Zynga founder Mark Pincus, the executive who turned social gaming into a global habit, is sharing hard-won lessons on building and popularizing products in the AI era — and he has a lot to say about why AI won't save you.

Zynga, which Pincus founded in 2007, reached more than a billion users with hits like FarmVille, which after its 2009 launch drew more than 80 million monthly players on Facebook at its peak, before being acquired by Take-Two Interactive in 2022 in a deal valued at roughly $12.7 billion. Pincus has now written a book, Life at the Speed of Play, that is both a memoir and a guide to creating products that people want.

The lessons were earned the hard way. Fortune spoke with Pincus years ago, when the hard-driving, metrics-obsessed culture he had built was spiraling amid rapid growth, a volatile December 2011 IPO, and poor management decisions. By his own admission, he was a bad boss who had to learn leadership lessons on the job — he stepped down as CEO in 2013 and returned for a second stint in 2015 before the company's eventual sale. He is also a successful serial entrepreneur whose earlier ventures included the software company Support.com and the social network Tribe.net, and who has built popular products and empowered others to do the same.

In a recent conversation, Pincus offered his advice for creating and popularizing products in an AI era, framing it around observations drawn from his years building one of social gaming's biggest companies.

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.” His caution lands amid a broader industry debate over how far AI tools should carry product work, as executives across software, media, and entertainment weigh the speed of generative output against concerns that widely shared models produce widely similar results.

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.”

The piece appears in Fortune's CEO Daily newsletter, which also features the big leadership story “Who's in charge of corporate AI spending?” and reports on a good day in Asian markets, with Korea leading the way.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com.

Source: Fortune