 We've got a few more coming in, but I know we're all eager to get to lunch. I can hear the stomachs rumbling, so I know mine is as well, so I think I'll get started. And thank you all for coming. I'm very excited to be here and share what I've learned about building better, faster products with game thinking. I really appreciate your time coming here. I've come here all the way from Silicon Valley and to share what I know with you. I want to make sure you're in the right place. So have you ever felt like this? Have you ever felt you really wanted to accelerate your early design process? You wanted it to go faster. You wanted to find that thing that people want. Have you ever found it challenging to filter all the feedback coming at you from your stakeholders, from your customers, from your team? It's all coming at you, but what if it's conflicted? How do you sort it out? How do you know what to pay attention to? And have you ever found it challenging to take your big expansive idea that's going to be so great and then turn it into a stripped down, simple MVP? Raise your hand if you've ever related to those feelings. All right, well I know I have, and even though I've been designing products and games for 20 years, I still struggle with these issues whenever I'm starting a new project. We're all here for the same reason. We want to build things people want. We don't want to spend our time building what people don't want. That's a big part of what Agile and Lean is all about. Peter Drucker likes to say, there's nothing so useless that's doing efficiently what we shouldn't be doing at all. And what I'm going to show you today are some ways to prevent that and to go beyond the basics of Agile and incorporate engagement and game thinking. I'm a social game designer, an entrepreneur, and a startup and innovation team coach. I've worked on some very big products and games. Major worldwide breakthrough hits. And I've worked with some of the top brands bringing mission critical games and services to life. Today I'm going to show you how to create a product people love and come back to with game thinking. Now what exactly is game thinking? It's a combination of several key elements. First, game design, not gamification, that's something different, game design. It also includes Agile and Lean X. I'm assuming with everything I tell you today that this is on top of, this encompasses Agile, but takes it further in the design area. It also incorporates design thinking, the basics of how you iterate towards success by engaging with real user needs. And lastly, but perhaps more importantly, it incorporates systems thinking, something that's completely missing from most design thinking. But if you're building a product in the 21st century, you have to understand systems thinking. And even the basics will take you much further. And this, this combination, which I call game thinking, is your key to smarter, faster innovation. So I didn't start off knowing all of this anymore than you know all of this. I started off as an eager young programmer and designer getting into working on big systems. I started off working with eBay from when they were 30 people up through 300. And I designed a lot of their core social systems, including the reputation system. I actually redesigned that, their power seller program and the About Me pages. I then got an amazing gig working on Ultima Online, which is one of the very earliest MMOs that's pre-World of Warcraft. And again, designed and redesigned their core social systems. Along the way, I wrote a book called Community Building on the Web that amazingly, 16 years later, still popular. And that really solidified my knowledge about how to develop online web communities. One of the most popular elements was something called the community lifecycle, which described how an individual goes from being a visitor through these different stages, a novice or regular, and finally turns into a leader. Any of you who have ever been through any community, online or off, knows intuitively about this cycle. And what I did was codify it so that other people could build on that. And that led me to meeting this gentleman. Does anyone here recognize who this is? Well, this is Alex Rogopoulos, the CEO of Harmonix. And one day in my living room in Half Moon Bay on a beautiful day, we were having lunch. And Alex told me about a game they wanted to build, where normal humans, with no musical talent at all, would play plastic instruments, and feel like they were actually in a band. A lot of people told him that was crazy. A lot of people said it wouldn't work financially. And he asked me to help him bring that game to life. I did. And one of the things that confused me but that I now understand was brilliant is that we brought that game to life, initially not with our target audience, not with the party gamers and casual gamers and non-gamers that we wanted to reach, but with these very nerdy, early adopter music gamers who we had developed from Guitar Hero. That game turned into rock band. I was on the original design team. That became a worldwide breakthrough hit. It's now being redeveloped in VR. And from that experience, I learned that if you want to go after a large, addressable market, first, you need to win the hearts and minds of your early passionate customers. More on that in a moment. I went on and had great experiences working with Will Wright. I worked on three different projects with Will. He's the creator of The Sims and Sim City. And working with a crack team there at Maxis and Walnut Creek, we developed many small, high-learning, world-building experiments that focused on testing them with Will's early adopters, that early passionate market, which were simulation nerds. So many people look at The Sims and say, what a great game. But early on, we weren't building The Sims. We were doing experiments, looking to find the fun, looking to find that magic that everything else would build on. From that, I learned to focus your earliest efforts on prototyping, testing and tuning your core loop. More on that in a moment as well. Went on and was able to work on some amazing breakthroughs, including Covet Fashion, which is a sort of mixed reality fashion game on mobile, and Hapify, which is a digital mental health app that's now leading its category. I also worked with these great companies, including the New York Times on their paywall, some of Disney's games, and redesigning Netflix's onboarding experience. And along the way, I did a venture-funded startup, Photograph, which was next-generation brain games. I have a background in neuroscience, as well as being a programmer and a designer. So it seemed like a natural fit. It was very exciting. We built this beautiful game. It was award-winning. It had the most amazing first week of experience. People just loved it. I was so proud of it. And it completely failed to cross the chasm, to reach mainstream. From that painful experience, I really learned how important it is to understand where you are in this innovation curve. Again, more on that in a moment. And I learned how you don't want to just build a beautiful onboarding experience, which people love. It can be impressive. The stakeholders loved it. My VC's loved it. But it kept us from actually making that sustainable kit. So you want to scope down. You want to prototype and test your ideas uncomfortably early. Now, I don't think this is news to all of you, but I'm going to show you how to put it into a framework for driving deep-lasting engagement. So from all these experiences, I put together what I call the game-thinking toolkit, which is a bunch of very pragmatic hands-on tools that let my clients and anyone I work with or teach this toolkit to understand how to actually drive toward faster, better innovation. It includes the player's journey, which is a simplification of that customer community experience I showed you earlier. It also includes a core learning loop, which is one of the secrets of how game designers actually bring their games to life. And the game-thinking roadmap, which for anybody who's a product owner or a product manager, can save you months, even years of time when you're dealing with innovation. So this led me to an engagement with this gentleman, Renan Lachman of Play, P-L-E-Y. Play is a fast-growing Silicon Valley-based toy rental website where you can rent Lego sets and other high-end toys, and now VR and AR. So Play was successful. They had raised our Series A. They had a very fast-growing service, and they wanted to build an online community for all kinds of reasons, but they weren't sure what kind, and they wanted me to help them validate and test their ideas and make sure they were building what people wanted. So we did that using that game-thinking toolkit, and we were able to do validation, do a full pivot, build an MVP, test the MVP, and then iterate the MVP in five weeks, which was amazing. They were thrilled, and I learned the power of having a toolkit that I could use to empower an entire team rather than doing the work myself. So that toolkit is what I'm going to be talking to you a little bit about today. I'm also doing a workshop tomorrow that goes deep into this and gets all of you empowered with it. So this toolkit is based on the habits and practices of successful innovators, people that have actually shipped hits, versus the people that think they'd like to. So today I'm going to give you a little subset of that, four strategies for better, faster product design. The first is to design your product to evolve over time. The second is to find the fun in your core loop. The third is to connect with your super fans first before you reach your target market. This is part of the secret of managing feedback. And the fourth is to build out your roadmap with game thinking. Let's drill down. First of all, designing your product to evolve over time. There's nothing too mysterious about that. You just have to think about it that way. Steve Jobs likes to say, design isn't just what it looks and feels like, it's how it works. This is about how your product works. So you start by not just designing pages or designing features. You think about your customers end-to-end experience and how it evolves over time. This model here is a simplified model that comes out of game thinking. You may have been exposed already to customer journey maps and things like that, where you do all the touch points of the customer experience. That's great. That's a great thing. But that has nothing to do with actually an evolving experience. That's the backbone we're getting into here. So the first stage is discovery. Discovery is when someone hasn't yet made a commitment and they're just discovering, finding out about your product, they're deciding, is this right for me? On-boarding, that's for newbies. That's where you learn the ropes and start getting some value out of the experience and decide if you're going to keep doing it. Habit building is different. Habit building is the day 21, the day 30, the day 60 experience. What's the hit? What's the hook that pulls you back? And even more importantly, what is it that your customer is getting better at by using your product? And then mastery, something that's really missing from most of the agile and design thinking discussions. Mastery is for enthusiasts. There might be two to five percent of your customers that really go deep, master your systems, want more. They're your super fans, they're your enthusiasts. What do you have for them? Is there some way that they can leverage all the knowledge and skills they've built up using your product? Is there some way you can leverage their skills and passions? That's what designing a good mastery level is about. Let's take a look at Slack. How many of you use Slack? Awesome. So Slack, if you don't know, started as a multiplayer cooperative game called Glitch that was developed by a distributed team. And when that game failed financially, Stewart Butterfield took the tool that they had been developing for three years internally and turned it into Slack. So let's look at these stages. In Slack, discovery is really about social discovery. Yeah, it's popular enough that sometimes it's now provisioned by your IT department, but most people find out about Slack through their friends. They get pulled in or through their colleagues. You've got to check this out. That's very game-like. That's very much how people discover games. So in that sense, Slack is more like Minecraft than it is like Yammer. Onboarding is for newbies. And in Slack, onboarding happens with a friendly, helpful bot. Let me describe this to you in game terms. You come in and there's a training level where you interact in single-player mode with a bot that shows you the ropes and teaches you just enough that you can start getting value until it releases you into the multiplayer fray, a.k.a. your channel, where there's all these other people. Those of you who've ever played a console game with a training level will recognize this pattern as being very much game-like. Now, there's no gamification. There's no points or badges, but the feeling of it feels very familiar and like a game, and it's a very smart way for Slack to bring people in. On Slack, Hobbit building is really about customization. As you use the tool more and more, you peel back the onion layers of customization. You discover, oh, emojis. Oh, channel integrations. Oh, there's this thing I can do. Oh, I can start to customize the look. And before you know it, you're ready to launch your own channel after you're used to it, or maybe program up a bot. Maybe customize that welcome bot and even integrate your app into Slack's API. What's interesting about this is that there's a consistent through-line in Slack as you go through these stages of customization, ending with API integration. It's part of what makes Slack feel so good to use. So if you want to build something that people come back to, try to create an experience that gets better as your customers get more skilled. Easy concept to understand. Little tricky to implement in practice. But that's what the game thinking toolkit's all about. And solve a real problem for a small group of people. Get back to that in a moment. Slack didn't start as an idea. It started as an in-house tool. And they banged on their core loop. They weren't making fancy onboarding. They were developing that core loop to be useful to them internally. And that's part of why Slack seemed to come out of nowhere surprised. It was in development for a while. Second concept. Find the fun in your core loop. Now, find the fun doesn't just mean fun, fun, fun. It means find the nugget of value. Raph Koster, who's one of my dearest friends and heroes, wrote a great book called The Theory of Fun. If you've never read it, it's an easy read, very, very inspiring. And he likes to say fun is just another word for learning. I think this is a very deep concept. Here's the other thing. Fun means different things to different kinds of people. We're going to go into this in depth tomorrow in the workshop. But when you're a game designer, you learn about several different kinds of games. So when I was just starting out in gaming, there was a textbook that I read cover to cover called Rules of Play. And this was the definition of a game in the textbook. That seems pretty good. Quantifiable outcome, rules, so far so good. Turns out, that's actually a definition of zero-sum games. Here's Game Theory 101. A zero-sum game is a kind of game where we're framed as opponents. If you win, I lose, and vice versa, there is a limited resource that's going to be divided up among the winners. That's what a zero-sum game is. So head-to-head battles, any war simulation, chess, go, polo, all those games. Rank order competitions from the Olympics to the leaderboard you saw on our website yesterday. And most gambling games are zero-sum games. But there's a whole other kind of game. One thing that confused me as I started to work in gaming more was I worked on rock band, and I worked on the Sims, and those games didn't fit narrowly into this definition. There's no end state in the Sims. So I came up with my own definition to describe these hits that I was working on. A structured experience with rules and goals that's fun to play together, it's a much broader definition. Well, it turns out that's very close to the definition for a non-zero-sum game. Non-zero-sum game is a game where we're partners. We win together, we lose together. And the key thing about a non-zero-sum game that's interesting to me and should be to you is that it's not about dividing up a limited pie. A limited resource. It's about creating more abundance for everybody by banding together. It's a fundamentally different kind of interaction. So here's some examples. Playing double dutch or hopscotch on the playground. The teams that play Pictionary are playing a non-zero-sum game. They win together and lose together. The way martial arts is practiced in the United States. Everybody's encouraged to level up together and support each other. Probably the best example is charity walk. The more people that play and participate, the better everyone does. It's the opposite of a zero-sum game where the more people that play, the lower your chances of winning. So ask yourself, what kind of fun are my customers looking for? Are they interested in being partners or opponents? Don't be fooled into thinking that game means competition. Sometimes competition is exactly the right thing to introduce into your game-like experience. Sometimes it's absolutely not. And there's a whole world of other game-like experiences that you can provide that aren't zero-sum. So now let's talk about how this fits into finding the fun in your core loop. Dan Cook, again, a dear friend and one of my big heroes, likes to say, in a loop you're learning a skill and you're updating your mental model. That's the thing that leads to player delight. So let's take a look at some of the popular ways of thinking about how you build an MVP. Because a lot of what we're here for is, on the way to any great product, you need an MVP. So there's a meme that says, oh, a fake landing page is the right MVP. Everybody should build a fake landing page. I can think of 10 companies that'll build one for you and tell you that's the right MVP. But now that you know about the player's journey in those four stages, you know that that tests your discovery phase. Of your experience. So it doesn't mean it's worthless, but it has nothing to do with testing your product experience, whether that's compelling. All an MVP, all a fake landing page does is test your marketing message, which is your discovery. Now, there's something called an operant conditioning loop or skinner box. How many people here know what an operant conditioning loop is? Okay. So, an operant conditioning loop came out of BF Skinner's work in the early part of the 20th century. And it's basically behavior manipulation with rewards and routines. So there's a lot. There's a book called Hooked. There's the power of habit. They both are based on this model. This gets you closer, but it doesn't lead to player delight, player empowerment, or long-term engagement. If that's what you want, this is going to lead you into a dead end. You need skill building. You need to make your customers more awesome. That's the thing that is the core of game thinking and of creating a game-like versus a gamified experience. So let's dig in. This is a core loop, or habit building, skill building habit loop. Think of it as your day 21 experience. It's that habit stage, habit building stage of your experience. Let's take a look at how Flaks core loop works to bring this idea to life. Here it is. It starts with an engaging activity that's motivated by an internal motivator, internal trigger. And in Slack's case, the engaging activity is just reading and responding to updates. The internal trigger is not wanting to be left out. FOMO. The feedback in Slack is very simple. It's an important point. People get really caught up in progress, and that's great. But without a simple core feedback loop, you're not building on a strong foundation. And Slack has simple feedback. I've read all my responses. Now, beyond that, you can layer in progress and investment. This is how games actually come to life. And engage triggers. An engaged trigger is a trigger that kicks in once people are engaged in your product. So in Slack's case, an engaged trigger is checking your notifications once you've configured them. In something like Twitter, it would be checking your stats. It only happens once you're into it, once you've committed. And the progress and investment is really more and more customization as I told you about earlier. So remember, skill building is the thing that makes your customers more awesome. That's what they want to be. They don't want, they don't care about your features. They want to be better than they were before. They want to be empowered. And a core loop is the key to making your customers more skillful. So if you want to build long-term engagement, start with a skill building core loop. Come back to that in a moment. Third, connect with your super fans. Paul Buckeye runs Y Combinator. He knows a thing or two about startups. He likes to say try to create something just a few people really love. Even if most people don't get it right away. This is one of the biggest mistakes I see startups making. They try to get their target audience and they forget that if you're doing anything innovative, you actually have to start with a much smaller group or you get off on the wrong track. So in 1991, Jeffrey Moore wrote a book called Crossing the Chasm. A lot of people know about this. He's a marketer and he wrote this book about his experience taking the Apple hobbyist computer and turning it into a worldwide hit, Crossing the Chasm. Most people don't know that this was based on work done 30 years earlier by Everett Rogers. This gentleman, a scientist at Bell Labs. Rogers came up with something called innovation diffusion theory. This is a data driven theory based on years of research with pig farmers and kids in malls and all kinds of groups all over the world about how innovation actually spreads in culture. And what Rogers learned is that you can't reach the majority, even the early majority, without going through your early market. So if you want to cross the chasm and have a hit, start by finding and delighting a few passionate early customers. Now Will Wright knew how to do this. I learned that. I told you before. I worked with him on three different projects. And in the early days of those projects, even though we were analyzing our target market, we were testing our ideas on innovation nerds who were Will's early passionate customers. Running small high learning experiments. Alex Rogopoulos knows this too. On rock band, we were testing our earliest ideas, our core loop on these music gaming nerds, not on our core target. We moved on to testing with them later in beta, but not at first. So if you want to accelerate innovation, start by finding and delighting your super fans. A small group of very passionate high need early customers. Fourth, build out your roadmap with game thinking. How many of you are product owners or product managers in some form? So even those of you who aren't, this is useful. But if you're a product manager, this is gold. I love this quote from Frank Lloyd Wright, because I think it really sums up why so many of us are here, what we want to do. You want to make those mistakes earlier. You don't want to build stuff and then find out it was a mistake. How do you do that? Well, I already told you that skill building is the thing that makes your customers more awesome. Game thinking is a framework and a toolkit for helping your customers develop and leverage their skills. And the game thinking roadmap shows you how you can actually do this over time. Because a lot of times people will learn these tools and say, well, I can't go to the ocean, where should I start? This is the where should you start. So here on the x-axis, we have the customer's journey that what we just talked about from discovery through onboarding, habit building, and into mastery. On the y-axis, we have the developer's journey, our journey, where we start with an MVP and go through beta to ship and into expansion if we have something that's worth expanding. So what you want to do is, let me go back here, what you want to do is follow this map and start with the habit building phase. A lot of people start with onboarding. Why? It's so much easier to do pretty onboarding than to do a good habit loop. Some people start with mastery because they discovered game mechanics and think it's cool. Really bad idea. This is the way the Sims came to life, Rock Band came to life, Covet Fashion came to life, every hit I've worked on, this is how it came to life. Now, I'm not telling you about the 20 or 30 things I worked on that weren't hits. Those didn't come to life this way. That's the message I want you to get. Let's talk about Rock Band a little bit. So we spent seven months working on the core loop before we got into any of the fancy graphics that those of you who have played Rock Band are familiar with. Here's the Rock Band core loop. It's really about playing a song together. The trigger is, hey, I want it, usually it's party time. One of the things we learned during our early research is people really wanted a game that they could invite their friends over to play, like board game knife, but more active. And the simple feedback is you just get your score, but there's also a lot of feedback during the song play. You get better, you play harder songs, you play bigger venues, you get cooler gear, all the natural stuff that you're familiar with. However, what I want you to take away from this is all that cool stuff, all the progress and investment stuff we didn't touch for the first seven months of the game development. All we did was work on the feedback loop to make it feel really good. It made me crazy. I was a much less experienced game designer then. I was like, I want to work on the cool stuff. I'm going to talk to our close and all this cool stuff. They said, you know, if this doesn't feel great, if this core loop doesn't feel great, nothing else matters. So that's what we're going to work on first. And they were right. Now I'm going to tell you about a product I worked on that's not a game, but very much uses these ideas. Happify. Have any of you played Happify? Looks like not. So it all started with these two entrepreneurs. Tomer and Ofer from Israel. They had come out of the gaming industry. They had sold their company and taken a class on the science of happiness which transformed them. They thought it was amazing and they wanted to bring it to the world. So naturally they said, well, let's build a game. So they came to me to help them validate and develop their ideas. We started by trying to find our passionate, high-need early adopters. We used five key discovery questions that, by the way, I'll be talking more about tomorrow in the workshop, to surface early customers. We had three hypotheses for who our early customers would be. And we honed in using these interviews. We honed in on a very specific group of high-need, passionate, early customers. Women who had recently left the workforce, had their first child and were now stay-at-home moms, over-educated, lots of skills, a little bit bored and a little bit depressed, but wanted to do something about it because they were doers. That was our early core and it turned out to work out well. Now, when we started working with these women and we honed in on them, we then tested our early ideas. We ran lots of small, high-learning experiments. And what we learned was the first ideas that the team had, Tomer and Ofer, they came out of gaming. So they had these visions of it looking like a game. A two-and-a-half de-isometric thing. So we had all these sketches. We showed them to women and they told us that looks stressful, that looks like a lot of work. And then we would ask them, well, what do you do to feel happier? What do you do to lift your mood? And you know what they said? Pinterest. I go to Pinterest. I look at ten-layer cakes I'll never build. I look at white living rooms without throw-up on them and I dream. That's what they would say. We re-architected the whole UX to look like Pinterest. And the thing took off. People looked at it and they said, oh, yeah, I understand that. That looks like it would be calming. That looks like it would be great. Today, HAPPify is a market leader in digital happiness with a whole host of competitors nipping at their heels and they recently released a new version that's a medical version that's getting prescribed by doctors for mental health prevention. So they, the team at HAPPify used the tools that I told you about today to reach that and to iterate their ideas before they built their MVP. And it ended up being hugely successful saving them months of time and really being the difference between shipping something they were excited about that people didn't want and shipping something they knew people would want. So, let me review. Four strategies. Design your product to evolve over time. Find the fun within your core loop first. Connect with your super fans. Test your ideas on them first before you reach your actual target audience. And build out your roadmap with game thinking. So I want to talk about you now. What would it mean to your project if you could accelerate your early product development process? What if you could 6X it or 10X it? What if you knew how to talk to exactly the right customers? What if you could say these seven people I'm going to pay attention to and the rest I'm going to ignore their feedback it's not relevant to me right now. What if you had that power? What if you could take those insights from talking to those seven people and turn them into a simple compelling MVP? What if you could do all that in a few weeks? What would that mean to your project? Are you interested? I want you to try out the ideas that you learned today. You can also go to gettingtoalpha.com We have a number of programs. Many of them are online. So they work for anyone anywhere in the world. And I also would encourage you if you can or if you're not already signed up if you're really interested in this come to the workshop tomorrow. This is a brief preview. I'm going to apply them to your project to 10X your innovation cycle and help you build a better faster product. So if you're interested in this kind of material please follow me on Twitter. I share a lot of free material. We have free webinars coming up that go deeper. You can also subscribe to Design Tips on my website and if you want to connect with me and ask me a question feel free to send me an email. I'll leave that up. So I hope this has been inspiring to you in thinking about how you can use the groundwork of Agile and build on top of it to create something that people love and want to come back to again and again. So thank you very much.