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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

😜From liberal arts to gaming.

🎮Learning about social gaming.

🤔Why is viral cycle important and how to optimize it?

💯Experimental results and observations of early Facebook times.

😎The Wild West of virality.

🔡Relaunching Words with Friends.

🔑The key to longevity.

❓What is the core loop design and where does it apply?

✌How Spotify aces the core loop design.

📧Games on messaging platforms.

❓Tic-tac-toe and why people still play games like it.

✔The players are the content

👑What makes a great product manager.

🎮The games ‘book club’ and deconstructs

🎮Artificial intelligence and its role in games. 

📚The 3 books that Josh recommends to PMs

💯Josh’s approach to networking to seek advice

KEY QUOTES

Games on Facebook spread virally

The way that I thought about mobile growth was actually born out of what I observed on the Facebook platform. Games on Facebook spread virally. Facebook was a new platform and so was mobile, and when a platform is new, the barriers to share are a lot lower. 

So, people were willing to send fake cows to their friends, even if they were professional bankers and doctors and lawyers or other careers. That was just culturally acceptable. And so, when the barriers to share were very, very low, the initial playbook for growth on both Facebook and mobile was to just get people to share stuff. If you prompt them to share stuff, they will end up sharing it and you’ll end up getting a ton of impressions, a ton of clicks, a ton of installs and a ton of DAU. 

Getting to the top of the charts

We had millions and millions of DAU in our old SKU that we could basically force through a migration flow, and get them to download the new skew. By virtue of downloading the new SKU, they would actually help us drive up to the top of the charts. 

The coolest thing about all of this is we knew that getting to the top of the charts required a certain amount of installs, but that you don’t really get extra credit for crushing the number. So when we were migrating folks over, we would migrate them slowly and drip them through. So when we would get to the top of the charts, we would turn the spigot off and wait until we saw some pressure and then turn the spigot back on again. 

We were actually on top of the charts for like 43 or 45 days, which ended up generating a ton more organic installs than if we just blew our load from the start.

Words with Friends- A social game

Words with Friends is a very simple game, but at its heart, it’s a social game. You can only really play with somebody else.

The back and forth of me playing my turn and then you playing your turn, that reciprocity is sort of what keeps the game alive and what leads to very long tail retention curves that we see in the game. So by virtue of having more people, all of these organic installs, we observed at the time that retention increased just because there were now more people to fill more matches.

The second piece of this is that the team made a ton of improvements to the game and built a ton of new features, which again, for our very old players, made the game feel fresh and new and different and that was also meaningful. So the sequel got lots of new people in, but also kept them at a much higher rate, which was the real success.

Core loops in games are the basic action that you want your players to take

Core loops in games are the basic action that you want your players to take. If we take Words with Friends, for example, the core loop is really, really tight. You want people to create games and play their turns, and then they get turns back and they play turns again.

So the loop is really just two things. In a game like Farmville, the loop is just a little bit wider, but still very, very tight. You plant some crops, you water those crops, and then you harvest those crops. When you harvest those crops, you get some gold that allows you to buy more seeds that allow you to plant more crops.

The core loop of a game is just an activity loop that gets people into the game then you spend the rest of your game design time building meta games around that core loop. So planting seeds and then watering them, and then harvesting, and then getting gold. The loop right around that is, well, the more I do that, the more I level up.

The next loop around that is, well, the more I level up, the more different types of crops I have access to. When I get to a certain number of crops, suddenly my farm becomes this interesting hub for other people to buy and sell goods with me, and it grows.

So the core loop is the basic activity. And then you spend the rest of your game design time building meta loops and progression loops between and around that core loop to make your full game. 

Things that are important in a core loop in a game

If you look at the B. J. Fogg’s model of action it’s three things.

It’s creating triggers, it’s removing friction and giving people the ability to do what you want them to do, and it’s providing motivation. 

All of those things are important in a core loop in a game, and they’re just as important in non-game consumer products. You have to trigger people either through marketing or through internal trigger timers or whatever. To get people into the loop you need to remove as much friction as you possibly can and let them do what they wanna do, and you wanna give ’em some incentive in the end. The incentive, hopefully, is variable in nature, and the little hit of dopamine changes over time so they don’t become saturated.

What makes a good Product Manager?

The very best Product Managers I’ve ever worked with have been ones that are obviously incredibly smart, but the key learning that I’ve seen, at least in this industry, is an ability to have the intellectual humility to throw away what you know and relearn something very, very quickly. 

About matchmaking algorithms

One of the experiments that we ran on Words with Friends is, we thought, people that lose a lot might get frustrated and leave the platform.

So we actually did this thing where we identified all of the people that had lost three matches in a row, and the next time they got matched against someone random, we matched them against someone really bad. So they had a really good chance of winning. We found that this had a terrible impact on retention and that the best way to improve retention through matchmaking was actually just to prioritize close matches.

People didn’t care if they won or lost. They only cared if they felt they had the opportunity to win and that the game was exciting. That’s a heuristics based way of doing matchmaking. There’s no reason why we couldn’t leave that up to AI to help us find new matchmaking algorithms that are more optimized or actually serve different matchmaking algorithms to different segments of people.

Fresh undergrads can make better Product Managers

There is a whole class of folks, fresh undergraduates, that I am really bullish on bringing into Product Management very early. 

A. because they get overlooked by the market, and 

B, because that inexperience actually ends up being an advantage. 

I talked earlier about having the ability to be intellectually humble.

Fresh undergrads are by nature intellectually humble because they haven’t been taught anything yet. So they don’t have to forget anything. You can indoctrinate them with good habits from the start. So that’s maybe one example of something related that I’ve spent a lot of time on in my career.

Building personal skills

The way that I do that is, let’s say there’s something that I wanted to add to my skillset or wanted to improve on my skill set, I would find the person in my network that was most well known for being good at that thing.

I would go to them and I would ask for their advice on this one thing. At the very end of the conversation, I would say, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d introduce me to the top person in your network who’s good at this one thing and one person in your network that’s really, really good at this other thing that I wanna get good at”.

That has worked out really well for me, because you’re always interacting with folks that are socially validated to be good at the thing that you want to get. It’s just a good excuse to network with people. I am by nature an introvert, so that’s a forcing function to go invite folks and it also leads to a warm introduction.

If I can email somebody and say,” Hey, this person that I really respect in my network and that you really respect in your network called you out as being really good at this one thing, and I’d really like to pick your brain on it.”

That ends up being a much warmer introduction than anything you could possibly write on your own.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Shamanth

I’m very excited to welcome Josh Lu on How Things Grow. Josh, welcome to the show. 

Josh

Thanks for having me. 

Shamanth

Absolutely. Josh, you graduated in economics, diplomacy, and World Affairs, and at the time that you started working in gaming, even the space of mobile gaming was brand new.

So what brought you from the liberal arts background that you had to gaming?

Josh

I went to college not really knowing what I wanted to do, primarily because of games. I spent my entire childhood playing games, went to school and knew I needed a job after school. I did a couple of internships. I was in finance for a while, but my favorite internship was at a tech company Yahoo and I loved the environment. 

I came out of school and thought to myself, “I really want to get into technology”.  The one big thing I learned from liberal arts college was that the only way I was going to have an advantage in the world was to do something that I really loved and that I really felt connected to and so that was my path into gaming. 

I played traditional console and PC games my whole life. But Facebook and mobile gaming were really exciting to me. It felt like the intersection of two things that were academically interesting to me, but also just near and dear to my heart.

Shamanth

Was there anything about your decision that made you feel like this could actually work long-term as a career? There are also a lot of artists, writers who want to do something that they really, really love and feel connected to, but there really doesn’t seem to be a career path out there. So was there anything specific around gaming, at a point in time when gaming wasn’t even an industry, that compelled you to pursue that path?

Josh

It was sort of a confluence of a lot of events that ended up working out. At the time, Facebook’s gaming was just getting big and I was in the generation that was onboarded to Facebook right as I got into college. It was this confluence of things where I loved Facebook as a product. It helped connect me to a lot of my peers. I was on Facebook all of the time and so I knew Facebook backwards and forwards. 

I also knew games. The opportunity of games on Facebook was fascinating to me because for the first time in my life I saw people on Facebook playing games that I never would’ve imagined would play games. My very, very serious classmates who would normally never play games were sending me fake cows on Facebook every single day.

That resonated with me. There was something there as I was a gamer my whole life and back then it was only really the nerds in the basement who were playing games as much as I did. 

To see my popular friends playing games it struck that there was an opportunity to turn everybody into a gamer, and Facebook was a really, really good product to do that.

So, it was that intuition that pushed me into that specific field of games.

Shamanth

Certainly we’ve had many interviews on the podcast where people have spoken about the early days of Facebook. Given how ubiquitous it is now, it’s easy to forget how much of a game changer the entire platform was.

Rewinding the clock to the start of your career, you started working with PlayDom and then you worked with Scopely. At that time, social gaming was very new. The world was just about to embrace mobile and also Facebook as you mentioned. 

So how did you learn about gaming and growth back then and what were your key learnings at a point of time when there weren’t any playbooks about how mobile works or how to grow on mobile?

Josh

The way that I thought about mobile growth was actually born out of what I observed on the Facebook platform. Games on Facebook spread virally. Facebook was a new platform and so was mobile, and when a platform is new, the barriers to share are a lot lower. 

So, people were willing to send fake cows to their friends, even if they were professional bankers and doctors and lawyers or other careers. That was just culturally acceptable. And so, when the barriers to share were very, very low, the initial playbook for growth on both Facebook and mobile was to just get people to share stuff. If you prompt them to share stuff, they will end up sharing it and you’ll end up getting a ton of impressions, a ton of clicks, a ton of installs and a ton of DAU. 

So, very early on, the playbook wasn’t really a playbook at all. It was just finding as many ways as you possibly can to get people to share on as many channels as they could and force them through a flow to send to as many people as you could every single time. If you think about the concept of viral cycle time, our goal as growth PMs very early on in the platforms was just shove people through the funnel as quickly as you can and get them to invite as many people as you can. 

These days, the playbook has evolved where the concept of viral cycle time is not much, there’s more focus on retention. It’s to get people to stick around for longer and they’ll have more opportunities to invite folks. But back then it was very much just brute force, getting people to invite.

I’d add the other thing that we did to that end was we spent a lot of time on the platform trying to reverse engineer channels. As soon as the channel burnt out on Facebook, we’d moved to another channel. On mobile, I remember an experiment that I ran where I got people to connect their address book and then send a mass SMS to their entire address book for a small incentive.

A horrible user experience, but probably indicative of the time.

Shamanth

You did mention a key area of focus with the viral cycle type and how to optimize it.

For those of our listeners who may not be familiar with it, can you explain what that means?  Also speak to why that has changed over the years because you did say that isn’t nearly as important these days because retention is much more important. 

Josh

So viral cycle time is the measure of time between when a user will invite their friend to your product. If you can get your users to invite their friends more frequently and be more viral more frequently means you’ll grow.

In decreasing viral cycles, cycle time is still important. But as user preferences have changed, people have gotten more familiar with the platforms and less okay with being forced down flows they’re not particularly interested in. Users these days have a very high bar for what they send out to their friends.

Which means that the viral cycle time is less inorganic now it’s much more organic. People invite when they feel that they have something worthy to share. The longer you retain a user, the more chances you’ll have for them to come up with some content that meets that bar to share with friends.

Shamanth

I guess that also ties into what you said about mobile and Facebook being completely new media at the time, so people were more open to sharing because the bar was far lower at the time. As you experimented with virality at the time, and you experimented with getting people to share more and more often and more and more aggressively, what were some of the things that surprised you at the time?

Josh

The single biggest thing that surprised me early on was that people would share basically anything. 

One of the experiments I remember running was on Facebook and we were trying to get people to share Facebook requests with their friends. They were already sharing at a very, very high rate. But the one change that I remember that made a significant difference, was that instead of sending a gift to a friend, we changed the prompt to say, “send this gift to your five best friends”. When we did that, they ended up getting way more engagement, because back then on social media the quality of friendship was everything.

People wanted to connect with as many people as possible. So they were obviously sending it to their five best friends, but they would send it to multiple groups of five best friends. In order for them to look like they were close to lots and lots of people. On the backside we actually found that people accepted those requests at a significantly higher rate because they wanted to appear like they were best friends. 

Shamanth

Yeah, that sounds like such an incredible win for you guys, even though a lot of companies unlocked a ton of virality and grew, a lot of companies also failed at the time. 

So in what’s been described as the Wild West of virality, what were some of the common mistakes that companies made at the time when attempting to take advantage of what seemed like enormous opportunities with virality at the time? 

Josh

Even success stories ended up being failure cases. If you think about the very early days of Zynga, they did a better job than anybody by taking hold of the viral movement on Facebook. Farmville, largely due to the exploitation of Facebook channels, grew to 30, 40, 50 million DAU and was the largest Facebook game in the entire world. But what they didn’t do was move off of those same tactics fast enough. Which to say in the Wild West the channels were open and then taking advantage of the channels got you lots and lots of players. They also allowed you to keep some of those players, because those same channels were used as engagement and reactivation tools.

But when the channels went away, you observed that these games hadn’t built enough moats to keep people in the experience, that they had relied a little bit too much on the channels and not enough on actual core loops that kept people in the experience. The channels ended up becoming the content versus a really good social experience. So when the channels went away and they did quickly, Facebook turned off channels very, very quickly you observed that those games lost a lot of people, lost a ton of critical mass and sort of collapsed in on themselves. 

That was a hard lesson to learn for lots of folks during that time who were relying on channels to get and keep folks. Then you saw a very rapid evolution of game makers switching their models. 

Shamanth

Because Facebook really was driving the entirety of the ecosystem at the time, it’s hard to imagine that it turned on many of the people until it actually did start to happen. 

To switch gears a little bit, in your last role at Zynga, one of the things you did work on was Words with Friends. You were involved in relaunching Words with Friends as well as Words with Friends 2. Now, this was a pretty old game at the time when it was relaunched. 

Can you speak to how the team thought about finding opportunities to relaunch, what was a fairly established game at the time? 

Josh

I think there were a couple of things going through our heads.The first is that, as you mentioned, Words with Friends had been around for eight or nine years by the time we launched Words with Friends 2. So we’d had close to 300 million people download Words of Friends over a lifetime. When you’re dealing with something that old and that large, you’re inevitably fighting this slow descent into the ground.

As somebody who grew up as a growth PM it was really hard to see the gentle erosion of the user base of your product, so that was one driving force where that team tried a ton of things over the years such as optimizations, experiments. All those things did was to slow the rate of decline.

So we came to the realization that we needed to do some step function instead of an incremental one. We could have built just a giant list of features and launched them in the game, but the choice to do a sequel was also very deliberate.

The choice to create a totally new SKU and migrate all of our players over was mostly due to a quirk of the platform. For games that have been around for a very long time and who have had lots of installs, it’s very hard to get to the top of the charts on Apple and Google.

The charts are a really good source of organic installs and organic installs perform significantly better than paid installs. So our whole strategy, relaunching the sequel in a new SKU was to actually take advantage of the fact that we could be on the charts.

We had millions and millions of DAU in our old SKU that we could basically force through a migration flow, and get them to download the new skew. By virtue of downloading the new SKU, they would actually help us drive up to the top of the charts. 

The coolest thing about all of this is we knew that getting to the top of the charts required a certain amount of installs, but that you don’t really get extra credit for crushing the number. So when we were migrating folks over, we would migrate them slowly and drip them through. So when we would get to the top of the charts, we would turn the spigot off and wait until we saw some pressure and then turn the spigot back on again. 

We were actually on top of the charts for like 43 or 45 days, which ended up generating a ton more organic installs than if we just blew our load from the start.

Shamanth

I think that’s pretty incredible because one of the things that is impressive about Words With Friends 2 and also the older Words with Friends when it did launch a couple of years ago was that it had just as much longevity at the top of the charts and it seemed to have been a very intentional strategy.

If you have a couple million DAU or MAU, you have a couple hundred thousand people who start to download the new app per day. That’s all you need to be at the top of the charts. 

It was a very intentional strategy that drove a ton of organics just because you guys really understood what it took to be on the top of the charts.

Josh

Just to close the loop here. We decided to release the sequel and a new SKU in order to get lots of organic installs. At the end of the day, it’s all a waste of time if the game isn’t meaningfully better and all of those new folks stick around at a higher rate. 

So there were two things that contributed to people sticking right at a higher rate. The first is that there were lots of new people. 

Words with friends is a very simple game, but at its heart, it’s a social game. You can only really play with somebody else.

The back and forth of me playing my turn and then you playing your turn, that reciprocity is sort of what keeps the game alive and what leads to very long tail retention curves that we see in the game. So by virtue of having more people, all of these organic installs, we observed at the time that retention increased just because there were now more people to fill more matches.

The second piece of this is that the team made a ton of improvements to the game and built a ton of new features, which again, for our very old players, made the game feel fresh and new and different and that was also meaningful. So the sequel got lots of new people in, but also kept them at a much higher rate, which was the real success.

Shamanth

Certainly. It wasn’t just about getting to the top of the charts, but those users still have to stick around and come back. That’s substantially more effort and time. 

Josh, something you’ve spoken about quite a bit is the concept of habit formation through core loop design.

Can you tell us about this concept? 

Josh

Core loops in games are the basic action that you want your players to take. If we take Words with Friends, for example, the core loop is really, really tight. You want people to create games and play their turns, and then they get turns back and they play turns again.

So the loop is really just two things. In a game like Farmville, the loop is just a little bit wider, but still very, very tight. You plant some crops, you water those crops, and then you harvest those crops. When you harvest those crops, you get some gold that allows you to buy more seeds that allow you to plant more crops.

The core loop of a game is just an activity loop that gets people into the game then you spend the rest of your game design time building meta games around that core loop. So planting seeds and then watering them, and then harvesting, and then getting gold. The loop right around that is, well, the more I do that, the more I level up.

The next loop around that is, well, the more I level up, the more different types of crops I have access to. When I get to a certain number of crops, suddenly my farm becomes this interesting hub for other people to buy and sell goods with me, and it grows.

So the core loop is the basic activity. And then you spend the rest of your game design time building meta loops and progression loops between and around that core loop to make your full game. 

Shamanth

Would this concept apply for a digital product that’s not a game or to non-digital products at all?

Josh

I think so. Certainly some of the major concepts do. 

So one of the major concepts is that you want to properly incentivize and motivate your players to go through the core loop and you wanna remove as much friction as possible. 

If you look at the B. J. Fogg’s model of action it’s three things.

It’s creating triggers, it’s removing friction and giving people the ability to do what you want them to do, and it’s providing motivation. 

All of those things are important in a core loop in a game, and they’re just as important in non-game consumer products. You have to trigger people either through marketing or through internal trigger timers or whatever. To get people into the loop you need to remove as much friction as you possibly can and let them do what they wanna do, and you wanna give ’em some incentive in the end. The incentive, hopefully, is variable in nature, and the little hit of dopamine changes over time so they don’t become saturated.

Shamanth

Are there examples that you can think of outside of gaming that illustrate how this works? 

Josh

Let’s look at Spotify. It’s not going to look exactly like a loop, but it’s got a lot of the same concepts. So on Spotify I’m listening to music and at some point I really like a song and I add it to a playlist.

The act of adding that song to a playlist is frictionless, it’s one tap. My incentive for doing that is twofold. One, it’s to save that song for future use. But the second is actually social validation. At least this is true for me. My playlist is public. I have folks that follow me and when I see people subscribe to my playlist or send me notes about the songs that they like in my playlist, that’s also another way that I’m motivated to do this action.

The more I do it the more interactions I get and that ends up keeping me in the experience. 

Shamanth

There are very clear parallels and the way users get increasingly invested in the product itself. So you have also worked on and spoken about games that have launched on messaging platforms. Can you speak to some of the key learnings from some of the games that you’ve worked on messaging platforms?

Josh

Yeah. The promise of games and messaging platforms is really interesting. It’s going back to the roots of the wild west days of social media and not in a negative way. If you think about messaging platforms, they are intrinsically social. Mobile as a platform is not intrinsically social.

The beauty of mobile is that it’s a content consumption platform that you can take with you anywhere you go. It’s completely accessible. 

Messaging has all of that accessibility. It’s there with you all of the time, but the expectation is that you’re doing the messaging stuff because you want to interact with people all of the time, and you’re sharing memes and other content as your primary activity.

When I initially thought about games on messaging platforms, the opportunity is to put social games in the place where people are feeling the most social and mobiles are with them all of the time. There are now suddenly new social channels by which people are sharing information.

All of that combined was a really cool opportunity. The team I was running at the time, we put a couple of games on iMessage and Facebook messenger, and particularly on Facebook Messenger, we saw a ton of really, really good engagements. Facebook, obviously, is very good at creating social experiences. They’re much more experienced at this than Apple is. And so you saw on the Facebook Messenger platform, the games channel there had lots of surfacing points, lots of contextual channels. They did a really good job of surfacing friends, and so the engagement that we saw with the games that we made for the Facebook platform was really, really strong.

In the example of Words of Friends we saw that the Facebook Messenger product ended up becoming an incremental 15% of our DAU and almost none of it was cannibalistic because Words of Friends on the mobile platform, primarily older folks, skewed heavily towards women, 25 plus and on Facebook Messenger, we saw that our audience was almost universally under 20 years old and predominantly young men, young boys. 

That was really interesting to us as we not only attracted a new audience that was a significant portion of our existing audience, but that were completely new to the platform or to the game.

Shamanth

And what do you think about what sort of games are a good fit for a messaging platform versus what aren’t? 

Josh

It’s less about the type of game and more about how you designed the game to take advantage of the messaging platform. With a messaging platform, there’s gonna be a lot of call and response type messaging.

Any game that takes advantage of the fact that folks are communicating with each other, not in depth much but very often, is really good.

One piece of it is can you imagine a game where the output between friends are short, sporadic pieces of information that occur fairly frequently. 

The other piece is finding games that take advantage of the group dynamic in messaging. Like in Words With Friends, it’s a little bit harder to do this because you’re really just playing with one person at a time. But certainly there were games on the messaging platforms that did a really good job of this.

When you have group chats finding ways to involve all the members of the group, incentivizing people to bug the other folks in the group to participate are really strong. Our observation with other games is every incremental person in a group that you got to engage with the experience meant that the entire group’s retention went up significantly.Games that found a good way to do that flourished. 

Shamanth

I also do remember that one of the most popular games at the time on Messenger was Tic Tac Toe. You would think it’s so simple, but it ties into what you just said about something that ties right into having a back and forth interaction between people.

I do remember you saying that long-term retention is oftentimes a function of social experiences, so, can you speak to how social experiences inside of games can drive long term retention?

Josh

I think no game in history has ever been able to capture the imagination of folks significantly beyond the life of the game. By life of the game, I mean the content within the game. The very best games have survived the longest, such as something like World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft today launches new expansions every two years and has lots of new content. But if you actually look behind the covers, you’ll find that people get through the content significantly faster than the two year cycle. The reason people stick around is because the players become the content.

Think about something like Checkers. Checkers is a game that’s been played for millennia and it’s been mathematically solved for at least a hundred years. There is an optimal way to play checkers or tic-tac-toe, and yet people continue to play.

Why? It’s not because the game is particularly engaging, it’s pretty linear and it’s been mathematically solved. The reason people play is because there’s somebody across the table from you and there’s asymmetry of information. You can see the emotions in their face and you can talk trash and all this stuff.

All of that’s a long winded way of saying that the players are the content and so games that do a good job of turning their players into the content through social interactions are the ones that survived for a very long time. 

Shamanth

Sure, and even Facebook really flourished because of its emphasis on the social connection, which again is obvious today but wasn’t nearly as obvious in the early days of some of the other social networks, which did not emphasize it as much.

If I remember correctly, Facebook did make this concept much more popular with its method of getting users to seven friends in 10 days, or maybe it was the other way around. And I think it makes complete sense in that context.

Josh

Yeah, and in that same experiment that Facebook ran in its very early days.

We did the same thing and validated that at the last two companies, Zynga and Blizzard. So we found in Words with Friends that if we could get a new user to play three matches with their friends in the first two days of their install, they had a step function change in their retention because their friends would get an experience. 

The same deal happened with Battlenet. I’m not allowed to share the actual numbers, but the Battlenet platform at Blizzard has run similar experiments and found very similar things. So this learning is pretty ubiquitous. 

Shamanth

Josh, you also mentored and taught many incredibly talented Product Managers by now.

What would you say characterizes a great Product Manager as compared to somebody that’s good?

Josh

The very best Product Managers I’ve ever worked with have been ones that are obviously incredibly smart, but the key learning that I’ve seen, at least in this industry, is an ability to have the intellectual humility to throw away what you know and relearn something very, very quickly. 

I started in games. The very first company I worked at made most of its money making MySpace games. They switched to Facebook games and the companies that I worked at went to mobile games and there’s been exploration now into Messenger games and who knows, next we’ll be talking about AR games or VR games.

The platforms are changing all of the time and our player expectations are changing all of the time. So your ability as a Product Manager to understand when everything you’ve learned is obsolete and you have to learn something new again is really important.

Your ability to cast that information away and then your ability to relearn new stuff quickly is also important. Part and parcel of that is just a ton of intellectual curiosity. The only way you’re going to be able to learn quickly is to be able to take a hypothesis without any bias and go really deep into it, validate it, understand whether you should keep it or discard it, and move on.

The very best Product Managers have been very, very good at that. The other trait I’ve seen in really great Product Managers is just folks that are constantly getting more data. One of the beautiful pieces about working in technology is you have access to all of this data all of the time and in games you have access to even more data than than most other folks.

Because not only do you have transactional data, you have behavioral data. You can infer things about what people are doing. They’re voting with their actions all of the time in your games. But data in this case is not just quantitative, it’s also qualitative. So the very best Product Managers I’ve worked with have also been really great at collecting data of all sorts, whether it’s inviting people in to do focus groups or just standing in line at Starbucks showing folks an experience doing your own field work. 

This is a corollary to academic curiosity, folks that are really good at collecting and then creating stories and data, end up being good at this job. 

Shamanth

I’m also curious though, when you say it’s been very important to unlearn and learn again.

I would imagine part of that is to really understand what’s going on in gaming, what sort of games are working and within that context, there’s hundreds of new games coming out pretty much every day. You could practically be spending your entire day playing games. 

A lot of people who are not Product Managers indeed do exactly that.

So how do you make time to figure out which games to play, which games to figure out and when to stop for yourself? How do you make that? 

Josh

Yeah. It’s very difficult to scale if you’re just doing this by yourself. But, something that I did at my last job, and at this job is to take advantage of the crowd.

You get a bunch of people together who all need to be playing games, but all don’t have time to be playing all of these games and you just assign it out.  I call it the book club. You have a group of folks who are responsible for one game. There’s some upfront work in determining who gets which game.

But from then you do a book report, just like any other book you prepare. We meet as a group, you talk for a little bit, you share the core insights and that way you get to experience lots of games without actually having to play them super deeply. 

There’s another concept that we do that’s a little more formal, we call them deconstructs.

You go in, you play a game or a mechanic, you talk about why it works or why it doesn’t work, and what are the learnings that scale to the game that you’re working on or to the broader portfolio. 

I think every gaming PM needs to be doing this all the time to stay sharp and need to be going deep to make sure that they understand when they play a game normally that they’re thinking about the right things, asking themselves the right questions. 

There’s a very big difference between playing a game for fun and playing a game for research. When you’re playing a game for research, you’re trying to understand the core tenet of research. Understanding that whenever a game is designed, every single thing in the game is there for a reason, and you have to be able to ask the right questions in order to get to the decision behind the design. Deconstruction is just a really good way of doing that. 

Shamanth

Speaking of learning new concepts, learning new things over time and unlearning things, one of the things, one of the ideas of concepts that’s really changing growth and marketing, which is where I do most of my work, has been Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. It’s been easy to dismiss some of these as buzzwords, but I’ve certainly seen how the Facebook platform and the Google platform, at least on the marketing side, have pretty much changed the game very significantly by the adoption of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

So in your work, is this something that you’ve seen impact and change the way games are made and how gaming products are designed? 

Josh

Absolutely. It’s interesting because there’s potentially space for it, but at the end of the day,  games are entertainment products that are meant to evoke emotion.

I tend not to agree with those purists, which is to say if you understand that technology as a way for you to ask questions that you would normally ask in a much faster and much more structured way, and to get answers in a much faster and more accurate way, then, there’s space for AI and Machine Learning everywhere.

In games, this has manifested itself in a couple of ways early on, which I think are really interesting. I mentioned that in games you get access to lots and lots of data. It used to be that without these techniques, we’d have to go in manually and try to create stories out of that data ourselves.

There are lots of stories that we would’ve never identified without the help of ML. We discovered  totally new segments of players. Behavioral segments of players through ML have been fascinating. So that’s probably an early application. There are lots more, I think, to come in the future.

If you think about something like Call of Duty matchmaking, right now most matchmaking algorithms in games are heuristics-based. There’s no reason they really should be. 

One of the experiments that we ran on Words with Friends is, we thought, people that lose a lot might get frustrated and leave the platform.

So we actually did this thing where we identified all of the people that had lost three matches in a row, and the next time they got matched against someone random, we matched them against someone really bad. So they had a really good chance of winning. We found that this had a terrible impact on retention and that the best way to improve retention through matchmaking was actually just to prioritize close matches.

People didn’t care if they won or lost. They only cared if they felt they had the opportunity to win and that the game was exciting. That’s a heuristics based way of doing matchmaking. There’s no reason why we couldn’t leave that up to AI to help us find new matchmaking algorithms that are more optimized or actually serve different matchmaking algorithms to different segments of people.

Shamanth

Got it. What you mean by a heuristic based approach is that the matchmaking was based on certain characteristics of the users that were identified previously.

With an AI-based approach, you just say, look, we don’t care what the characteristics are. Let’s have the machine figure it out. Is that a fair understanding? 

Josh

Yeah

Shamanth

That makes complete sense. 

Something you also do is recommend books for folks that you advise and that you mentor.

What are some of the more impactful books that you typically recommend to people?

Josh

Let me start with the basic ones. So every product manager on my team has three books and they’re pretty easy because they’re all meant to be sort of pop culture type books. 

My reach book is Contagious by Jonah Berger. 

My retention book is Hooked by Nir Eyal. 

Then my revenue book is just Predictably Rational by Dan Arieyi. 

If folks are interested in behavioral economics and the ways that people act differently than theory might suggest, I really like the book, Thinking Fast and Slow by Danny Kahneman.

As folks are moving along their careers and are starting to build out teams, one of the books that I really like is called The Rare Finds by George Anders. It talks about finding folks that are two-legged stools, basically it’s very, very expensive and difficult to get the unicorn candidates. But if you can find folks that have one major flaw or that get overlooked by the rest of the market, and you can correct that one thing, you end up with these unicorns. 

Shamanth

Is there an example of someone you worked with that comes to mind to whom that perception would apply of a two-legged stool? You don’t have to name names, but I’m curious.

Josh

One thing that I’m really bullish on, is this concept of bringing folks into Product Management before they really have the experience necessary. If you look at a lot of these entry level Product Management programs at lots of other places, they’re typically looking for folks from a top tier B school or from good programs.

There is a whole class of folks, fresh undergraduates, that I am really bullish on bringing into Product Management very early. 

A. because they get overlooked by the market, and 

B, because that inexperience actually ends up being an advantage. 

I talked earlier about having the ability to be intellectually humble.

Fresh undergrads are by nature intellectually humble because they haven’t been taught anything yet. So they don’t have to forget anything. You can indoctrinate them with good habits from the start. So that’s maybe one example of something related that I’ve spent a lot of time on in my career.

Shamanth

Interesting. You’ve worked at gaming for a long time now. Who do you look to for advice and how do you typically approach them if this is in an area that you’re not super familiar with? 

Josh

I’ve always managed my career like a Product Manager. I collect as much data as I possibly can and find the areas of leverage that I need to improve and then go out and systematically improve those things. 

The way that I do that is, let’s say there’s something that I wanted to add to my skillset or wanted to improve on my skill set, I would find the person in my network that was most well known for being good at that thing.

I would go to them and I would ask for their advice on this one thing. At the very end of the conversation, I would say, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d introduce me to the top person in your network who’s good at this one thing and one person in your network that’s really, really good at this other thing that I wanna get good at”.

That has worked out really well for me, because you’re always interacting with folks that are socially validated to be good at the thing that you want to get. It’s just a good excuse to network with people. I am by nature an introvert, so that’s a forcing function to go invite folks and it also leads to a warm introduction.

If I can email somebody and say,” Hey, this person that I really respect in my network and that you really respect in your network called you out as being really good at this one thing, and I’d really like to pick your brain on it.”

That ends up being a much warmer introduction than anything you could possibly write on your own.

Shamanth

When you speak of the area of leverage in your career, to the extent you’re comfortable sharing, what would that area of leverage be right now? Is that an example you can give of how you’re approaching it?

Josh

Yeah. At the moment, a big opportunity I’m thinking through is that I met a new company where mobile is a new thing. Blizzard has been around for almost 30 years. The company has done things in a way that has made the company extraordinarily successful for a very, very long time.

But the mobile platform is new and it requires the company to do things a little bit differently than they’re used to. One of the things that I’m focusing a lot of my time on at the moment is building out a narrative that shows folks that while the technique for making games on mobile might look different, they share a lot of the same things. 

That narrative is something that I’m trying to work on, which is, how do I tell the story that makes sense to a primarily design driven organization where I’ve primarily worked at data driven organizations before. I’m actually going to folks that work here, quest writers and narrative writers, and picking their brains on what is the language that’s effective with folks that care about this stuff? What is the story arc that makes sense? 

And it sounds kinda kitschy, does the narrative story arc for something like Diablo work for something like this? Well, it actually does because in a culture that cares deeply about this kind of stuff, that language and that arc actually does make a difference when you’re trying to build out an organization.

Shamanth

What is something you are excited about going forward in your work around gaming or anything else at all?

Josh

I’m really excited to see the continued evolution of the gaming space. So one of the trends that I’m observing at the moment and that I think is really good for players, is that the focus of game makers is starting to become less focused on the platforms. You’re starting to see technologies, like Stadia, companies like Epic that are making games that for the end user can be played in any number of ways. You can play on your PC, phone and your console.

You can pick up and leave off wherever you want all of the time. 

For a game nerd like me, that’s the dream. Your gaming experience shouldn’t be confined to whatever device you have, you should be able to experience it, all of the time. And those are truly immersive experiences that have the best chance of creating like this, ultra long-term retention that I love.

So one of the things I’m really excited about is how that manifests itself as we see more games that are built for every single device out there. What does that mean for social interactions? If I can now literally 24-7 interact with people in a game, what does that mean for a guild feature where now people are expected to be online all the time, or what does that mean for virtual friendships? All this stuff is really exciting to me. 

Shamanth 

Can you tell our listeners how they can find out more about you? 

Josh

Totally. You can find me on the web. I blog sometimes. You can just email me if you have any questions. My email is me@josh.lu.

Shamanth

Wonderful. We’ll link to all of that in the show notes, highlights, and transcript. Josh, it’s been an incredible honor having you. Thank you so much for making time for how things grow. 

Josh

Thanks for having me on. This was really fun. 

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