one week as the incumbents take in one year.’
“That was our mantra. How do we learn from as many shots on goal in one week as the industry does in one year?”

Minimum Viable Idea State

To cycle through idea variants quickly, focus on the minimum viable idea state, not the minimum viable product. Getting a particular idea variant to the minimum viable idea state allows you to learn whether it’s valuable quickly and cheaply.

“People talk about MVP (minimum viable product). I don’t even believe in minimum viable product. I believe in minimum viable idea state.
“You don’t have the time. You do not have the time to build your product, and fail, and do it again.
“You will run out of money and time by then. So how can you move faster than that? That’s too slow for what we need today in a world of AI.”

Minimum viable idea state is the barebones minimum that you can put in front of real customers and observe their response. This could include paper or digital prototypes, or a “glue and duct tape” version of the product that allows you to test your idea variant. What’s key is to be ruthless about scoping things down, living with imperfection, creating just enough of an experience so that you can learn whether the idea variant is valuable.

In addition to minimum viable idea state, Pincus urges us to reuse as much as possible from what’s already out there and focus our efforts only on where we can truly innovate.

“So much of the first part of what you’re doing has already been proven and done by other people.
“How do you build the proven pieces that everyone has also already done? How do you do that quickly and cheaply and not waste any time on that? You need to legally copy everything that’s already been done, you need to see who’s doing it best, how to copy what they’ve done so you can get to the edge.
“And the edge is what’s better and what’s new.”

His statements remind me a lot about the Adjacent Possible. The Adjacent Possible is a concept that argues that the frontiers of innovation are defined by the state of the art at the time — what “spare parts” are available to be remixed and recombined into an innovation. Most innovations build upon the state of the art, where they take the available inputs and combine them into something new.

The key is to experiment on the edges of the Adjacent Possible. Operating on the edges of the Adjacent Possible can allow us to “open new doors” and push forward the boundaries of the Adjacent Possible. We should build upon the proven pieces to be able to get to the edge of the Adjacent Possible quickly.

Bringing it all together

So what have we learned about innovation from Marc Pincus? Let me summarize below:

• True signal: Your goal is to get true signal about your product idea. Is what we are building actually valuable to our customers?
• Idea thesis: The core idea thesis consists of the most important assumptions and hypotheses about the problem and solution space. An example of an idea thesis is Amazon’s bet on third-party sellers, or the iPhone’s touchscreen interface.
• Conviction: Start gathering data to strengthen your instincts and hunches, until you start to develop conviction in your idea thesis. The best product thinkers have high conviction in their idea thesis before they pursue it.
• Idea variants: These are the specific implementations of your core idea thesis. It’s super important to separate your idea variants from the underlying idea thesis. You should develop a backlog of possible idea variants before you even start testing your first one.
• Cycling through idea variants: You should cycle through the idea variants as quickly as possible, thinking about them as taking shots on goal. “How do we learn from as many shots on goal in one week as the industry does in one year?”
• Minimum viable idea state: To cycle through idea variants quickly, focus on the minimum viable idea state, not the minimum viable product. Getting a particular idea variant to the minimum viable idea state allows you to learn whether it’s valuable quickly and cheaply.

I am now using this framework to provide guidance to all innovation projects at my company. I definitely would have benefited from this framework earlier in my career, when I was a co-founder of a startup company. We clung too long to one particular idea variant, instead of discarding it quickly and trying another one.

The art, of course, is knowing when to continue iterating a particular idea variant, and when to move on. More tricky still is knowing when it’s time to stop investing in an idea thesis altogether. The second question comes back to conviction. How deep is your conviction in the idea thesis, how much time and money do you have to invest, and how patient are you and your investors? Your conviction will probably be a function of the progress you’re making with idea variants — are you seeing momentum, are you close to validating some key assumptions, do you see an eventual path to achieving product-market fit?

If you’re pursuing any kind of 0 → 1 projects, I highly encourage you to adopt the framework of innovating with conviction. It has helped me and my teams, and I’m confident that it will also help you.